Article by Kishor Napier-Raman & Madeleine Heffernan, courtesy of The Age.
As Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart has few qualms about giving out advice to the country’s leaders – and the odd museum curator.
But Rinehart, who was in South Florida to soak up the vibes at Donald Trump’s victory party, has returned to Australia with a spring in her step, even more buoyed by the immense wisdom shown by about 74 million Americans earlier this month.
At a speech for National Mining and Related Industries Day, hosted by Santos at its Moomba plant in South Australia last week, Rinehart showed her fellow resource heads just how chuffed she felt about the state of the world.
“Great to be with you all for our National Day. Shouldn’t we really have a national month or two, given our industry’s contribution?” Rinehart opened.
The rest of the speech was a fawning Trump love-fest, demonstrating just how breathlessly enthused Australia’s richest person is about a change in the White House.
“Don’t you just love the saying ‘drill baby drill’?” Rinehart asked the crowd, repeatedly returning to a slogan Trump had used on the campaign trail to rev up the oil and gas industry.
Echoing Trump’s supporters’ attacks on RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), Rinehart had plenty of digs at LINOs, which we presume are “Liberals in Name Only”.
“This is not a time for LINOs timidly fiddling around a few edges, careful not to upset the minority noisies or rapidly increasing bureaucrats, none of whom will ever vote for the Coalition. We need to make Australia great again, don’t we?” she said.
As leaders from around the world scrambled to Azerbaijan for the COP29 global climate talks, Rinehart took a swing at bureaucrats’ and billionaires’ luxurious gabfests in aid of banning fossil fuels. “This expensive net-zero cult sure likes to use lots of fossil fuels for their many, many trips, including using hundreds of private jets,” she continued.
There was more effusive praise for Rinehart’s fellow billionaire pal Elon Musk, appointed by Trump to run the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy.
Rinehart finished things off with a gushing tribute to another foreign leader, Argentina’s arch-libertarian President Javier Milei.
“This year I’d like to leave you with a quote from another brave, outstanding leader, the president of Argentina: ‘The collectivism and moral posturing of the woke agenda have collided with reality and no longer have credible solutions to offer to the actual problems of the world’,” she said. “The Americans and Argentinians have recognised the reality of this and voted.”
It was all very fawning, but when you’ve got Rinehart’s level of wealth and a captive audience of miners, you really can say whatever you like.
