Bushfire recovery: Donor war as Andrew and Nicola Forrest donate $70m

Andrew and ­Nic­ola Forrest have made a $70m pledge to fight and prevent bushfires — and to help victims — as social media bickered over who has donated and how much.

“There’s a multitude of reasons why the fire extent has been so devastating. A warming planet would be part of that,” Mr Forrest said on Thursday. Picture: Colin Murty

Philanthropists Andrew and ­Nic­ola Forrest have made a $70m pledge to fight and prevent bushfires — and to help victims — as social media bickered over who has donated and how much.

The Forrests announced on Thursday that the charitable organ­isation they created, Minderoo Foundation, would give $10m to mobilise specialist volunteers from Western Australia, $10m for immediate bushfire recovery and a $50m investment to developing “a holistic assessment and blueprint of what Australia needs to do to improve resilience”.

“There’s a multitude of reasons why the fire extent has been so devastating. A warming planet would be part of that,” Mr Forrest told journalists on Thursday.

“The biggest part of that is arsonist­s. But we are not looking at anything politically, we’re out there to help fellow Australian families.”

The donation came after a spokesman for Australia’s richest woman, Gina Rinehart, was prompted to issue a statement saying the billionaire preferred­ to make her donations privately.

Mrs Rinehart had apparently done so at a function for fire relief at her home on Tuesday, the same day comedian Celeste Barber named her in a tweet and wrote, “If you’re in Hawaii on a family holiday, I’m going to flip a f..king table”.

Barber’s own online bushfire appeal has now raised more than $48m, and she has urged wealthy people who donated to repair Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral last year to do the same for Australian bushfire victims.

She was not alone in singling out Mrs Rinehart. Australian billionaire and co-founder of software­ company Atlassian, Mike Cannon-Brookes, also took a swipe. He described her $4.5m donatio­n to what he labelled as a “climate sceptic think tank” as “absolutely shameful”.

Whatever Mrs Rinehart’s confidential donation, her spokesman made it known she did not resile from her views on global warming.

“(Mrs Rinehart) is most concerned that the true causes of this sad devastation are tackled, rather than missed in the rush to blame climate change,” he said.

Mr Cannon-Brookes recently pledged $5000 to each of the 20 different NSW Rural Fire Service brigades, and also bought actor Russell Crowe’s soot-covered South Sydney Rabbitohs cap for $100,000 in an online charity ­auction.

The Forrests’ donation follows a $30m pledge on Wednesday by the Paul Ramsay Foundation to support communities affected by the bushfires — $3m of which will be donated immediately, with the Red Cross, the Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal and St Vincent de Paul to get $1m each for current relief efforts.

The remaining $27m will be allocated­ over the next 12 to 18 months in consultation with governme­nt agencies, charities and affected communities.

James Packer, the ninth-­richest Australian with a net worth of $4.2bn, has also donated $5m.

On Thursday, the Forrests present­ed their donation as a gift from one family to others that needed it. “We’re here with our family to help support your ­family,” Mr Forrest said.

“We’re stepping up … to go out to the communities in South Australia­, Victoria and NSW to find out what you need — what your families need, what your communiti­es need — and to help you not rebuild to perhaps what you had but to plan for what could be, what may be even better.”