Poet, comedian, proletariat: a brief history of Gina Rinehart’s many multitudes

Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart has been spotted at Donald Trump’s fundraiser for his 2024 presidential run via a fortuitous selfie framing on Eric Trump’s Instagram. It’s worth noting she’s not allowed to donate to the Trump campaign, but as Crikey writes elsewhere today, she’s such a Trumpette she wanted to be there anyway. It’s just the latest in a long list of roles Australia’s wealthiest woman has played.

Comedian

We should have known that Rinehart would be keen on Trump as he was objectively the funniest president in history. In 2021 she put together a larf-a-minute “comedy” “book” that “gathered jokes, quotes and cartoons into a book to bring joy to those doing it tough”, according to Sky News.

The book may have looked like a cheaply assembled collection of boomer memes about socialism, Barack Obama, vegans and probably all the different kinds of milk available nowadays, but in a shocking twist, that’s precisely what it turned out to be.

The disclaimer at the front of the book makes clear the publishers make no claim to the copyright of the book’s jokes. Apparently the book’s content was published as “a website” (yeah, it’s called my uncle Rod’s Facebook page) for three months to allow the true authors to “assert their moral rights”.

Poet

Forget the impact of her companies’ mining on the environment, or the propping up of conservative think tanks — the country’s richest woman will leave her most lasting legacy on the art of verse. No poet before would be so bold as to work “short-term foreign workers” and “special economic zones” into poetry, as Rinehart did in her immortal “Our Future”. None have dared follow the path she tore through the literary thicket.

Thankfully, aspiring scribes can always visit the shrine to the poem that Rinehart put together, affixing a plaque of her work to a 30-tonne iron ore boulder located outside the Coventry Square Markets in Morley, Perth.

Workers’ advocate

One of the most stirring lines in Our Future exhorts policymakers to “embrace multiculturalism and welcome short-term foreign workers to our shores”. And Rinehart certainly has some views on the work practices of other countries. Rinehart was panned worldwide for a speech to the Sydney Mining Club in 2012 where she complained about the cost of doing business in Oz, with an aside about the wages that workers from “Africa” were willing to accept:

The evidence is inarguable that Australia is becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export-oriented business.

Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day. Such statistics make me worry for this country’s future.

What’s your favourite side of Gina Rinehart? Does she boast some other talent not listed here? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.