Rinehart supports Roberts-Smith but won’t say whether she paid for appeal

The billionaire mining magnate has thrown her support behind the war veteran after his failed defamation appeal but won’t say whether she bankrolled the case.

Hancock Prospecting chair Mrs Gina Rinehart in WA.

Billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart has thrown her support behind Ben Roberts-Smith following his failed ­defamation appeal against Nine newspapers but declined to say whether she helped to fund the case.

On Friday, the Full Court of the Federal Court upheld judge Anthony Besanko’s finding that, on the balance of probabilities, the former SAS soldier was complicit in the murder of four unarmed prisoners in Afghanistan.

Justices Nye Perram, Anna Katzmann and Geoffrey Kennett also rejected a claim by ­Roberts-Smith that he had been the victim of a miscarriage of ­justice following the release of a tape in which Nine reporter Nick McKenzie claimed to have ­access to the former SAS soldier’s legal strategy.

In a statement on the weekend, Mrs Rinehart claimed that the court’s decision had been “taken by some in Channel 9 as something they can gloat about”.

“This relentless attack hasn’t made the country better, as some journalists like to imply, it’s just weakened our Defence Force, already struggling with inadequate numbers to defend us,” Mrs Rinehart said.

Ben Roberts-Smith leaves the Federal Court in Sydney on May 1, 2025. (Photo by Saeed KHAN / AFP)

“Many patriotic Australians ask, is it fair that this brave and patriotic man who risked his life on overseas missions which he was sent on by our government, is under such attack.”

Fellow billionaire Kerry Stokes backed Roberts-Smith’s original legal action against the Nine newspapers and is now facing legal costs of up to $30m, but has reportedly denied funding the appeal, which may have cost a further $4m. Within minutes of the appeal being dismissed, Roberts-Smith vowed to challenge the judgment in the High Court, but the Victoria Cross recipient faces an uphill battle to have the case accepted by the court.

The Federal Court has not yet published its full reasons for the decision, noting only that the evidence was “sufficiently cogent to support the findings that the appellant murdered four Afghan men”.

In dismissing Roberts-Smith’s interlocutory application over the “secret recording” – which his supporters had hoped would be the smoking gun in the appeal – the Full Court judges on Friday strongly backed McKenzie, saying they “reject the submission that he should be treated as a witness of no credit and generally accept his evidence”.

Roberts-Smith had alleged his ex-wife, Emma Roberts, had access to his email account and that she and her friend Danielle Scott had passed on his privileged ­messages to McKenzie.

In sometimes heated cross-examination by Roberts-Smith’s barrister Arthur Moses in interlocutory hearings two weeks ago, McKenzie strongly denied he had access to any legally privileged information.

On Friday the Full Court agreed, saying: “We did not perceive any significant contradictions or implausibilities in his evidence. We accept that actively setting out to obtain the other side’s confidential information by surreptitious means, with the intention of using it to advantage, might be regarded as “wilful misconduct’ … However, this is not misconduct of a kind that is capable of calling for the judgment to be set aside unless there is shown to exist ‘at least a real possibility’ that the result was affected.”

May 2, 2025. Journalist Nick McKenzie arrives for an appeal by Ben Roberts-Smith at Federal Court. Picture: NewsWire / Max Mason-Hubers

The appeal judges found there was no “convincing evidentiary link between something known to Mr McKenzie and something of significance that occurred in the trial”.

McKenzie was seeking to reassure an important potential witness and had an incentive to exaggerate both his confidence she would come out of it well and the depth of knowledge upon which that confidence was based, the judges found.

“This is a reason why the recording should be treated with caution in so far as it is relied on as an admission of wrongdoing or otherwise as evidence that Mr McKenzie really was receiving briefings on the appellant’s ‘legal strategy’.”

The judges noted the recording was part of a longer conversation and they could not be confident “that the contents of the recording have not been doctored by removing sections or splicing together different parts of a recorded conversation.”