Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question, and she is right in articulating that the landmark critical minerals framework agreement that was signed by the Prime Minister and the President last week is genuinely in Australia's national interest—is 'worthy', in the terms of the member—and will absolutely have a huge impact on the Australian industry and, through that, the Australian people. Critical minerals are one of the great opportunities that our nation has. We have one of the five largest resources of critical minerals and rare earths in the world. The opportunity not only to mine those critical minerals but to process them represents one of the great opportunities for our manufacturing and our industry this century. That's because of the particular items which use critical minerals and rare earths, which are simply fundamental to the modern economy.

Now, what we have faced globally is that, whilst we have been engaging in the mining and extraction of critical minerals and rare earths, the processing of them—a sector which would involve significant employment and significant industrial development in this country—has proven much more difficult, given the structure of the global market. That's why we have put in place a number of measures, such as the Critical Minerals Production Tax Incentive and the Critical Minerals Facility, to demonstrate that the Australian government is there supporting the critical minerals sector to engage in that kind of work. That represents a $28 billion investment in this sector by our government since 2022. In saying that, I would add that, when it comes to the Critical Minerals Production Tax Incentive, we did that in the face of the opposition of the coalition, who talked about that as 'billions for billionaires', completely failing to understand what this represented for Australian industry.

It is difficult to do this on our own, and that is why the agreement that we signed with the United States last week, between the Prime Minister and the President, was so important. What this does is bring together the might of the US government, along with our own, in terms of being able to genuinely support these industries going forward. The benefit for the Australian people is manifest. What this will see is significant numbers of downstream processing jobs in this sector, which currently are not there in the Australian economy, and that will be an enormous advantage for the Australian— (Time expired)

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