I don't care about investing in alcohol or porn but helping the fossil fuel industry survive a bit longer really annoys me.
Coal is Australia's single biggest export earner and when it's not the biggest it comes in 2nd. Get rid of coal and our economy tanks.
No doubt you don't drive a car, catch a diesel bus, fly anywhere and have completely unplugged your house from the grid ?
The economic benefits of mining are grossly overstated. I am especially irritated by the advertising blitz the BHP has engaged in, in part purveying the benefits of coal mining.
The headline export numbers might be large, but if you take away transfer pricing of revenue to marketing hubs in Singapore, the excessive use of intracompany loans to holding companies in Bermuda and the Caymans (Adani, Chevron here's looking at you), the monumental capex spending required to actually dig up the ore (much of it wasted on one-off infrastructure in and around a mine in the middle of nowhere, to a port in the middle of nowhere, the degradation of vegetation, habitat and the water table & basins, the social and family related problems caused by the FIFO "lifestyle".... etc etc
The resulting royalties, wages paid and company tax extracted is simply not enough to counter all of this. Couple with the fact the vast majority of large mining and oil companies have significant foreign ownership, which means profits go offshore and not accrue to Australia at large means we get a pretty raw deal.
Norway had the right idea. Even the much maligned middle eastern oil sheikhdoms manage to hold onto the wealth (however unevenly distributed).
Over here - we simply give it away. A $5m advertising campaign was all it took to overthrow the government 10 years ago when Rudd's mining tax was introduced (which raised a rounding error of tax anyway). The general population have no idea how much they are being taken for a ride, and there is little hope on the horizon of that changing.