Reuters reported that France, whose President Emmanuel Macron met Albanese last week in New York, was also interested in Australia’s reserves. Reuters also reported the G7 nations were considering trade measures to prevent rare earth price-dumping that include tariffs and price floors, though the countries have been reluctant to call out China explicitly as they worked to fend off Trump’s barrage of tariffs.
The federal government is hosting a summit in Australia next month to lure global investors into the energy transition.
Resources Minister Madeleine King with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at Rio Tinto’s Dampier Port, near Karratha in Western Australia, this year.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Peter Dean, co-author of the government’s landmark Defence Strategic Review, talked up the importance of Australia’s critical minerals to the new geopolitical landscape.
The Australian National University professor is working on a project funded by the US State Department centred on AUKUS, which Albanese said on Sunday could incorporate plans to develop critical minerals.
Australia’s push for a Western supply of critical minerals aligns with Trump’s America-first approach, Dean argued.
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“The big question will be how you re-energise [pillar two of AUKUS], and where do critical minerals sit? Do they sit with AUKUS, or separate bilateral agreements with the US and other allies?” he said.
“The UK is interested in critical minerals, and it seems to be one of the things the US administration is really focused on.”
Dean echoed the sentiment of former Labor leader Kim Beazley, who said on Sunday that governments needed to take ownership of critical minerals funding because Chinese state investment far outweighed what private investors could tip into projects.
“China is destroying anyone who comes into the market. They are willing to kill off competition to use the dominance as leverage,” Dean said.
“The only way you break that is with a consortium of countries where everyone agrees to invest in production. The amount of money you need is significant.”
AUKUS has been under a cloud since the Pentagon announced a review into the pact in June, but Australian officials are hopeful the deal will remain intact when the probe is completed. A range of critics, led by former prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Paul Keating, have argued Australia was ceding sovereignty by agreeing to enmesh itself into America’s nuclear capabilities.
A parliamentary inquiry into the Australia-UK treaty attached to AUKUS will be held on Thursday. Serco, the global services giant, has made a submission to the inquiry arguing Australia did not currently have the workforce to proceed with AUKUS.
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