Gina Rinehart

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Here we were thinking that Clive PalmerWikipedia was the most disconnected and clueless.
Oh no, they're talking about
Politics
Icon politics.svg
Theory
Practice
Philosophies
Terms
As usual
Country sections
United States politics British politics Canadian politics Chinese politics French politics German politics Indian politics Iranian politics Israeli politics Japanese politics South Korean politics Turkish politics
Despite what Channel 10 would have you believe, the only genius financial decision that Gina ever made was not being choked by her own umbilical cord.
—Jordan Shanks[1]

Gina "Vogon" Rinehart (1954–) is an Australian mining heiress and a compelling argument for the nationalisation of her industry. Gina is the daughter of the late Lang Hancock,[note 1] inheriting Hancock Prospecting following his death in 1992. She was at one time the wealthiest woman in the world, with a personal net worth of $18.9bn. When she started out in 1992, all she had was a dream. And $75 million dollars.

Gina and her family of thieves have stolen billions from Australians. They receive the lion's share of mining profits because the government allows individual families to own assets that are non-innovative, required by all, and generate massive profit. The Rineharts don't even do the developing themselves; all they do is sell their ore rights to companies like Rio Tinto.[2] Other companies do all of the actual work of developing the mine, but it happens in a 'joint venture' so that Gina gets her share and it looks like she's doing something useful. She's taking a finite natural resource and shipping it off to other countries so she can hoard cash. She's just a glorified shoveling and taxi service.

If she'd been born with nothing, she'd be the local caravan park harridan (much like that Dan Bilzerian shitkicker), but instead you get her witless articles sprayed over the press every few months.

A Dolla Make Her Holla[edit]

...slothful, vindictive and devious baby elephant"
—Lang Hancock[3] (Looks like someone's already made a start on that obituary)

Controversial viewpoints[edit]

Rinehart has caused some public controversy and debate over her personal viewpoints and for statements she has made in recent times. (15 billion dollars, and she still can't afford decent PR. Or some decent eyebrows.) You can't deny she makes great copy. She owns a fair chunk of Fairfax, so perhaps she is single-handedly trying to revive their fortunes by literally making the news for them.

In 2012, Rinehart stated that Australians should spend less time consuming alcohol and socializing if they desired to become wealthy. This offended then-Australian treasurer Wayne Swann who considered it an attack upon the working class, while Ged Kearney of the Australian Council Of Trade Unions claimed Rinehart's views were immensely backward.[4]

A handy guide to picking yourself up by your bootstraps, by Gina Rinehart.

  1. Go back in time
  2. HAVE YOUR FATHER DISCOVER AND DEVELOP THE WORLD'S LARGEST IRON ORE MINE
  3. Profit

Rinehart created more controversy in 2014 when she argued that Australian welfare recipients were destroying the economy and accused left-wing media sources of brainwashing the public.[5] This from the person who bought a newspaper so she could whine like a stuck pig about taxes and her workers' salaries any chance she gets.

In 2013, Rinehart intimated that convicted felons should pay a fine to avoid prison.[6] For the incredibly wealthy, increasing their wealth makes little marginal difference. However, increasing the power of what you can do with your wealth makes a big difference. This proposal is not about getting out of jail. She's literally asking to be able to write a check for all her misdoings. But notice how it is sold. It would be doing us a favour by saving taxpayer money from being 'wasted'. We particularly like how she suggested you could forgo your voting rights if you didn't have enough money to pay for release.

Laws? Taxes? Pfft... they're for the little people.[7] Drop all regulations so we can be just like India![8] What an amazing standard of living and corruption we can aspire to. Her message is so mixed one presumes she is caught in a maelstrom of her own spin.

She thinks Australia is blessed but could do with a dose of Thatcherism.[9] Thatcher would eat you for breakfast, spit you out into the ocean and then sink you with a torpedo, Rinehart. Furthermore, Thatcher was educated in chemistry and took climate change very seriously. This woman's pores are literally leaking entitlement juices.

She didn't actually call for sterilization of the poor, though. What does it say about our society that we have trouble working out if this kind of thing is satire or not?

