KARVELAS: Can you provide an example of a risky project that’s not in Australia’s national interest? I mean for people listening what do these changes mean?

CHALMERS: We want to maximise the right kind of investment and that means minimising the risk. The sorts of risks that our Foreign Investment Review Board are especially attentive to are where a supply chain might be dominated by a foreign investor, where there’s the capacity to manipulate that supply chain or to interfere with it in one way or another.

So these are pretty familiar features of the screening in our system, but I want to make them much stronger, much more robust and that’s what these changes are all about.

KARVELAS: So how are they currently not strong enough?

CHALMERS: At the moment what happens is we treat most investments more or less the same; the less risky ones and the more risky ones, and that gums up the system.

So what I want to do is I want to streamline the process for investments which are less risky so that we can devote much more time, much more effort, energy and resources to screening investments, whether it’s in critical infrastructure, critical minerals, critical data, and some of those more sensitive areas.

KARVELAS: Is this ultimately about curbing investment from China?

CHALMERS: No, our foreign investment regime is non-discriminatory. We apply pretty tough tests to certain kinds of investments no matter where they come from, from around the world. We want to look very closely at who’s making the investment, what the structure of the investment is and what kinds of industries people are proposing to invest in. And those pretty tough tests, which will be even stronger after the reforms I announce today, they will apply equally to investment from China as from other parts of the world.

KARVELAS: You say it will look at sensitive sectors and assets. Canada introduced tighter investment laws for artificial intelligence, for critical minerals, space technology and also the video game industry. Are they the same sectors you’re looking at?

CHALMERS: Similar, and I work closely with my Canadian counterpart, the finance minister and deputy prime minister of Canada. We focus a lot on what’s happening around the world. Our efforts are similar but not exactly the same.

My efforts are really focused on those critical industries I mentioned a moment ago and making sure that we can robustly screen them to make sure that they’re in our national interests. But also when we impose conditions on those investments to make sure that people comply with them as well.

KARVELAS: Do you expect that you’re going to get any push back from countries, including China?

CHALMERS: I wouldn’t have thought so. I mean we’ve communicated before now and certainly in the context of this announcement that our foreign investment regime, as I said, is non-discriminatory. We want to make it stronger where it needs to be stronger and more streamlined where we can afford to make it more streamlined. That applies to investment from wherever it is around the world.