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FIRB monetary screening thresholds under the Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Act 1975 are indexed annually on 1 January against the change in the Australian CPI for the preceding June quarter (rounded down to the nearest million dollars). Because different investor categories have different base thresholds — driven by whether the investor's home country holds a bilateral or plurilateral free-trade agreement with Australia with an investment chapter (e.g. CPTPP/AUSFTA-linked FTA-partner thresholds vs. the lower general/non-FTA thresholds) — a single uniform CPI adjustment produces divergent absolute dollar changes across countries, and in a few cases GTA recorded moves that look like "increases" or "decreases" relative to the prior-year baseline for a specific partner. Global Trade Alert's intervention log (secondary source, state-act 95966) recorded threshold decreases affecting Chile, New Zealand and United States investors and increases for India, Hong Kong and Peru investors in this indexation round; GTA classified the associated sector tags (cereals, vegetables, fruits and nuts) reflecting the agricultural-land/agribusiness threshold lines that are broken out separately from the general commercial thresholds.
Several threshold lines are explicitly excluded from indexation and did not move: the $0 thresholds for national-security businesses, residential land, vacant commercial land, foreign-government investors and media; the $15 million cumulative agricultural-land threshold; and the $50 million Thailand-specific agricultural-land threshold under the Thailand-Australia Free Trade Agreement.
This is a routine, statutorily-mandated annual technical update, not a discretionary policy change — it is procedurally distinct from the 19 May 2026 FIRB structural reform package (2026-05-19-australia-firb-foreign- investment-framework-reform), which changes processing rules, exemption certificates and sensitive-sector scrutiny rather than the indexed dollar thresholds themselves.
applicable thresholds rose with CPI; marginal tightening for jurisdictions where the applicable threshold fell relative to 2025.
investment and national-security-sensitive transactions regardless of deal size.
FIRB reform package's low-risk fast-track and sensitive-sector-tightening changes will be layered from 2027.
investor categories in the 2026 cycle are published only in Treasury's PDF/ DOCX threshold tables (not machine-readable HTML); this filing did not transcribe the full country-by-category dollar table.
ECTA/CECA-linked trade relationship with Australia, not a full investment- chapter FTA) is not explained in the sources reviewed — worth checking whether this is a genuine indexation artefact or a reclassification.