France has been eyeing Australia’s critical minerals sector with the focused attention of someone who just watched their neighbour sign a very profitable agreement and is now wondering, quietly, whether they moved too slowly.
Australia’s Resources Minister Madeleine King said Thursday that France is “more and more keen” to invest in Australian mining and processing projects — a shift in urgency that began, in earnest, when Canberra finalised its framework deal with the United States last October. That agreement unlocked an $8.5 billion pipeline of investment and apparently sent something of a signal through the corridors of advanced manufacturing nations: those who hesitate may find themselves at the back of a queue that is shortening by the season.
It is the kind of dynamic Nigerians understand instinctively. When the big man signs his deal and the rest of the table sees the terms, everyone suddenly finds reasons to have been interested all along.
The urgency is not manufactured. The world is in the middle of a quiet but consequential scramble for the raw materials that make modern technology possible — the rare earths, the gallium, the antimony, the minerals with names that sound obscure until you learn they sit inside every smartphone, every electric vehicle, every defence system that advanced economies depend on. China has dominated the production and processing of these materials for four decades, with the kind of patient, systematic investment that the West is only now scrambling to replicate. Australia, sitting atop substantial reserves and governed by institutions that advanced nations trust, has made itself the alternative they are looking for.
“Since the framework agreement with the U.S., that work has taken on new urgency from some other partners as they make sure they also have access to critical minerals,” King told Reuters on the sidelines of the Minerals Week summit in Canberra.
France has engaged at the policy and financing framework level — including through its export credit agency Bpifrance Assurance Export — but has not yet announced the kind of large-scale project funding that America and Japan have committed. The distance between expressing interest and writing cheques is, in the critical minerals business as in most businesses, the distance between conversation and consequence. King’s comments suggest France is moving toward the latter, though no specific investment figures or project announcements accompanied her assessment.
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The appetite is understandable from Paris’s position. France has a sophisticated defence and manufacturing sector whose supply chains run, in many critical components, through Chinese-controlled processing facilities. That dependency has become uncomfortable in ways that the Iran war and its disruptions to global commodity markets have only sharpened. Securing upstream access to Australian minerals — before the best projects are spoken for — has acquired the quality of a strategic calculation rather than merely a commercial one.
Australia, for its part, is not simply waiting to be courted. The government has provided A$28 billion in financial support to its critical minerals sector since May 2022 and is developing an A$1.2 billion strategic reserve focused on antimony, gallium and rare earths — materials expected to be operational for supply to partners in the second half of this year. The reserve will carry a floor price element to protect against market volatility, but its agreements are structured to allow the government to capture upside when prices rise. “When there is an upside, the government should be able to get some of that benefit, but also exit this part of the arrangement,” King said.
The reserve is also being positioned as a feeder into America’s own $12 billion minerals stockpile, known as Project Vault — details still under discussion, but the direction clear enough. Australia intends to make itself indispensable not merely as a producer but as a trusted intermediary in the supply chains of its closest partners.
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The ambition requires patience that politicians rarely possess and electorates rarely reward. King acknowledged as much with a comparison that carries the weight of honest assessment. China built its dominance over 40 years — four decades of sustained state investment, processing infrastructure development, and strategic positioning that the world mostly ignored because the materials were cheap and abundant and nobody was thinking about what dependency would cost. “We would like to do it quicker,” King said. “But we do need to think of it as a long-term proposition.”
It took that kind of patient capital to build Nigeria’s oil sector, too — and anyone who has watched that sector navigate the decades since knows that the long game, played without consistency, is really no game at all.
Australia has secured cooperation agreements with Japan, South Korea, India, France, Germany and Britain alongside the American framework. On Tuesday, an eight-year negotiation with the European Union finally produced a free trade agreement that eases Brussels’ access to Australian critical minerals — though without the specific project-level investment commitments that accompanied the American deal. The EU agreement broadens the field; the American deal set the standard against which everything else is being measured.
The 49 mining projects and 29 midstream processing projects Australia is currently seeking billions more to fund represent the shape of an industry that exists, for now, more as potential than as production. The forecast of A$18 billion in export earnings for the financial year beginning July suggests the potential is substantial. Whether France and other advanced manufacturing partners move from interest to capital — and do so before the strategic window narrows — will determine whether Canberra’s four-year mission produces the diversified, China-independent supply chain the world says it needs.
Everybody wants to be first. Nobody wants to be last. France, watching from a few steps behind, is apparently deciding which it would rather be.