Heiress Gina Rinehart and the fine art of self-interested drivel

Back decades ago when it was a real newspaper, the Financial Review would have cast a decidedly sceptical eye over the special pleadings of mining heiress, joke curator and poet Gina Rinehart. These days, it gives her gongs — Business Person of the Year — and a platform for her eccentric, far-right views.

The AFR edited the speech she gave in accepting their gong, so who knows what Rinehart actually said, but we doubt that she has been edited maliciously — if anything, quite the opposite. But even with any tidying up, Rinehart’s views are incoherent and self-serving.

The first thing the mining heiress wants you to know is that she’s not an heiress. “My dad’s estate was bankrupt … So I still puzzle why the left media love to call me heiress,” she says. Gosh, Gina, not just the “left media”. The Australian calls you heiress, too. Has Gina gone so far to the right that the Oz has now joined the ranks of the lefty media? Hell, even far-right blog Spectator Australia has called her an heiress.

That’s because, without her father Lang Hancock, Rinehart wouldn’t be a billionaire. She might own some cattle stations, or some boarded-up asbestos mines — both activities Hancock prospered in before iron ore — but she hasn’t built herself up from not much in the same way as, say, Andrew Forrest, who started off as a stockbroker.

Indeed, Rinehart’s solitary achievement was to develop the Roy Hill mine. It’s a small version of the mammoth operations of Rio Tinto, BHP and Fortescue. Otherwise, she has two high-priced, overly expensive plays in lithium in WA — Azure Minerals and Liontown. Outside of that, the basis for her to be acclaimed as business person of the year looks decidedly thin.

One thing Rinehart makes clear she hates in her mining operations is paying diesel excise. But she doesn’t simply say “it’s an expense I don’t like paying”. She dresses it up as an economic reform issue: “I can’t think of anything that isn’t touched by the excise on fuel. I call that a nasty tax that, with people struggling, would be an absolutely fantastic one to cut.” Except none of that is true. Fuel excise is a relatively efficient tax. Cutting it has minimal economic benefits. And the benefits of cutting it flow primarily to high-income earners. And, of course, to major fuel users like mining companies. How many billions of dollars would Rinehart benefit if the fuel excise was slashed?

And what taxes or spending cuts replace the lost billions that are transferred from the government to high-income earners and mining companies? You’d think an organ of economic rationalism like the AFR wouldn’t let Rinehart’s self-interested nonsense go unchallenged, but there it is.

One way to get rid of the scourge of diesel excise is to switch to vehicles that run on renewables. But Rinehart can’t abide renewables. She conjures a dystopic Australia in which the countryside has been turned into a wasteland by “the building of vast tracts of solar panels and wind farms and electricity connections”. “It is estimated that one-third of prime agricultural land will be taken over,” she says.

Who estimated this? Why, the far-right climate denialists at the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), of course. The one-third claim is nonsensical and relies on absurd assumptions such as that Australia will never have offshore wind farms. A recent US study detailed exactly how little land is actually required for renewables infrastructure including transmission to meet US renewable energy goals.

What’s strange is that what Rinehart, the IPA and other climate denialists are in effect saying is that farmers shouldn’t be allowed to make their land available for the most efficient economic use, one for which they will be directly rewarded. Is that the Rinehart agenda the AFR is happy to promote?

She also warns of Australia having to rely more on imported food as a result of one-third of the countryside given over to wind farms — ignoring how Australia’s agricultural productivity, production and exports have dramatically surged in recent decades despite drought and floods. Rinehart sounds like her dear friend Barnaby Joyce and his ranting about “food security”, which apparently means foreigners should buy our food but we shouldn’t buy theirs.

And curiously absent from Gina’s screed about wind farms is the damage inflicted by fossil fuels on agricultural land, which had led governments to ban fracking on agricultural land to prevent permanent damage to habitat, water quality and productive capacity. “Blind Freddie can see. Common sense would be so helpful,” Gina says, having declared a number of her concerns ones that “Blind Freddie” could see. In fact, anyone can see that Rinehart is talking a mix of self-serving nonsense and climate denialist drivel, blaming renewables for increasing prices when it is fossil fuels — particularly gas — that have been a key contributor to the recent surge in inflation, and which pose a direct threat to agriculture.

“The Australian Financial Review, Australia’s leading business newspaper, and its media mates have an important role to play in conveying these Blind Freddie messages to our government,” she concludes. It’s an apt summation. Unlike the AFR of decades ago, the paper is now primarily a platform for the self-serving views of the business elite at the expense of good public policy, sound economic management and rigorous fiscal control. Blind Freddie could tell you that. And in this case, there are none so blind as those who are paid not to see.