Rinehart is at the mercy of the iron-ore price. It has shot as high as two hundred dollars a ton—many times the price of producing a ton in the Pilbara. But when it fell to eighty-nine dollars, last September, not only was Rinehart suddenly no longer the richest woman in the world but reports circulated that Roy Hill workers were being laid off and contracts were being deferred.
The latest ranking of billionaires by Forbes, however, lists Rinehart as the sixth richest woman in the world. Roy Hill, assuming it gets off the ground, will be fundamentally different from any of its main competitors. They are all owned and operated by publicly traded companies. Many Australians are afraid to talk about the most talked-about person in Australia. He meant that Rinehart might sue him for defamation, a relatively easy thing to do in Australia, and that defending himself against the sort of legal onslaught she is renowned for mounting would leave him destitute.
I contacted many associates, ex-associates, employees, ex-employees, politicians who publicly support her projects, even neighbors. Most declined to speak—even the politicians. Most of the exceptions insisted on anonymity. I happened to meet, in Perth, a person who had worked at Hancock Prospecting. Hard Heart! A nondisclosure agreement precluded further comment.
Fred Madden worked at Hancock and was the rare employee who refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Rinehart hired him shortly after she became chairman. He was an experienced Canadian mining executive who knew both the Pilbara and world iron markets, and she made him chief executive.
He found the company chaotic. Rinehart trusted no one. One is the hero tale. The other is that she inherited a shattered, debt-ridden company. The best known of this shafted group was Ken McCamey, who accompanied Hancock through decades of prospecting. But McCamey remained a modestly salaried employee throughout his career. Hancock left him five hundred thousand dollars in his will, but not a penny of that was paid. Indeed, Rinehart fired the aging prospector shortly after her father died.
Queen Elizabeth visited Perth in Rinehart was at the garden party at Government House, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. Prince Philip asked her why she was on the guest list. She was simply a loyal subject, she replied. He asked again. Obviously HRH would have seen many hats over the years and would not choose to stop to speak to someone for the purpose of criticising their hat, including a hat worn in honour of his wife, the Queen.
Rinehart has been expressing herself recently in a range of media. She suggested lowering the minimum wage in Australia. Rinehart seems to lack any sense of just how dimly her fellow-Australians might look upon a multibillionaire arguing that their standard of living should be lowered in pursuit of tax and labor policies that will obviously benefit her.
And yet she craves the admiration of her countrymen. Rinehart did not win a spot on the list. Worse, Clive Palmer, another mining billionaire, somehow did. Palmer is the opposite of media-averse. Rinehart is uncomfortable addressing an audience. She was scheduled to give a speech to the Sydney Mining Club in August.
Instead, she sent a ten-minute-long video, in which she simply read, verbatim, one of her columns, previously published, from Australian Resources and Investment. By normal standards, it was a snore—a tendentious, obtuse, finger-wagging lecture, poorly delivered. And yet it was fascinating. Her performance was so odd. She spoke in a high, highly unnatural voice, with an accent more Queen Mother than Western Australian mine boss.
She wore a huge pearl necklace. Her face was shiny and her color unhealthy, and there were cuts so clumsy that they seemed like vintage Monty Python gags. At some points, her voice suddenly shot up so high, and became so breathy, that you half-expected an ambulance crew to rush into the frame.
Her tone was chilly, pious; there was an air of head-shaking concern. For billionaires who cannot buy good press, there is the option of buying the press. In late , Rinehart bought, for a hundred and seventy million dollars, ten per cent of a national television broadcaster, Network Ten, and received a seat on its board of directors. The chairman is Lachlan Murdoch. Fairfax is in poor financial shape, suffering from the industry-wide decline in print advertising. Until recently, its share price was in long-term free fall.
At Fairfax, she wanted at least two of the nine board seats. As a result, she was offered no seats. Her dispute with the Fairfax board escalated and was amplified by the natural interest of journalists in their own fate.
Fairfax cut nineteen hundred jobs and announced that its two flagship papers would switch to a tabloid format. It was all more fuel for the Gina obsession, already raging across the federation.
