Before the May election Australia’s richest ($38.11 billion) reactionary was also politically powerful. Gina Rinehart’s muscle was flexed through her purse and palliness with Peter Dutton, though they reportedly fell out because he didn’t fully oppose net zero emissions.
It’s all academic now as the former Opposition Leader is grazing elsewhere. So Rinehart must rebuild her kick-all-wokes credentials and get close to the more moderate Sussan Ley.
The billionaire’s ploy is scaremongering in a way that’s unlikely to influence the Middle Australia voters Ley’s trying to seduce, a triumph of ideology over reality.
Rinehart is publishing statements and videos foretelling dystopia should Australia’s commitment to the UN Paris Agreement by 2050 come to pass – and getting these into Murdoch’s papers.
Like Egypt’s Ten Plagues, the doomsayer predicts banning fossil fuels will stop cremations, close hospitals, ground the RFDS and force health workers to buy EV cars. Missing is the Swan River turning to blood and frogs clogging toilets.
If Gina Anyone tried to flog this weirdness, her copy would get spiked in a second. But in Australia we harken to the words of the rich even those with inherited wealth; when you pay the paper, you call the tune.
Rinehart told the Herald Sun: “Who is going to look after the elderly, when aged care facilities will have to close in accord with net zero requirements?
“It’s time for properly and truly considering the costs and consequences of net zero, the many, many, many Australians that net zero requirements by our governments will hurt, the cost Australia simply cannot bear. It’s time for truth.”
It’s also time for a competent sub-editor.
What we know about Rinehart is usually told by the subject, or through public court disputes over royalties with the two eldest of her four kids.
Revelations by independent journos are rare. Your scribe once booked a promised chat and sat outside her door for a morning. She never appeared – nor did an apology. Ten years ago the ABC did better with a two-part Australian Story.
Although she shows off as a big-hat, red-dirt bushie loathing greenies, Rinehart operates in urban green territory symbolically above the WA Parliament and adjacent to Kings Park.
More greenery is coming soon with the lady’s “first major foray into commercial property development” around the same site, having spent $41 million buying out the neighbours.
In their places will rise a $250 million cat-friendly “business hub” for 1,000 workers in “an intelligent kinetic facade (whatever that means)… with a distinctive pink facade featuring petal-shaped exterior fins.”
The colour apparently reflects Rinehart’s “commitment to breast cancer awareness” after her mother Hope died from the disease in 1983.
If she’s putting millions into researching cures for the wretched malady, then that’s most commendable. How much? She’ll tell what solar systems cost but is shy on figures for donations.
These are listed as “substantial funding” for two years, so no way of knowing if it exceeds her sponsorship of a News Corp series of six ‘Bush Summits’ this month.
Gratuitous comment on social issues runs in the family. Lang Hancock was one of the more unpleasant people any journo could meet, a dour single-minded narcissist pre-dating Donald Trump. In the simplistic media values of the age, he was ‘good copy’.
Like his only daughter, he had no earned academic qualifications but knew scads of money earned public admiration. Elbowing into public debate was easier with a chequebook than a doctorate, decades of expertise and peer recognition.
Hancock claimed discovery of huge areas of iron ore in 1952 while prospecting by plane – seemingly by chance when forced lower by storms – though a smart biographer checked the weather that day and found it normal.
No matter – the myths hardened, turning a knockabout sheep and cow cocky into a sage. Earlier, he’d found blue asbestos in Wittenoom Gorge. The product – widely used in construction - killed an estimated 255,000 globally through the lung disease mesothelioma.
An Internet search hasn’t shown indemnifications to the victims’ families by the Hancock enterprises. The mining company James Hardie was eventually forced to pay $4.5 billion to the Medical Research and Compensation Foundation. Wittenoom closed in 1966.
Hancock and partner Peter Wright shared the leases they’d pegged with the Rio Tinto Group, and flew away supposedly with annual royalties of $25 million each. The sums and conditions are in dispute but they were hefty.
In societies that claim to be egalitarian, much of this money would have gone to the state.
It went to Rinehart because Australia is a finders-keepers culture, unlike Norway.
According to an ABC documentary, the Scandinavian country is “one of the world's most prosperous, peaceful and egalitarian nations through state ownership and development of its natural resources.”
It would be unfair to tar Rinehart (her second late husband was New York lawyer Frank Rinehart) with her father’s vile views on the First Australians, though there is no public record of her repudiating Daddy’s extremism.
The repulsive plan Hancock announced on TV, had welfare recipients being lured to a central location:
"When they had gravitated there, I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in the future, and that would solve the problem."
In 2021 Rinehart was supporting women’s netball, but when an indigenous player refused to wear a Hancock logo because of the old man’s racism, his daughter was offended. Instead of apologising for Papa’s prejudices, she scrubbed the sport’s $15 million sponsorship.
Maybe Rinehart, now 71, will use the maturity that comes with ageing to accept that net zero advocates may be worth hearing, to tone down the loony tunes and take the opportunity to denounce Hancock’s hate.
It would be good to conclude that privately Rinehart is a pleasant businesswoman, generous with her good fortunes, genuine with her concerns and keen to become an inspiring philanthropist following another WA mining magnate Andrew Forrest.
Till he split with his wife Nicola in 2023, “Twiggy” was listed as second to Rinehart with $33.3 billion. The couple’s money is reportedly going to the Minderoo Foundation focusing on Indigenous Australians’ education - a possible place of rest for the Hancock billions.
Maybe the Time for Truth is now as the saturated and sunburned electors realise climate change is real, and for all its defects the Paris deal is better than Rinehart’s absurd prophecies.
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