Hello from the big (and very hot) state!

I'm jumping in to keep you company here on the markets blog for the rest of the day.

As Michael pointed out, the miners are really kicking into gear today.

I have a feeling this might have something to do with a few government announcements in the last couple of days.

On Friday, the federal resources minister, Madeleine King, announced an update to the critical minerals list.

It was only in December that the government updated the list after months of submissions and feedback from industry and stakeholders.

At the time many had been calling for commodities like nickel and copper to be added to list.

They weren't.

But since then, nickel businesses have been facing some serious headwinds with the spot price tumbling, a number of mine closure (and job losses) have been announced.

The industry had been in crisis talks with the federal and WA governments.

The decision to add nickel to the list means companies will have access to financing under the $4 billion Critical Minerals Facility.

The WA government also announced royalty relief during the weekend.

It cut the royalty payments nickel miners make to the government by 50 per cent for the next 18 months.

Industry lobby groups are calling for more measures from government, but these two announcements, I suspect, will have returned some confidence to investors — and helped push up the share price.

Also, this is resources week for reporting season, when we'll get updates from a lot of miners across various commodities, including BHP, Rio Tinto, Santos, IGO, FMG, Mineral Resources, Northern Star Resources, Pilbara Minerals and Sandfire Resources.

The resources sector is still the best performer on the ASX today —  it's up 1.3 per cent as at 11am AEDT.