Gina Rinehart is the patron saint of Aussie sports. But it comes with weird strings attached

Though Gina Rinehart’s patronage of Australian sporting codes goes back well over a decade, her presence at the Paris Olympics was substantially more overt than what we’ve seen in the past.

Australia’s richest citizen attended numerous events, took endless photos with athletes and their families, hosted the team on a cruise down the Seine, and detailed how Hancock wagyu beef was especially flown in from Australia for the catering, while athletes have been quick to sing her praises. After winning a bronze in rowing, Annabelle McIntyre declared of her benefactor: “She’s really in it with us.”

Artwork: Dionne GainCredit:

Since the 2012 Olympic Games in London, Rinehart – through her mining company Hancock Prospecting – has ploughed up to $80 million into sports and athletes across swimming, rowing, volleyball and artistic swimming. But with that money, weird strings can be attached.

Even writing it down months later, what happened in May was a bizarre sequence of events. Staff at Hancock contact an Olympic gold medallist. They want him to rally the national swim team to lobby an art gallery to remove a painting that none of them have gone to see. All because among a panel of 21 portraits, someone else didn’t enjoy a likeness.

Kyle Chalmers has a lot of artwork inked across his chest, but he’s not known for giving regular comment on the National Gallery of Australia’s programming choices. Nor were the curators likely to be moved by his intercession, lap times notwithstanding. Spend five minutes with Vincent Namatjira’s works, and you’ll see his portraits use dynamic clashing blocks of shape and colour. The depictions may not flatter, but being chosen for one should.

To a point, gratitude makes sense. Elite sport demands years of grind and doesn’t always pay. Through Hancock, Rinehart makes payments directly to swimmers to help them balance training with work or study.

But there’s a disconcerting tone. Swimming Queensland boss Kevin Hasemann called Rinehart “a great Australian,” and said of his correspondence to the NGA, “There’s a price to pay for speaking out.” As if sucking up to the most powerful people in existence is a personal risk. You’ll notice that when speaking of their benefactor, all of the swimmers refer to her as “Mrs Rinehart”, strange in both its deference and its consistency, as though a memo was circulated on forms of address.

Then there is the loaded description of her as the sport’s “patron”. Renaissance artists were funded by patronage, but no matter the level of genius, there was no doubt about who owned who. Nor about the motivation: the nobles who paid for statues and friezes wanted glory reflected in their direction, and some insurance for the afterlife to offset earthly sins.

As a mining magnate, all of Rinehart’s sins are earth-related, but she has never appeared in doubt about her righteousness. That is why the concept of Hancock Prospecting as a vehicle for altruism grates. Being associated with warm glowy feelings, like the ones people enjoyed watching Australia’s medal tally climb, softens the image of a company reliant on the environmental destruction that we desperately need to avert.

Gina Rinehart arriving at her boat party for Australia’s Olympic swimming team.Credit:

Right now, sportswashing and greenwashing are often the same thing. Middle Eastern petro-states are all in on football: the UAE with Manchester City, Qatar with Paris Saint-Germain, Saudi Arabia with Newcastle United. Saudi royals have also bought out golf, are on the way with tennis, and their oil giant Aramco has international cricket.

Hancock has major coal investments and corresponding climate denial. A recent Rinehart quote on a Hancock website opposed climate action because it was “making students anxious with climate-induced global extinction propaganda”.

Her public pronouncements are consistently anti-tax, even slipping that into a 2022 partnership launch with the Australian Olympic Committee, saying, “As Australia looks to hosting an Olympic Games in 10 years, it will be important for our country to be open to investment and reduce the regulatory burden that impacts development.”

Of course, the wealthier someone is, the more ways they have to write down their tax bill. This includes discretionary donations and financial gifts. But if normal citizens don’t get to pick and choose where their portion is spent, why should spending from Rinehart’s vast reserves be praised as philanthropy?

Especially when, as the Namatjira episode showed, Rinehart is intent on control. Instead of constructively addressing her late father’s racism against Indigenous people, she cut off Netball Australia when the issue was raised. When Swimming Australia resisted appointing a Hancock-approved president, funding was pulled.

That’s the problem with the self-styled patron. With arbitrary funding, anyone’s can vanish. Or as dual sailing gold medallist Matt Wearn pointed out last week, sports like his that don’t interest the powerful have to do without.

Really, national programs shouldn’t involve wealthy backers at all. Government funding should be applied consistently so everyone can prosper. If governments are concerned about paying for it, guess who has the power to write legislation to recoup costs from those who can most afford it?

Instead, what we have is pretend largesse cloaking an ego show. All that money, all that power, still not enough. It’s the same urge that made Elon Musk buy Twitter because people on there laughed at him. Now he can camp in his despoiled kingdom, cosplaying a teenage dank meme king without the awareness that this internet presence is a decade out of date.

It’s the insatiability of the billionaire: the final delusion that along with everything else, they also want to be loved. The one thing they can’t force into being eludes them. They want to live in a luxury that the rest of us can never imagine, float above our relatively drab level of existence, occasionally drop us a few crumbs, and for us to still be grateful.

Geoff Lemon is a freelance writer and co-host of The Final Word podcast.

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