Gold Strength Helps Australian Mining Investment Rise but Broader Concerns Linger

With gold prices continuing to hit record levels, interest in precious metal miners is matching the hype, helping to create investment in Australian bullion exploration.

New data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has found that there was a significantly stronger gold exploration performance during the June quarter, with expenditure up 36.1% from the March 2025 quarter to more than $400 million.

Australian iron ore exploration also rose, up 21.7% to $216.1m.

Solid Quarterly Data

Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (AMEC) chief executive officer Warren Pearce said the June 2025 ABS quarterly data for mineral exploration and expenditure provided some solid numbers.

“Gold has been on an incredible run of late and these stats back it up—it’s also a sizeable indicator that things are starting to improve,” Mr Pearce said.

“In fact, gold was responsible for 40% of all exploration activity recorded across the quarter.”

National Exploration

The total national exploration spend for FY2025 was $3.83 billion, with brownfields accounting for $2.82b and greenfields $1.01b.

Total metres drilled were down by 1.0% compared to last year, while exploration spend increased 21% to $19.2b over the past five years.

From a state perspective, South Australia and Tasmania have impressive triple figure growth over the same period, with 161% and 177% growth respectively.

Western Australia and Tasmania exploration expenditure rose by more modest increments of 10.2% and 19.8% respectively.

Greenfield Concerns

However, the ABS figures also raised some concerns with AMEC, with quarterly expenditure for national greenfields exploration falling 17% to $253.2 million, compared to $305.6m a year ago.

“The greenfields exploration figure is the most concerning for our industry and demonstrates the need for things to change.” Mr Pearce said.

“This continuing reduction in greenfields activity has critical implications for future new project discovery and development and filling the pipeline needed to ensure the future economic prosperity of the nation.”

Mr Pearce said the ABS data reflects some of the concerns shared by AMEC and its members for some time, including the continuing barriers for industry to get on ground.

“This is impacting the investment environment and is visible to investors,” he added.