In addition to her media acquisitions, Rinehart financially supports a number of conservative think tanks and antitax groups. As she put it in a poem of her own composition, inscribed on a plaque attached to a thirty-ton boulder of iron ore outside a shopping center on the north side of Perth:.
Another major Rinehart theme is climate-change denial. The nation has been wracked by floods and bushfires. Rinehart is unconcerned. I have never met a geologist or leading scientist who believes adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will have any significant effect on climate change. Frankly, whatever you do at street level—which is what you are talking about here—is not going to have much of an impact compared with capturing an entire news media.
There are only two shops in town, so, if she can shut down our coverage of the climate issue, it will be game over in Australia for a long time. Rinehart has a tumultuous personal life, which has been revealed mostly in court cases. Her long legal battle with her stepmother unearthed her grisly struggle with her father. She took to bulletproofing her car and office windows and hiring bodyguards. In , one of them, an ex-policeman named Bob Thompson, filed a sexual-harassment suit against her.
Her employees must sign agreements never to talk to the press about her or Hancock Prospecting. Family disputes have clouded the question of who will eventually succeed Rinehart.
Her oldest child and only son, John Hancock, has a difficult relationship with his mother. He changed his name as a young man, preferring to honor his grandfather rather than his stepfather, Frank Rinehart. He joined the board of Hancock Prospecting at twenty-one and was seen as the heir apparent.
Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan said in a statement that the quote was "an insult to the millions of Australian workers who go to work and slog it out to feed the kids and pay the bills. In Rinehart's opinion, Australia has become too expensive for the mining industry , and she suggests getting rid of recent taxes levied on miners as well as wage cuts for workers. Despite her penchant for privacy, Rinehart joined a campaign protesting the Labor Party's mining "super tax" that caught the media's attention.
The impassioned Rinehart reportedly jumped on a flatbed truck once owned by her father and bellowed, "Axe the tax! Rinehart believes the tax will drive away investments worth billions of dollars. These include a rejected idea to use nuclear explosions to mine iron, and highly controversial secessionist policies. Rinehart has said she wants to split Australia in half right through the center, believing it would help shield the country from economic downturns in Europe and the U. In the piece she penned for Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision known as ANDEV— which she also founded , she argued the Northern zone would be economically miner-friendly by slashing taxes and having more lenient immigration laws to allow cheap foreign workers to come into Australia.
Her prose, which was engraved on a plaque and attached to a ton iron ore boulder , was crucified by the Australian media for its grammatical errors and lack of punctuation but hey, at least it rhymes! Rinehart does not believe in climate change, and in the past has supported climate change skeptics such as Christopher Monckton and Professor Ian Pilmer.
She also believes the government carbon tax is a waste of money. In a piece originally published in Australian Resource and Investment magazine , Rinehart says:. The sooner the carbon tax and MRRT are gone the sooner we stop wasting our time and money on these endeavours, and the easier it will be to finance for investment in Australia.
But her bid to the Fairfax Media board to buy three board chairs and have the ability to fire editors was denied. Since then, Rinehart has continually tried to dump her remaining shares. After Gina's mother's death in , Rose Lacson was hired as a maid by Rinehart, but began an affair with the late Hancock instead. The two were married in Even today, she regularly refers to the horrors of the anti-business Whitlam government, an enduring memory of the passionate politics she embraced in her father's name.
Gina Rinehart with one of the locomotives that will carry the ore on the Roy Hill rail line. She dropped out of an economics degree at Sydney University to work in the family business. An early, brief first marriage at the age of 19 to one of the company's pilots produced two children, John and Bianca. In , she married Frank Rinehart, a US lawyer who was much older. They had a happy marriage that produced two more daughters, Hope and Ginia, but when Frank died in , she became a young single mother of four.
Although she proved relentless in her determination to rebuild the business and keep the Hancock legacy together, she would not have the same success with her own family. A rift with two of her children who eventually took her to court , revealing details of bitter family emails and complaints, created even more of a public sensation than the fights with her father's widow. It burst into public view in when Hope Rinehart sued her mother to remove her as sole trustee of the Hope Margaret Hancock Trust.
