Queensland’s influential mining lobby has been accused of exaggerating the industry’s benefits by using “biased” economic modelling in a public relations campaign targeting candidates in the state election.

The Queensland Resources Council (QRC) used Twitter to tell MPs what benefits their individual electorates derived in terms of jobs and money spent on goods and services due to mining.

Their targets included premier Campbell Newman and opposition leader Annastacia Palaszczuk, who was told her seat of Inala, in Brisbane’s west – where household incomes are below the state and national average – owed an economic injection of almost $1bn to mining.

While only 143 full-time mining employees lived in Palaszczuk’s seat, they and the industry in total spent $409m at 174 businesses in Inala in 2013-14, supporting another 4,405 jobs, the QRC claimed in a media release.

Labor environmental spokeswoman Jackie Trad – a day before she revealed Labor would roll back taxpayer support for the controversial Carmichael mining project – was told mining contributed $5.6bn to her seat of South Brisbane.

QRC chief executive Michael Roche said in a release: “In parts of the south-east, there is a misconception that minerals and energy production benefits only resource regions when the data is absolute in declaring Brisbane the biggest mining town in Queensland.”

Rod Campbell, a researcher with progressive thinktank the Australia Institute, said the mining lobby’s claims were “clearly nonsense”.

Campbell said the QRC figures were based on a type of economic modelling which the Australian Bureau of Statistics said was biased and the Productivity Commission said was widely abused.

The ABS abandoned its use of so-called input-output multipliers in 2001.

“None of these numbers (from the QRC) should be taken seriously,” Campbell said.

“Coal mining employs 1.2% of the Queensland workforce and pays only 4% of Queensland government revenues.

“It is a minor part of the Queensland economy which, like most modern economies, is based on service sectors.”

Roche defended the modelling, saying “the same technique was used by the Reserve Bank of Australia in a 2013 research paper that estimated that the resources sector accounted for 18% of Australia’s gross value-add”.

“That RBA study in turn built on work by the Australian treasury in 2011,” he said.

Roche said the QRC’s modelling was more accurate “than can be achieved with standard applications of general equilibrium models” because of the level of specific detail in the data collected.

Roche also launched a counter-attack on the Australia institute, saying it had forfeited “any pretence of analytical credibility … when they agreed to do the bidding of the Australian anti-coal movement in 2011”.

He said a report by a former NSW treasury chief had exposed fundamental errors in a report by the thinktank which “grossly exaggerated” government subsidies paid to the resources sector.

“The Australia Institute not only joined the anti-coal movement’s strategy advisory group, but put up its hand with GetUp! to receive campaign funding to ‘challenge the economics of coal’ and ‘create investor uncertainty’,” Roche said.