The report published a month ahead of schedule comes as a poll shows Australians are divided over the 40 per cent tax on super profits from mining and the issue has dominated question time.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott demanded yesterday the Government provide ''all Treasury and Tax Office modelling in relation to the great big new tax on mining''.

Resources Minister Martin Ferguson was ordered to withdraw his accusation the Opposition was against the tax because it was only interested in attracting ''grubby donations from certain sectors of the Australian community''.

And Treasurer Wayne Swan suggested the Opposition was doing the mining sectors' bidding by running an ''unprecedented, hysterical scare campaign which has been sponsored by those opposite and paid for by the Minerals Council ...''

A Treasury analysis circulated last night featured a chart that showed the mining sector's tax rate was 12 per cent below the average for all industries in 2004-05.

Over a decade, the mining sector's average company tax rate was 17 per cent compared with 26 per cent on average across all industries.

''The average tax rate is found to be relatively high in the finance and insurance industry and relatively low in the most capital intensive industries, such as electricity, gas and water, and mining,'' according to the Treasury paper.

The findings were similar to those in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States which Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described as ''credible'', but which Opposition finance spokesman Andrew Robb called ''the shonkiest piece of work''.

For more on this story, see the print edition of today's Canberra Times.