Speech to ANU National Security College

Website search ANU, Canberra I begin by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we gather today, the Ngunnawal People. I pay my respects to their Elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with us today. Thank you for the kind invitation to speak today.

Thanks in particular to ANU Deputy Vice Chancellor Stuart Wyithe and James Pitman from the National Security College for this for this opportunity. And I acknowledge the distinguished guests from our diplomatic community who have made time to be here this morning. I am delighted to be among so many distinguished academics, policy leaders, security practitioners, government, industry and members of the diplomatic corps gathered here today.

Collectively, you all sit at the intersection of ideas, policy and national purpose. That makes you a vital part of this discussion. Our economic prosperity has been built on the back of our resources sector.

Increasingly, though, our rich endowment of natural resources is playing a vital role in our nation’s security. So, when we talk about critical minerals, we are not simply talking about resources. We are also talking about sovereign capabilities that will secure Australia’s future.

Australia’s geology is our inheritance, shaped by forces over millennia, over which we have no control and never did. But what we make of that inheritance is entirely up to us. In many respects, generations of Australians have made that choice and now Australia is a dominant resources nation.

We have a world-leading geoscience capability, a highly skilled workforce, and a mining sector globally recognised as the best in the world. Through our resources sector, we make an outsized contribution to global manufacturing and in providing energy security to our region. The Albanese Government understands resources are central to Australia’s national security and the economic security of our region.

The sustained period of peace and prosperity in our region that we have known for many years can be attributed in very large part to the steady, constant and reliable supply of Australian energy commodities – coal, gas and uranium - to our neighbours. But increasingly it is the question of critical minerals that now sits at the centre of strategic decision making.

Critical minerals are key to defence systems, energy, communications, advanced technologies and industrial capability. They help protect us, keep the lights on, drive innovation, and deliver economic gains. There is no Future Made in Australia without a strong domestic critical minerals sector.

The challenge for critical minerals lies in the markets, and how they are structured and traded. Australia has an abundance of raw critical minerals and rare earths. But China, over decades, has built a substantial advantage in critical minerals midstream and downstream processing leading to outright dominance in the international market.

Beginning in the 1960s and ramping up in the 1980s, those Western countries with significant mineral processing capacity, allowed it to atrophy. That was in large part because of increasingly thin margins and growing environmental complexity and an unwillingness of governments to manage that complexity – choosing instead to outsource the whole enterprise to places where environmental concerns are often ignored.

Whereas the United States and Europe were the centre of gravity in rare earths processing in the 1960s, by the 1990s that capacity – including expertise in mining, separation and refining – all but ceased to exist. In contrast, China, has for decades treated minerals processing as a strategically important industry and built that industry up to such an extraordinary scale that mid-stream and downstream supply chains are wholly concentrated in that one country.

The result has seen a strategically significant domination in global supply of rare earths. And in recent years we have seen a rapid increase in export controls, restrictions and bans across the whole chain of critical minerals and rare earths production. This has emphasised the risk of concentrated supply of the products the world needs for most modern technology.

The United States, Japan and our European partners have recognised their exposure. They are actively seeking to build resilient supply chains that are less dependent on a single supplier and are looking to Australia as a key ally in that effort. This creates a challenge for Australia.

We are supporting new supply chains, deepening international cooperation, and playing a larger role in diversification for those resources. At the same time, we are continuing to manage trade with our largest trading partner. These are not conventional market conditions.

But we have a responsibility to step up and lead on critical minerals globally and that is exactly what we are doing. Australia – a country of 28 million people – has mobilised one of the largest financial support packages anywhere in the world, with the sole purpose of reinvigorating critical minerals and rare earths processing capacity here at home. This $28 billion package ensures Australia is stepping up to take on its responsibilities to lead on critical minerals globally.

The scale of this taxpayer support is significant, but it is a funding package that meets the scale of the challenge given what we are asking projects here at home to confront: To take on opaque markets, shaped by concentrated market power and structural distortions. That is no easy challenge. And no one country can do this alone.

Just two weeks ago, the G7 leaders meeting in France signed a new declaration on cooperation on critical minerals mining, production and the need to diversify supply chains. The G7 declaration hasn’t received much coverage in Australia. But as the opening paragraph of the statement notes, Australia supports the declaration where: G7 leaders committed to reducing dependency on a single supplier outside the G7 and partner countries.

In 2025, Australia joined the initial G7 Critical Minerals Production Alliance, established by Canada. We will continue to be a member of the expanded alliance under the latest declaration. This declaration is recognition of the work Australia has been doing with our partners, including Japan, Canada and the United States.

The declaration is a direct result of Australia’s global leadership in this area. It recognises that today’s critical minerals markets present unconventional problems that require unconventional responses. Australia’s response has been to commit the nation to developing a critical minerals and rare earths industry that captures more value and builds sovereign capability and an enduring position as a world leader.

If Australia is to capture more value, we need to move further down the value chain. The value, and the leverage, lie in the processing and refining – and increasingly in the systems, data and technologies that sit around them. Ambitious Australian companies have recognised this and are attempting to broaden these concentrated supply chains.

For instance, Victory Metals has established a rare earths pilot processing facility in Perth as part of the development of its North Stanmore heavy rare earths project. The facility will play a critical role in demonstrating and optimising rare earths processing, helping to advance plans for future commercial production. It’s a milestone that demonstrates Australia can move down the value chain and make important inroads into alleviating outright supply chain domination by one nation.

