Miners have proven to be the big winners of the 2024 Budget released by Canberra overnight, with $7B in spend for critical minerals leading to positive market sentiment today.
“This Budget establishes a Critical Minerals Production Tax Incentive for eligible processing and refining costs from 2027–28 to 2039–40 to incentivise investment in refining and processing of the 31 critical minerals currently identified on the Government’s Critical Minerals List,” the Budget papers read.
“[This comes] at an estimated cost of $7.0 billion over the decade.”
Australia’s Critical Minerals List was most recently updated in February of this year to include nickel. It also includes niobium, lithium, REEs broadly, PGEs, HPA, and even arsenic – far from an exhaustive run-through of all 31 minerals on the list.
In turn, stocks that dabble or dwell solely in any of these minerals are all seeing a sentiment boost today lead to gains on the market.
The materials sector is in the lead heading into lunchtime, helped in no small part by BHP jumping over +2% in morning trade.
In the second hour of trade on Wednesday, the following stocks were all among the top gainers for the day (excluding nanocaps and smaller microcaps.)
- Renascor Resources (ASX:RNU) – up +15% to 11.5cps
- Arafura Rare Earths (ASX:ARU) – up +8.11% to 20cps
- Chalice Mining (ASX:CHN) – up +7.90% to $1.57/sh
- Metals Acquisition (ASX:MAC) – up +7.31% to $20.71/sh
- WA1 Resources (ASX:WA1) – up 5.19% to $21.28/sh
- Vulcan Energy Resources (ASX:VUL) – up +4.38% to $4.29/sh
- Syrah Resources (ASX:SYR) – up +4.17% to 50cps