Miners found an ally on Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, who declared on Monday that the federal government needs to honour its royalty deal with BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata, regardless of the contentious issue on the agreement's time frame.

Ms Bligh is under the impression that the proposed mineral resource rent tax covers all royalties and Canberra is solely responsible for the deal it entered into with Australia's mining giants while state governments maintain their rights to impose hikes on royalty taxes.

Any disputes arising from the tax deal would not prevent the Queensland government from exercising its right to determine its own royalty taxes provisions, according to Ms Bligh, and the same goes with the Western Australian government, she added.

Ms Bligh told The Australian that "a democratically elected Queensland government in five, 10, maybe 15 years may decide to lift royalties, and if they do so, and then there is a gap in the arrangements, that is a matter for the mining companies and the federal government."

BHP, Rio Tinto and Xstrata are insisting that the federal government is obliged to refund them on state royalty dues under the agreement forged for their acceptance of the MRRT but government officials have clarified that such provisions were only contained in the rebuffed resource super profits tax then pushed by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Rudd's successor, Prime Minister Julia Gillard, decided to ditch the RSPT when the former stepped down and offered a deal on the country's major mining firms under her own MRRT, which she said carries no limiting royalty coverage.

Ms Gillard also stressed that it would ne inimical for the federal government to shoulder additional costs once state governments initiate upward movements on their royalty taxes.

Meanwhile, opposition leader Tony Abbott said that the latest row between the government and the mining companies was simply "another case of the prime minister saying one thing before the election and doing something quite different after the election."

Abbott claimed that Ms Gillard lured the miners into a deal to halt the negative feedbacks they were incurring in the lead up to the August national elections and now that Labor has achieved its goal of gaining power "they're desperate for the revenue and they're breaking promises."

Barring any more legislative glitches and power-broking issues, the government is eyeing to implement the MRRT by July 2012, which carries a headline tax rate of 30 percent and covers mainly iron ore, carbon and coal.