Supply chains that were once optimised for efficiency are now being reshaped around resilience, trust, strategic alignment, and geostrategic interests. We are now part of a broader reconfiguration of a global trading order – a system that has been largely stable since it was created after the Second World War. Countries are making different choices about how they manage risk.

This presents both an opportunity and a test for Australia. While we are well positioned at the front end of the supply chain, the next phase of the work we do with international partners will be defined by how effectively we drive the creation of a sustainable, enduring alternative market for the world. And this work we will do with partners in the United States, Japan, Europe and across the G7.

We are more than simply a resource provider. We are an enduring strategic partner of choice. That’s why we are working with the US on agreements to deliver strengthen, secure, and diversify critical minerals and rare earths supply chains.

Last year the Prime Minister, Industry Minister Tim Ayres and I met with US President Donald Trump to sign the landmark United States-Australia Framework for Securing of Supply in the Mining and Processing of Critical Minerals and Rare Earths. One of the projects included in that deal is the gallium production facility at Alcoa’s Wagerup alumina refinery in Western Australia.

This project will support growing demand for the critical minerals necessary for semiconductors, advanced electronics and defence applications. But it will also address the market disruption caused the well reported introduction by China of export controls on gallium in 2023. Gallium is a byproduct of bauxite that we process to aluminium.

We never had to make gallium before because it was freely available on international markets. That all changed when China put in place strict export controls on supplies. I am enormously proud of the work of this government and that of our partners in Japan and the US, who have all worked together diligently and with purpose since that trade ban to create new sovereign capability in the production of gallium.

Production capacity is anticipated to be 100 tonnes per annum, representing about 10 per cent of global demand for that commodity. Australia’s financing is being provided through Export Finance Australia (EFA) under the Critical Minerals Facility (CMF) and delivers on the objectives of the Critical Minerals Strategic Reserve. Another important milestone in building this industry is the Arafura Nolans Rare Earths project which was able to announce very recently that it is ready to commence construction near Alice Springs as a direct result of support through our Critical Minerals Strategic Reserve.

All of this would not be possible of course without the strong leadership of a united government with Ministers working together in lockstep in the national interest. And in this regard I want to acknowledge the excellent stewardship of Australia’s Trade Minister, Don Farrell. It is also critical to recognise the exceptional work of the Treasurer Dr Jim Chalmers in relation to decisions facing the Foreign Investment Review Board.

We have similar partnerships to the US Framework with nations like Japan and Canada. Through multilateral forums like the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative, we’re working with likeminded countries to build critical minerals supply chains for our shared economic and national security. In doing so, we’ll be able to deliver outcomes we simply couldn’t deliver on our own.

Because resilience requires scale – and scale requires diversification across global supply chains. This will require coordination on investment, shared standards, and a willingness to work through the complexity of building industrial capability across jurisdictions. It is very difficult work that takes time and commitment, and it requires trade-offs.

But the alternative – continued concentration and domination of supply chains by one producer – presents a greater risk to our national interests. The risks of economic coercion are real – Australia has experienced this directly. We are already seeing how disruptions in critical minerals supply can flow through to manufacturing, energy systems and defence capability.

They constrain choice, increase costs, and slow technological development. For countries like Australia, the challenge is to navigate this environment with clarity about where we can have the greatest impact. Part of that is industrial policy.

It is about where we, and our partners, choose to build capability, and how we support it over time in the face of global competition and how we confront the challenge of unfair treatment charges that make our smelters uncompetitive. The other part is market creation – because we don't have viable secure or transparent critical markets at present. We need to help shape the next generation of critical minerals markets and the trading systems that underpin them.

That means understanding where the pressure points are, where new dependencies may emerge, and where the next bottlenecks will sit. And positioning Australia where we can add and draw down the most value. This is where institutions like the National Security College play an important role.

Because the challenges we are dealing with do not sit neatly within a single discipline. They cut across economics, science, security, technology and geopolitics. And they require a level of integration, between research, industry and government, that we have not always had to bring together in the past.

If we get that right, Australia will be well placed. As I said, we have the resources, we have the talent, we have the technical capability, and we are a trusted partner in a global system that is placing increasing value on trust over cost. We need to be clear eyed about the limits of Australia and our partners.

We will not out compete on every mineral, or at every stage of the value chain We don’t need to. Our task is to be deliberate about where we invest, where we partner, and how we position ourselves in a system that is increasingly contested. Ultimately, this is not just about resources.

It is about how countries manage dependence and build resilience in a more uncertain world. Critical minerals and rare earths sit at the centre of that challenge. It's a problem that grows with success.

As the markets get bigger, so does the demand on Australia and our ability to respond. It's a good problem to have, but a difficult problem to solve. As we look to solve problems like this – and many others – it is institutions like this, and people like all of you, who will remain crucial to our efforts.

Thank you again for the chance to be part of today’s discussion, and I am looking forward to taking part in the panel discussion that is set to follow. The Department of Industry, Science and Resources recognises the First Peoples of this Nation and their ongoing cultural and spiritual connections to the lands, waters, seas, skies, and communities. We Acknowledge First Nations Peoples as the Traditional Custodians and Lore Keepers of the oldest living culture and pay respects to their Elders past and present.

We extend that respect to all First Nations Peoples. Stay informed of the latest ministry list on the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet website This website is managed by the Department of Industry, Science and Resources