About the palladium price
Palladium goes into petrol-engine autocatalysts, where platinum goes into diesel ones, so the two trade against each other as manufacturers substitute one for the other when the price gap gets wide enough. Russia and South Africa dominate supply, and that concentration is why palladium has swung further and faster than any other metal on this page.
Buying and holding palladium in Australia
A line separates palladium from the other three metals here, and tax law draws it rather than the market. The GST Act names gold, silver and platinum, each in an investment form and each at a set fineness. It then leaves a door open: any other substance may be added by regulation, at a fineness that regulation sets. No such regulation has ever been made. The Australian Taxation Office states the consequence plainly. To be precious metal for GST purposes, the metal must be gold, silver or platinum.
A supply of precious metal is input taxed, so no GST is charged on a qualifying gold, silver or platinum bar. Palladium does not qualify no matter how fine it is or what form it takes, so a palladium bar or coin bought from a registered seller is an ordinary taxable supply with GST in the price. Nothing about the metal changes; the definition simply never grew to include it. That gap sits underneath any comparison between a palladium price and a gold one, because the two are not quoted on the same tax footing.
The physical market is also less accommodating. Palladium clears wholesale in plates and ingots of one to six kilograms, the same convention as platinum, and most of the metal in existence moves between industrial buyers rather than through retail counters. Investment products exist, but the range is the narrowest of the four metals here and the two-way spread reflects a market where fewer sellers hold stock. A benchmark price still runs twice each day in London. Those auctions have the same administrator as the platinum ones and begin as they finish, and they price the wholesale market rather than anything sold across a counter. Those prices are set in US dollars, so the Australian number answers to the currency as well as to the metal.
Longer read: Where palladium comes from, and why recycling is the swing factor. Two countries account for nearly four-fifths of mined palladium, almost none of it is mined for its own sake, and about a third of total supply now comes from scrapped vehicles. That third is the part that moves.
See other metals and markets on the Australian markets hub.