Andrew Bolt: Big lesson in netball’s $15m loss

Australia’s national netball team has truly represented the country by highlighting our moral, mental and economic decline.

Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart is a friend, and I’d like to say here what I’ve told her in private.

Bravo! Thank you for teaching the Diamonds, Australia’s national netball team, an urgently needed lesson: go woke, go broke.

I mean that literally. The race and global warming posturing of woke sportswomen has now left Netball Australia broke, after Rinehart scrapped her $15m sponsorship.

Let’s hope the rest of Australia is watching, because for once the Diamonds have truly represented their country by showing exactly our moral, mental and economic decline.

The Diamonds were praised by Twitter moralists for refusing to wear the logo of Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting to support an incoming player, Donnell Wallam, who identifies as Aboriginal and objected to something Rinehart’s father, Lang Hancock, said 38 years ago.

Yes, it really is that pathetic.

Gina Rinehart. Picture: Getty Images

Gina and the company she’s led for 30 years were being judged by an offensive comment by her long-dead father, who said Australians with both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ancestry who were not assimilated should be sterilised to “breed themselves out”.

Appalling, but do we really now judge people by ancient comments made by a relative?

How can such witch-hunting be applauded as “brave” and “principled”, when it’s so immoral and vindictively tribalist?

I’ve known Gina for many years and have never heard anyone accuse her personally of racism, or heard her say something racist.

In fact, Clinton Wolf, managing director of the National Indigenous Times, says of Gina: “She does deeds with a good heart.”

The Karlka Nyiyaparli Aboriginal Corporation promotes her Hanrines Futures scholarships which give young Aborigines, training, mentoring and a job.

She also backs Pilbara Faces, which uses 3D facial analysis to identify rare diseases in Aboriginal children.

That’s on top of the more than $300m her company has paid in royalties over seven years to traditional owners.

So when Wallam said she couldn’t wear the Hancock Mining logo because of something Gina’s father said before Wallam was born, her teammates should have told her to pull her head in. Be fair.

They should have told her not to be so selfish, either, and think of the rest of the sport, desperate for Gina’s sponsorship with Netball Australia facing ruin with reported debts of $4m.

Aussie Diamonds player Donnell Wallam.

But race politics has robbed this nation of sense and courage. The players decided if just one player objected to wearing the logo, then they all did: “We are fully committed to the Diamonds’ Sisters in Arms legacy.”

Besides, Wallam was Aboriginal, so who’d dare resist her demands?

As the team said: “The singular issue of concern to the players was one of support for our only Indigenous team member.” So the minority of one overruled the interests of everyone else.

How often we see race politics now trump democracy, with Labor even calling for an Aboriginal-only parliament?

The team denied reports they’d refused the Hancock logo on “environmental grounds”, but I find it hard to believe that anti-Rinehart and anti-mining propaganda didn’t sway them.

For instance, former Diamonds captain Sharni Norder attacked Netball Australia for taking money from a “climate denier” and a company “who’s (sic) profit-at-all-cost attitude puts our future in danger”.

But Gina is an intensely practical woman who actually realises it’s madness to think the world can scrap the fossil fuels that still give us 79 per cent of all global energy without going as broke as, well, Netball Australia without Gina’s $15m.

As for putting “our future in danger”, the opposite is true. Gina’s Hancock Prospecting Group digs out the iron ore we need for things like cars, buildings and bridges that Norder would use.

In doing so, it last year paid $2.7bn in taxes, used to fund the hospitals, roads, schools and police Norder would demand.

The Diamonds may be ranked No.1 in the world, but they exist in a financially fragile environment, after Hancock Prospecting walked out on a $15m deal.

So Australia without our mining industries would, again, be like Netball Australia without Hancock sponsorship.

Luckily, Gina does not cower to fools who think we can reject the things that make us rich without getting, er, poorer.

She noted netball’s top players would be hurt most by losing her sponsorship, having demanded “a very substantial increase in wages during a time the sport is reeling financially and unable to provide such an increase”.

What a badly-needed message for a country drowning not just in debt, but in race politics, global warming catastrophism and an anti-mining earth-worship.

You can’t demand the lifestyle if you reject the culture, discipline and industries that create it. Thanks, Gina, for making that so clear.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Big lesson in netball’s $15m loss