Future Made in Australia (Production Tax Credits and Other Measures) Act 2025

Schedule 2 of the Act inserts Division 419 into the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997, creating the Critical Minerals Production Tax Incentive. Section 419-5 entitles a constitutional corporation to a refundable tax offset for income years starting on or after 1 July 2027 and ending on or before 30 June 2040, where it holds a registration for CMPTI processing activities and incurs CMPTI expenditure carrying them on, subject to residency and community-benefit conditions. Section 419-10 sets the offset at 10% of the company's total CMPTI expenditure. Section 419-15 enumerates the critical minerals, including antimony, gallium, germanium, graphite, tungsten, scandium and the rare-earth elements individually (cerium, dysprosium, erbium, europium, gadolinium, holmium, lanthanum, lutetium, neodymium, praseodymium, promethium, samarium, terbium, thulium, ytterbium, yttrium); subsection (2) bars the regulations from prescribing uranium. Section 419-20 confines a CMPTI processing activity to substantially transforming feedstock through extractive metallurgical processing into a purer or more refined form that is chemically distinct from the feedstock. A registration may be in force for 10 income years within the 1 July 2027 to 30 June 2040 window, with the Industry Secretary deciding whether to issue the certificate.

The clearest statutory example in this database of an incentive aimed squarely at the separation-and-refining step rather than at mining — the Guide to Division 419 states the offset exists to support processing that produces a form "chemically distinct from the feedstock", and the Act's own explanatory structure places the entitlement outside extraction. That targeting is the point: the chokepoint the Chinese measures operate on is midstream processing, and this is the allied fiscal instrument aimed at the same stage. It is also the first Australian record here coded to a statute rather than to a programme announcement.