We’re four weeks out from the Paris Olympic Games and one would hope by now that the VIP and VVIP accreditations had been bedded down for Australian dignitaries, especially for sports’ most generous benefactors.
But no, instead we’re hearing of an utter scramble by the Australian Olympic Committee and its many affiliates to get a much-coveted swimming pass for the country’s wealthiest person, Gina Rinehart, who was somehow forgotten until now.
Rinehart must have been left off in the rush of early applications, which isn’t a great look when her Hancock Prospecting is a major partner of the AOC.
Worst of all, it looks like her people have had to go and request a pass from the AOC, her people tapping their people to raise the matter with officials as senior as IOC vice-president John Coates. Why would she even have to ask?
Margin Call hears that everyone from Coates down is working double-time to ensure the accreditation is delivered – and stat. It’s just days away from happening, apparently, and in the final stages of approval, the paperwork just waiting on a rubber stamp from Paris.
Presumably no similar trouble for Rinehart at the volleyball, which she funds and of which she has been a patron since 2013. And we assume Wesfarmers boss and Rowing Australia chair Rob Scott has already sorted out Rinehart with a pass for the rowing, because he knows how to treat a sponsor.
But it’s the swimming where Rinehart’s relationship with the governing body runs a bit cooler. The billionaire cut ties with Swimming Australia after her funding payments for athletes weren’t passed on to them on time, and after a series of frustrations involving her board delegate, who kept being asked to leave the room during discussions. We know all this because Rinehart listed a news article chronicling aspects of the dispute on her very own Hancock Prospecting website, like some kind of trophy.
But her froideur with Swimming Australia hasn’t stopped her funding of swimmers directly. Rinehart still provides payments to athletes through a Hancock fund. She also remains a principal partner of Swimming WA and appears to maintain a positive relationship with Swimming Queensland, run by chief executive Kevin Hasemann, who once described her as “the greatest benefactor I’ve seen since Santa Claus”.
He’s a fan of swimming, too? We figured Santa for more of the alpine sports.
Snapchat decision
We jeered at Snapchat earlier this week for blasting out news of security and privacy enhancements to its platform, two days before its top man on policy, Henry Turnbull, was shunted before a parliamentary hearing on the ills of social media.
A cynical move and a stupid one, by Snapchat. The committee saw straight through this arse-covering exercise and we named the cause as an absence of sound external advice ahead of the hearing.
Google, by comparison, had signed Christopher Pyne’s Pyne and Partners, Meta leaned on Ryan Liddell’s Principle Advisory, and TikTok chose Labor-stacked Anacta, run by Evan Moorhead and David Nelson, each of whom are so embedded in Queensland Labor that they’ve been black-listed from lobbying the government there.
So imagine our surprise after making this snarky point on Wednesday to discover that Snapchat moved quickly to sign someone – anyone – to coach it on the better habits of parliamentary grillings.
By Thursday the lobbyist register was updated to reflect its choice of Ogilvy Health, specialists in … disease awareness, medical education and healthcare marketing. Not quite a perfect fit for Snapchat, which is clearly a fish out of water next to OH’s usual stable of clients: Rare Cancers Australia; Lymphoma Australia; Haemophilia Foundation Australia; Macular Disease Foundation Australia; Roche Australia; Janssen Pharmaceuticals.
But look, given the last-minute nature of it all, we suspect OH was the only mob available on such short notice.
Forrest’s Gaza claim
Andrew Forrest keeps claiming that up to one million people in Gaza are being exposed to “death through starvation” as a consequence of Israel’s war on Hamas.
A disturbing statistic, no doubt, and propagated by the billionaire on multiple occasions. But a report out this week from the global authority on food security and nutrition analysis cast serious doubt on the claims. Not only did it say there is no famine in the territory, but that previous projections of famine had turned out to be incorrect.
“The available evidence does not indicate that famine is occurring,” said the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification organisation, in a report that still warned of a famine threat being possible but that food supplies had “steadily increased” and averted it for now.
Forrest’s role in this sphere? He’s been to Israel at least twice in the past six months to spruik a free piece of technology called SafeGates, designed by his Minderoo Foundation, to help facilitate the movement of aid trucks into Gaza.
This is already happening, of course (and the report acknowledged as much) but the Israelis obliged Forrest anyway with a meeting and were polite about the offer. Apparently it even had some support at the ministerial level.
But when his deadline for their commitment expired – because governments answer to Forrest, of course, not the other way around – he slammed the table and issued a statement accusing Israel of “dithering” over his proposal.
Right? As though the Israelis aren’t fighting a two-front war, weathering rocket barrages in the north, attempting the recovery of 120 hostages, managing extremely delicate international diplomacy, or prepping the military for a prolonged, regional conflict with Iran, via Hezbollah, that could kick off any week now.
But no, stop everything for Twiggy, whose ideas are always world-changing and exceptional. Remember green hydrogen? We still haven’t seen a bucketful of that. He promised to deliver it more than a year ago. And sure, maybe SafeGates is the answer. Does he know that Gaza shares a border with Egypt, too?
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