AMEC Urges Victoria’s Resources Policy Reset for 2026

The Geological Paradox at the Heart of Australian Resources Policy

Across global mining investment circles, a jurisdiction's geological endowment and its regulatory competitiveness are rarely discussed as separate issues. Yet in Victoria, these two variables have drifted so far apart that the disconnect has become one of the more striking anomalies in Australian resources policy. The state sits atop mineral systems that geologists have long recognised as prospective for a wide range of commodities, including gold, base metals, and an emerging suite of critical minerals. And yet, by almost every measurable investment metric, Victoria continues to trail its national peers in exploration activity, project development momentum, and capital attraction.

AMEC calls for a Victorian resources reset to address this policy paradox directly. The Association of Mining and Exploration Companies, Australia's peak body representing junior and mid-tier explorers, has used the return of Jaclyn Symes to the resources ministerial portfolio to issue one of its most pointed calls for structural reform in recent years. The message is clear: geology alone does not build a mining industry. Policy does.

Victoria's Mineral Endowment Versus Its Investment Reality

Victoria has a documented history of mineral production stretching back to the 1850s gold rush, which remains one of the largest alluvial gold events in recorded history. The Bendigo and Ballarat goldfields produced tens of millions of ounces over their productive lives, and modern geophysical surveys suggest that many of the deep structural corridors feeding those systems remain underexplored at depth.

Beyond gold, Victoria hosts prospectivity for minerals increasingly central to global energy transition supply chains. Lithium-bearing pegmatites have been identified in parts of the state, and there is exploration interest in cobalt and rare earth elements associated with specific geological settings across central and eastern Victoria.

Despite this endowment, Victoria has consistently recorded lower exploration expenditure than Western Australia, Queensland, and even South Australia. The reasons are structural, not geological:

• Regulatory timelines that lack the certainty required for junior explorers funding and budgeting cycles
• The absence of a prescriptive critical minerals strategy to anchor investor attention
• Unresolved land-access conflicts that create sovereign risk perceptions before a drill bit enters the ground
• Inconsistent funding cycles for exploration incentive programmes that make multi-year planning difficult

"The gap between what Victoria has in the ground and what it has attracted in exploration capital is not a market failure. It is a policy failure accumulated over many years of treating the resources sector as a secondary economic consideration."

What AMEC's Four Reform Pillars Actually Require

Rebuilding Investor Confidence Through Policy Stability

Junior explorers — the companies most responsible for generating new mineral discoveries — operate on tight capital budgets and long lead times. They allocate exploration spend based on a jurisdiction's perceived risk-adjusted return, which factors in not just geology but regulatory predictability, approval timelines, and the likelihood of a project reaching a development decision.

Victoria has struggled on several of these criteria. AMEC's position is that rebuilding confidence requires more than a ministerial statement of intent. It requires durable, multi-year policy commitments that explorers can factor into their capital allocation decisions before they spend a dollar on ground. Furthermore, current Australian exploration trends suggest that jurisdictions offering this certainty are already pulling ahead in the competition for exploration capital.

Accelerating Exploration Activity

Exploration is the lifeblood of any future mining pipeline. Without sustained drilling activity, a jurisdiction cannot build a project inventory to attract mid-tier and major mining companies downstream. Victoria's exploration expenditure has underperformed relative to its geological potential, and this underperformance compounds over time as competing jurisdictions deepen their project pipelines.

Streamlining Regulatory Approvals

The Resources Victoria Approvals Coordinator (RVAC) programme, established in 2023, represents an acknowledgment that Victoria's standard regulatory pathways were too fragmented and slow for competitive project development. RVAC provides a dedicated coordination function to help projects navigate the approvals process more efficiently. Currently funded through to 2027, the programme faces a discontinuity risk if it is not embedded permanently into the state's regulatory architecture.

AMEC has been explicit in its advocacy for extending and enhancing RVAC well beyond its current mandate. The distinction between a coordinated approvals mechanism and a standard bureaucratic pathway is significant in practical terms:

Creating a More Competitive Project Development Environment

Competitiveness in resources investment is relative, not absolute. Victoria is not competing with global jurisdictions in isolation. It is competing with Western Australia, which hosts some of the world's most investor-friendly mining frameworks, and Queensland, which has embedded critical minerals explicitly into its economic development strategy.