John and Bianca joined their sister and the three children would allege their mother illegally moved assets out of the trust.
Seven years on, the family feud continues, with the High Court agreeing in May to hear the childrens' claims. When asked via email about the case, Gina Rinehart says her actions saved money for the family.
I acted in my children's interests to do this. It was not the wish of my father to set up the trust for my children, as wrongly reported in the media, as he was then wanting to give my mother's shares elsewhere. The children did not pay for these shares or otherwise contribute in any significant way to the saving and building of the company. The bitterness regularly seeps out into other areas of dispute. In February, after news broke that Gina's friend Barnaby Joyce was having a child with his former staffer Vikki Campion, John Hancock joined those calling on Joyce to resign.
For someone already obsessed with privacy, Rinehart has become even more determined to protect herself given the family drama playing out, reality-TV style, to general fascination.
But given she only has one child who remains close to her, it's notable that youngest daughter Ginia, 31, is not on this trip to the Pilbara. It seems her absence is not unusual. We have a Ginia truck, one of the first [pink] ones for breast cancer.
She worked very hard on the Roy Hill Foundation, she was able to encourage not just Roy Hill people to contribute but our partners and lots of other companies that had something to do with Roy Hill along the way. So she made a big contribution as far as the foundation was concerned.
I am hoping that as she gets older she will want to do more and more. Close of subject. Typically, Rinehart is much more comfortable talking about her relationships at work.
Relationships with those she doesn't control are more fraught. Despite her huge pastoral interests, for example, there's now a schism between Rinehart and the National Farmers' Federation.
Following protest, he handed it back the next day. The Roy Hill mine is in a 27,hectare area of an even more massive north-west cattle station. In turn, Rinehart points out that the NFF did not provide any financial support for the gala dinner, which was a "great success". She criticises the NFF for applying for a government grant to support National Agriculture Day, saying that this had nothing to do with her or Hancock Prospecting.
Her gala dinner will be held again this year, she says. NFF members are welcome to attend "should they wish, subject to places being available". Yet all this counts as minor friction compared with her condemnation of Australian politics: "I am very worried about our country.
I believe the things we should be doing, we are not doing. We should be encouraging investment if we want to maintain or improve our living standards and job opportunities. We need to cut taxes and government tape and compliance.
Australia is a high-cost country which needs to export many of its products. The huge burden of government fat needs reducing, urgently and significantly. What a lot of people don't realise — and this is huge — is that investment is at lower levels now than when it was in the anti-business Whitlam government. Certainly, the level of mining investment has fallen after the massive construction boom but, as federal Treasurer Scott Morrison points out, non-mining business investment is accelerating again as the economy transitions.
Rinehart retorts that it's overall investment that counts and that this should be a serious wake-up call for action. Fortunately we can look across the Pacific to the USA and see what is working. Taxes and government tape are being slashed in the USA, with the results — rising investment, increased business and consumer confidence.
Why aren't we doing this here? Her desire to change the debate through owning media assets appears over. In , she sold out of Fairfax after disagreements over editorial independence saw her refused any board positions. Her 10 per cent stake in Ten Network was wiped out when the business went into voluntary administration and was sold to CBS in Rinehart, it seems, will battle on alone — as ever.
Look - lets stop sticking our noses in her family business. Who would know how we would handle it if it were in our family. And quite frankly, after reading Adele aka Leftie Ferguson's biography of Gina - and following the media coverage - I don't want to know. The big message here - and thank you Kate for posting the link to the video - is that everything she says in the video is absolutely appallingly true from an economic and business management perspective.
If any of you actually played the video to the end - and had a basic understanding of economics - you should agree. If you take away the image of Gina Rhinehart speaking and put an equally as rich international MAN up there saying the same things - would he get the same flack?
It was not her money but always belonged to the children from their grandfather. Her job was to manage it and recieve fees for doing so.
All those people going "boohoo the children have to work for a living, so what?
0コメント