Gina Rinehart scores Diggers EGOT with multiple awards for companies
Billionaire Gina Rinehart couldn’t be there in person, but was thankful for the accolades heaped on her companies.
Western Australia’s hard border kept the state’s Iron Lady Gina Rinehart from collecting her lifetime achievement award at the Diggers and Dealers gala dinner in Kalgoorlie.
The billionaire is currently interstate, with WA’s tough border restrictions and their associated two-week quarantine requirements no doubt playing some part in her decision to instead send along her long-term right hand man Tad Watroba to accept the GJ Stokes Memorial Award on her behalf.
The gong means Mrs Rinehart has now completed the trifecta of conference awards, given her Hancock Prospecting collected Dealer of the Year in 2007 and her Roy Hill Holdings picked up Digger of the Year in 2019.
She is the second person to collect the full deck, following in the footsteps of fellow iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest (Twiggy collected the GJ Stokes award in 2013, while Fortescue won the Dealer and the Digger awards in 2007 and 2016 respectively).
Digger of the Year went to Ramelius Resources, one of a host of gold miners flourishing amid the record highs in bullion prices.
The Dealer of the Year award was of little surprise, with Northern Star Resources and Saracen Mineral Holdings winning the award for the acquisition of their respective purchases of 50 per cent interests in Kalgoorlie’s Super Pit.
Northern Star boss Bill Beament and his Saracen counterpart Raleigh Finlayson both cut their teeth in Kalgoorlie at the WA School of Mines, and their purchase meant that the Super Pit was under full Australian ownership for the first time in its history.
Big score for De Grey Mining
There’s also every chance they two companies will go back-to-back for the award, given the $16bn merger between the duo on the eve of this year’s event will qualify for next year’s gongs.
The Emerging Company award went to De Grey Mining, which has seen its shares soar from 5c at the start of the year to $1.34 following its discovery of the big Hemi gold deposit in the Pilbara, while the media award was won by Dominic Piper, the longstanding editor of trade magazines Paydirt and Gold Mining Journal.
The Northern Star-Saracen merger also provided some fodder for the conference’s most entertaining presentation.
Having already provided perhaps the week’s biggest highlight on Monday night, when he took to the stage of the Palace Hotel to belt out AC/DC covers with his band The Smoking Guns, WestGold Resources chief Peter Cook used what he said would be 28th and final presentation at Diggers to get some cheap laughs at the expense of Beament and Finlayson.
Cook produced a few crude Photoshop jobs adding the heads of the new ‘Kings of Kalgoorlie’ to a photograph of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip and a photograph from the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.
Cookie did take one last swipe at the growing push for greater gender diversity within the mining industry, noting that women accounted for only 3.9 per cent of the total job applications received by WestGold last year.
Despite the low application levels, women account for just over 10 per cent of the WestGold workforce. It is also one of the few, if not the only, Australian gold miners with a female CEO in the form of Debbie Fullarton.