For Victoria to attract a meaningful share of exploration capital, its policy settings need to be at least comparably attractive, particularly for projects involving energy transition commodities. The rise in critical minerals demand globally makes this competitive alignment all the more urgent.

The Land Access Problem: Victoria's Emerging Sovereign Risk Signal

Why Competing Land Uses Have Become a Flashpoint

Victoria's land use landscape has grown significantly more complex over the past decade. Renewable energy infrastructure, transmission corridors, agricultural operations, and resources exploration are increasingly competing for access to the same terrain. Unlike some other jurisdictions, Victoria lacks a formal, government-convened mechanism to manage these competing claims in a structured way.

This absence creates a specific type of investor concern that is distinct from regulatory delay. When an explorer cannot reliably predict whether land access will be granted, contested, or subject to indefinite negotiation, the entire project risk profile changes. This is what sovereign risk analysts refer to as a structural uncertainty — meaning it cannot be mitigated through better project management or improved geology. It requires a policy solution.

The Proposed Coexistence Victoria Working Group

AMEC has proposed the establishment of a formal working group to bring together representatives from the resources sector, agriculture, renewable energy developers, and transmission infrastructure proponents under a government-convened framework. The objective is to develop structured coexistence protocols rather than relying on ad hoc negotiations between individual parties.

International precedents suggest this kind of multi-stakeholder governance can materially reduce land access conflict timelines. A well-designed land access framework, as seen in parts of Canada and Scandinavia, has been credited with shortening exploration approval timelines and reducing the frequency of legal challenges to project development.

"Victoria currently lacks a formal government-convened mechanism for managing competing land-use claims in resource-prospective areas. Without one, the state is effectively asking explorers to accept an unquantifiable variable in their project risk assessments."

Victoria's Missing Critical Minerals Strategy

What a Prescriptive Strategy Actually Involves

A critical minerals strategy is not simply a list of commodities a state considers important. A genuinely prescriptive framework identifies specific geological targets, maps existing tenement activity, sets measurable development milestones, and provides fiscal or regulatory incentives aligned to strategic supply chain objectives. It gives investors, offtake partners, and potential sovereign wealth fund counterparties a document against which they can evaluate a jurisdiction's seriousness.

Victoria does not have one. This absence is particularly consequential given the state's potential relevance to lithium, cobalt, and rare earth supply chains at a time when global demand for these materials is being driven by electric vehicle battery manufacturing, defence applications, and clean energy infrastructure buildout.

How Peer Jurisdictions Have Built Competitive Advantage

Western Australia's approach to critical minerals has been one of the most studied examples of state-level strategy in the Australian resources sector. The state has aligned exploration incentive programmes, approvals frameworks, and trade promotion activities around a clearly articulated agenda. In addition, Australia's critical minerals strategy at the federal level has reinforced this momentum, providing a national framework that state-level strategies can anchor to.

Queensland has taken a similar approach, embedding critical minerals into its broader resources and economic development strategy in ways that have attracted international interest from both private capital and government-backed procurement partners. The contrast with Victoria is stark:

Reading the Ministerial Appointment Through an Industry Lens

Jaclyn Symes: What the Portfolio History Tells Us

Jaclyn Symes served as Victoria's resources minister from November 2018 to August 2021, a period during which the sector consistently argued that meaningful reform remained elusive. Her return to the portfolio under Premier Ben Carroll, alongside responsibilities for the State Electricity Commission, Climate Action, and Environment, signals an integration of energy and resources policy that could be either an opportunity or a complication depending on execution.

The combined portfolio structure is notable. Bringing resources and climate action under the same ministerial umbrella creates the potential for policy alignment between Victoria's clean energy transition ambitions and its critical minerals development agenda. The materials needed for renewable energy infrastructure — including lithium, cobalt, copper, and rare earth elements — are precisely the commodities Victoria's geology may be capable of supplying.

AMEC's response to the appointment was measured but direct. The association welcomed the ministerial continuity while making clear that acknowledgment of the sector's importance is not a substitute for structural reform. As AMEC has noted publicly, the industry's view is that years of limited policy progress cannot be addressed through tone alone.