When it comes to government styles, Rinehart adores the authoritarian government of China in comparison to the democratic government of Australia. In a keynote address delivered to the purportedly libertarian Institute of Public Affairs, Rinehart praised China's special economic zonesWikipedia as well as China's rapid expansion of coal and nuclear power plants. She chastised Australia's carbon neutrality policy (and climate change in general) as being "climate-induced global extinction propaganda". Rinehart praised China's education system, with its state-enforced jingoism,[10] in contrast to Australian's education system, which she described as having "woke agendas" and "teaching its students not to be proud of their country."[11] (In reality, in most surveys, Australia's education system is generally ranked a fair bit higher than China's; to give but one example, a U.S. News and World ReportWikipedia survey in 2023 ranked Australia as #8 and China as #23.)[12]

On the flip side, in a stopped clock moment, Rinehart supports Ukraine in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to the point of pissing off the government of Vladimir Putin into banning her from Russia for having a supposed "Russophobia agenda".[13]

Activism[edit]

  • It's concerning that mining barons are holding meetings in private with the nation's leaders,[14] but then they do have a mining magnate in the HOR. (Starting to think the mining industry may have an unhealthy amount of power in Australia...)
  • She's one of the main backers of the Institute of Public Affairs (a Murdoch-run think tank) who have a large say in Liberal Party policy - in fact many Liberal party "ideas" are copypasted from the Institute of Public Affairs.[15]
  • Rinehart founded the anti-tax and climate change "skeptic" lobbying group ANDEV ("Australians for Northern Development & Economic Vision"), and has paid for the trips of Christopher Monckton and Ian Plimer to Australia. Here is a secret video with Monckton explaining how to "create a Fox News channel like the US, to control media influence." Gina thinks that scientists are misleading the public about a naturally-occurring phenomenon. She probably thinks geologists are top-notch, though. The iron-y (lol) being that much of climate science is done by geologists.
  • Rinehart took a lesson from her old man in buying a newspaper to push her views.[3] The value of unfettered propaganda is pretty high to right-wing corporate fascist types. The irony of Rinehart suing for journalist sources whilst trying to retain credibility as a primary shareholder of Fairfax should not be lost, people.[16]
  • She stood in opposition to the carbon tax introduced by the-then Australian government in 2011[17]
  • She gets everything she wants from her toadies in power, yet she's still unhappy. "Trump found out that Americans wanted America to be great again, regulations cut, taxes lowered and Americans to be safe, and then committed to do something about this."[18] If Rinehart really is bankrolling Senator Bernardi's new political party, than this is a good PR exercise:[19][20] Anti-tax, don't trust today's pollies, champion for the little guy.[21] Come next year, splashed across all Murdoch papers: "Under New Management, Adults Are in Charge, Kick This Mob IN!".
  • Rinehart has previously promoted the idea that Western Australia secede from the rest of the country.[22]
  • She once looked into the feasibility of using a nuclear bomb to create a harbour on the north-west coat of Australia.[No, not The Onion] She's like a villain from Captain Planet, which, to be fair, seems to be a recurring theme in Australia at the moment.[22] Lang also wanted to use nukes to get shit out of the ground faster. Too bad they didn't give him a test round, the radiation might have sterilised him.

Family[edit]

Gina got put in charge of the family trust. She was supposed to give to her children at age 30. When the bill came due, Gina didn't cough up the money because "they're not mature enough", which isn't how trusts work. What kind of psychopath defrauds their own children out of their inheritance?[23](One who likes being one of the richest individuals in Australia. On the downside Christmas must get a bit awkward.) Her own kids refer to her as Fatty. Jesus, even in her own family she can't command respect.[24]

But seriously, anyone else who did what she did would be hammered in the courts. S'pose you get the justice you can afford, and Gina can afford the best.

She might have lost this round of Let me bully my children the way my father bullied me,[25] but Gina's independent wealth was estimated at $US12.2 billion ($15.8 billion), down from $US17.4 billion in '13. She'll be fine.

Milla Jovovich Bianca Rinehart is currently running the trust. Sorry, she's already married. (And she'll age terribly.)

Thin skin[edit]

Rinehart alongside the painting she tried to prevent you from seeing.

