The residential real estate industry is a graspable example of the roundabout following the swing: the abnormal excesses of 2020-21 are now being redressed by the 2022 slump (or, put another way, the return to normality). Carn the free market. Renters are just waiting for your invisible hand.

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Where it seems less fair is when we look at the industries that profited during COVID, those who, thanks to being in the right place at the right time and no especial genius of their own, enjoyed bumper years in 2020 and 2021. Where these industries are acting as ruthlessly as the restaurants, the taxi drivers and the airlines, and do not have the excuse of recovering from pandemic pain. They attract and deserve little sympathy. Looking at you, mining and energy.

The subtext to last week’s federal budget feels to me like the public is being softened up to make sacrifices in the future. The Albanese government knows it will need to demand such sacrifice. But the demand for social justice is now fully intertwined with the demand for budget responsibility – these were dual themes that brought Labor to power in May – and there is zero tolerance for the unfair distribution of discipline and restraint.

Which is to say, while the Reserve Bank’s application of monetary policy through raising interest rates is as blunt an instrument as inflation itself, it is within government’s power, and indeed is expected of this particular government, to target particular sectors to make the heaviest sacrifices.

It might start with those industries for which conditions improved during the pandemic. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in the first year of the pandemic, the industries that enjoyed the greatest windfalls were mining, professional services, retail, finance and agriculture.

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In the following year, the Department of Industry found that mining and resources had record export earnings of $422 billion, forecast to hit another all-time high of $450 billion in the current year. Iron ore prices surged during the pandemic, and now, thanks to Vladimir Putin’s big fat spike in oil and gas prices, fossil fuel producers and utilities are recording super profits.

For some lucky industries, it is heads they win, tails you lose. When it comes to individual companies, petroleum exporter and producer Woodside and oil and gas producer Santos have benefited with supersized earnings. This builds on the performance of the energy sector during the pandemic. In 2020-21, of the 100 best-performing stocks on the Australian sharemarket, the resources sector was by far the best represented (55 companies), followed by technology (20) and energy (11).

Given the ALP’s foundation as a party of equitable redistribution of wealth, and the crisis facing it, the government will be forced into a fight sooner or later. Its strategic question is who it will line up. The word “super” is coming back into the lexicon as a descriptor of profits, and “super” brings back memories of the resource super profits tax that morphed, in 2012, into Labor’s minerals resource rent tax, a levy on the extraordinary profits enjoyed by that industry. It was repealed by the Abbott government in 2014.

Bad timing and planning, if not bad manners, buried that tax. It was defeated by politics and advertising but most of all by a slump in the iron ore price: the revenue it generated was simply not worth the political backlash. But if it existed now, a minerals resource rent tax as envisaged by the last Labor government could pay for all of last month’s budget commitments to child care, paid parental leave, aged care, fee-free TAFE, social and affordable housing, protection of the Great Barrier Reef and improved veterans’ welfare put together. Maybe it was a good idea ahead of its time.

It might have been a mistake also to target mining on its own for that tax. Today, resources is not the only sector to have enjoyed a string of super-profitable years. Taken collectively, those industries that have enjoyed high times during the pandemic might acknowledge they owe Australia a good-fortune debt.

OK, that might be too much to ask. But reading between the lines of the national debate is an appeal to what we like to assure ourselves is a uniquely Australian sense of fairness, in the form of government intervention to draw from those who have been blessed by fortune, so as to give to those who have suffered its curse.

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