The 2026 Victorian Election Platform: Raising the Policy Stakes

AMEC has confirmed it will release a dedicated Victorian Election Platform ahead of the state election, designed to be shared with both government and opposition representatives. This dual-audience approach is strategically significant. By engaging opposition as well as government, AMEC is attempting to build bipartisan awareness of the sector's policy requirements, reducing the risk that any future change in government resets the reform agenda.

The platform is expected to include:

1. Sustained and multi-year funding for exploration incentive programmes
2. Extension and permanent embedding of the RVAC approvals coordination function
3. Development and publication of a prescriptive critical minerals strategy
4. Establishment of the Coexistence Victoria Working Group with a clear mandate and timeline
5. Integration of resources policy with Victoria's clean energy transition objectives

Scenario Analysis: What Reform Pathways Look Like in Practice

The range of possible policy outcomes following the ministerial appointment can be broadly mapped across three scenarios, each with materially different implications for Victoria's resources investment trajectory.

Scenario A: Incremental Adjustment. Existing programmes receive modest extensions without structural reform. RVAC continues on its current funding trajectory with no certainty beyond 2027. Exploration incentive funding remains inconsistent. Investor confidence stays subdued and exploration expenditure continues to underperform relative to national peers. Victoria retains its position as a comparatively unattractive jurisdiction for resources capital.

Scenario B: Targeted Reform Package. RVAC is extended and embedded as a permanent feature of Victoria's regulatory architecture. A Coexistence Working Group is established within the first year of the new ministerial tenure. A prescriptive critical minerals strategy is published within 12 months, providing the policy anchor that investors and offtake partners require. Exploration expenditure begins to recover within 24 to 36 months as confidence improves.

Scenario C: Transformational Policy Reset. Victoria undertakes a comprehensive review and modernisation of its resources framework, aligning exploration policy, approvals architecture, land access governance, and critical minerals strategy into a coherent whole. The state positions itself as a nationally competitive destination for energy transition mineral investment. Regional employment and infrastructure investment flow to areas of geological prospectivity. This scenario requires sustained bipartisan political commitment and is aspirational in the near term.

"Industry analysis broadly positions Scenario B as the minimum threshold for meaningful change. Scenario A risks accelerating capital flight to competing jurisdictions, while Scenario C, though aspirational, represents the trajectory required for Victoria to genuinely close the gap with its national peers."

The Broader Stakes: Victoria's Role in Australia's Supply Chain Resilience

Australia's national critical minerals strategy is implicitly dependent on geographic diversification of production capacity. An overconcentration of critical mineral output in a single state creates supply chain fragility, both for domestic industry and for international trading partners seeking reliable sourcing partners.

Victoria's potential contribution to lithium, cobalt, and rare earth supply chains is not hypothetical. It is grounded in documented geology that has received too little systematic modern exploration to be properly evaluated. However, a state that commits to a genuine policy reset could, within a decade, become a meaningful contributor to Australia's critical minerals export capacity.

The window for capturing that opportunity is not indefinitely open. Global capital flows into critical minerals exploration are mobile, and they are already consolidating around jurisdictions with clear policy signals and competitive approvals environments. The Victorian resources framework must evolve if the state is to compete meaningfully for this capital. Victoria's new ministerial leadership has inherited both an obligation and an opportunity, and how quickly and decisively it acts will determine whether the state captures a share of one of the defining investment themes of the coming decade.

Key Policy Requirements for a Meaningful Victorian Resources Reset

• Regulatory permanence: Extend the RVAC programme beyond 2027 and embed it as a standing feature of Victoria's approvals architecture, not a time-limited initiative
• Strategic clarity: Publish a prescriptive critical minerals strategy with specific commodity targets, development milestones, and aligned fiscal incentives within 12 months
• Land access resolution: Establish the Coexistence Victoria Working Group with a formal government mandate and representation from all competing land use sectors
• Investment horizon: Introduce exploration incentive funding with multi-year visibility so junior explorers can plan capital allocation cycles with confidence
• Policy integration: Align resources policy explicitly with Victoria's clean energy transition objectives to capture the dual economic benefit of domestic critical mineral supply and renewable energy buildout

This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Readers should seek independent advice before making any investment decisions. Forecasts and scenario projections discussed reflect industry advocacy positions and analytical frameworks, not guaranteed outcomes.

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