Earlier this month, US vice president JD Vance announced the Trump administration’s plan to create a critical minerals trading bloc with 27 nations, including New Zealand, to reduce their dependence on China. A special assistant to Donald Trump says the US will “deploy hundreds of billions of capital into the mining sector to get projects going.”

Duncan Hardie of Hardie Pacific represented New Zealand’s mining industry at a recent summit in Washington DC. Speaking to Newsroom, he said, “The Americans wanted each of the 27 nations to prepare a collection of project briefings. These projects had to target an element that was on the American critical minerals list as well as the list of the host nation, and had to be either shovel-ready or in production.”

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