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.
Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person.Credit: Michael Quelch
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.
Poisoned chalice
One of the most cooked jobs in Australian politics is yours for the taking, dear readers, with the NSW Liberals putting out an advertisement for a party affairs manager. It is, according to the job ad, the party that “values the importance of family, freedom and individual enterprise”.
The lucky candidate will get the unenviable task of managing often cranky local branches, and dealing with the many internal squabbles that have plagued the state division over the past few years. After years of dysfunction, which culminated in the failure to lodge nominations for numerous candidates at this year’s local government elections, the Liberal Party’s federal executive launched a takeover of the NSW division.
CBD hears that the feds, with the backing of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, are plotting a suite of reforms to the state division intended to minimise said dysfunction, including shrinking the size of the state executive and streamlining preselection timelines.
But they are not likely to be pushed until after next year’s federal election, to avoid further infighting. It’s the kind of overhaul that has been flagged previously, most recently in a similar form by former Mackellar MP and state president Jason Falinski. That push fell apart after the hard right effectively filibustered them.
All of this should serve as a word of warning for any prospective candidates looking for a job in politics. This one could be more trouble than it’s worth.
Mosman Movers
To Mosman now, where the bulldozers are getting a workout on some of the country’s most exclusive clifftop real estate at Wyargine Point.
Mike Messara, chief investment officer at Caledonia, the fund manager to Sydney’s harbourside set, has lodged plans to give the family’s Seacliff mansion a $9.9 million facelift. Messara bought Seacliff off his father, John Messara, a renowned horse breeder and former Racing NSW chair, for a handy $23 million in 2019. He’d bought the street-facing house, part of the same compound, two years earlier for $10 million.
Messara’s plans involve rebuilding the front villa, with alterations, including a new pool, to the clifftop mansion out the back. Caledonia’s performance over the past three years has been ordinary if we’re being generous. Looking at Messara’s grand home reno plans, you’d hardly know it.
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