Labor has teased it will be releasing detail on plans for a critical minerals strategic reserve, which is politician talk for ‘we have worked out from giving away our other natural resources like gas that we probably should have kept a lot more for ourselves, so now we have found this other stuff, we’re not going to be complete idiots and let mining companies have it all at the detriment of the Australian people’.

Don Farrell is talking about that a little more today because the Trump tariffs are still dominating the news cycle (Israel is killing between 70 and 100 Palestinians a day on rough estimates and bombed a school sheltering families as we all slept last night, but trade impacts rich countries so….)

Australia has critical minerals needed in the energy transition and new technologies (batteries are very big right now) and so everyone is looking for their critical minerals source. The US does not have an abundance of critical minerals and rare earths, so it is trying to hoover up as much as it can (you may remember Trump tried to get Ukraine’s in return for support against Russia) so critical minerals are hot right now.

Farrell:

Australia is often described as the lucky country and when it comes to critical minerals and rare earths Australia is again a lucky country.

We either have the most or the second-most reserves of critical minerals in the world and, of course, we think we can provide those minerals to all of those countries that are part of the net zero project.

We have reached agreement with the Europeans, so we – we couldn’t get an agreement with the Europeans on a Free Trade Agreement, but we did get an agreement with the Europeans on critical minerals.

You’ll have seen President Trump talk about Greenland, talk about the Ukraine in the context of access to critical minerals. Well, we got them right here. We got the technology to extract them. We’re one of the most efficient countries in the world for the extraction of minerals and we can do the same for those critical minerals, and, of course, we can process them here.

This Government as part of our made in Australia policies, we believe we can process those minerals. So we think we can be a reliable supplier of those minerals into the future. As the Prime Minister said yesterday, he’ll be making some more comments and some more statements about what we propose to do in this critical minerals space.

Al Jazeera has reported on the US Geological Survey’s Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025 which ranked critical mineral countries this way:

  • China – 44 million metric tonnes (mt; 1mt is equal to 1,000 kilogrammes). It also controls about 70 percent of global rare earth mineral processing
  • Brazil – 21 million mt
  • India – 6.9 million mt
  • Australia – 5.7 million mt
  • Russia – 3.8 million mt
  • Vietnam – 3.5 million mt
  • United States – 1.9 million mt
  • Greenland – 1.5 million mt
  • Tanzania – 890,000mt
  • South Africa – 860,000mt
  • Canada – 830,000mt
  • Thailand – 4,500mt