By MarketWatch TOKYO (MarketWatch) -- The Australian dollar rose Friday after the Australian government announced a deal with the mining industry on a controversial resource-tax plan. The country's new prime minister, Julia Gillard, announced the deal in Canberra before the stock-market open, saying a "basic structure" for taxing natural-resource profits was now in place. See full story on Australian resource tax. The Aussie (CUR_AUDUSD 0.8475, +0.0011, +0.1300%) was buying 84.67 U.S. cents, up 0.1%, after rising as high as 85.095 earlier. The Australian currency "jumped 80 pips to 0.8510, almost 2 big figures up from where it was 30 hours prior," said Sue Trinh, senior currency strategist at Royal Bank of Canada. Meanwhile, China's yuan rose against the U.S. dollar to another record high, after the People's Bank of China set its daily parity rate sharply higher. The unit is allowed to trade within a bank of 0.5% on either side of the official rate. China set the rate at 6.7720, the highest level since it revalued the yuan and abandoned its dollar peg in 2005. The yuan climbed as high as 6.7700 against the dollar. The dollar index (DXY 84.65, -0.07, -0.08%) , a measure of the greenback against a trade-weighted basket of six major currencies, fell to 84.521 from 84.680 in late North American trading on Thursday. Against the yen, the dollar (CUR_USDYEN 87.9800, +0.2600, +0.2964%) bought ¥87.95, up from ¥87.42. The euro (CUR_EURUSD 1.2504, -0.0011, -0.0879%) rose to $1.2525, from $1.2486, and the British pound (CUR_GBPUSD 1.5183, +0.0018, +0.1187%) rose to $1.5199, from $1.5155 late Thursday. On Thursday, the dollar dropped against the euro and Japan's yen on Thursday after data showed U.S. jobless claims rose, pending home sales plunged and manufacturing activity slowed, all signaling weakness in the country's economic outlook. See Thursday's Currencies report.

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