Showing that Rinehart had never heard of the Streisand effect, in May 2024, Rinehart tried to suppress an unflattering portrait of her by acclaimed indigenous artist Vincent NamatjiraWikipedia that was being displayed as part of an exhibition of Namatjira's work at the National Gallery of Australia.Wikipedia[26] When that failed, Rinehart embarked on a campaign to have those in her orbit pester the gallery with the same demand.[27]

Predictably, this attempt at censorship failed miserably. Not only did the gallery refuse to censor the painting, the attempted censorship resulted in international coverage of the censorship attempt (which often included unflattering coverage of her family's racism and unsavory history), as well as widespread memes and mockery on social media.[28]

Gina Shrugged[edit]

Benjamin Marks, an Australian libertarian activist and comic writer created a website and Facebook page defending Ms Reinhart, where he argues that she is our "friendly voice of moderation"[29].

Notes[edit]

  1. Her father, who Gina believes was a visionary, seriously proposed that we put contraceptives in the drinking water in the Kimberly to restrict the reproduction of indigenous Australians. This is the same man who had a daughter to an indigenous woman and refused to recognise her. The indigenous woman involved acknowledges her origins but said she wasn't interested in claiming any portion of his assets.

See also[edit]

  • Donald Trump - Has there ever been anyone so fixated on their wealth and trolling the public? Oh. (She makes Donald look like a saint and a supermodel.)
  • Silvio Berlusconi - But people actually liked Berlusconi.

External links[edit]

References[edit]

  1. "Australia Was Almost NUKED"
  2. Hoyle, Rhiannon, "Gina Rinehart Wins Legal Battle Against Rio Tinto", WSJ (10/13/15 at 9:46 p.m. ET). Gina Rinehart is a black hole for money.
  3. 3.0 3.1 Chenery, Susan, "Gina Rinehart: Australia’s lonely little rich girl", New Zealand Listener 7.28.12.
  4. "Gina Rinehart attacks 'jealous poor'", The Daily Telegraph, August 30, 2012. She earns the weekly minimum wage every second. It's a tough life being a mean-spirited scrooge with vendetta in your blood.
  5. Janda, Michael, "Gina Rinehart takes aim at Australia's 'entitlement mentality', points to Thatcher", ABC (Updated 7 Mar 2014, 7:33am). Hmm, minimum wage collecting empties at the local or digging rocks for a billionaire. A tough decision.
  6. Butler, Ben, "Rinehart says prisoners should be able to pay their way out of jail", SMH 9.5.13. What does she think this is, a game of Monopoly?
  7. "Gina Rinehart company faces fines after allegedly not lodging annual reports", The Age 4.4.14. Poodo da imperal regulations. Chut chut 457!
  8. La Canna, Xavier, "Scrap all regulations for small businesses, mining magnate Gina Rinehart urges", ABC (Updated 11/23/14, 1:40pm). They do worship cows over there, so she might do all right.
  9. Helen Davidson and Michael Safi "Margaret Thatcher made ‘courageous decisions in the interests of Britain, despite noisy detractors’", The Guardian (3/6/14 at 02:29 EST, modified 5/8/16 at 20:56 EDT). OK, just shut down all the mines, just as Thatcher would want!
  10. "China passes patriotic education law for children, families -state media" by Reuters, 2023 October 24
  11. "Mining magnate Gina Rinehart says China’s government is ‘doing a better job than ours’" by Adam Creighton, The Australianm 2024 April 21, archived on 2024 April 22
  12. "Best Countries for Education", US News and World Report, 2023
  13. "Gina Rinehart fires back after being named on list of Aussies banned from Russia" by Rohan Smith, News Corp Australia, 2022 June 18
  14. Swan, Jonathan, "Gina Rinehart meets Coalition MPs in secret trip to Canberra", SMH 11.14.13.
  15. Wilson, Cameron, "Should the Northern Territory be tax free?", ABC (3/28/14 at 11:12AM).
  16. Robertson, James, "Rinehart fails to force journalist to reveal sources", SMH 8.7.13.
  17. "How mining and media distract Australia's carbon tax debate", Environment blog on The Guardian website, May 31, 2011.
  18. "Gina Rinehart’s message to Australian politicians on what the country needs", news.au (12/31/16 at 6:48am).
  19. Smethurst, Annika, "Gina Rinehart should be next Australian of the Year, says Senator Cory Bernardi", Herald Sin (1/20/16 at 4:22pm).
  20. Bickers, Claire, "Is Gina Rinehart helping Cory Bernardi set up a Donald Trump-inspired political party?", West Australian (12/21/16 at 2:30PM).
  21. Duffy, Andrew, "Rinehart wants 1,500 foreigners to fill mining jobs", 3.20.12.
  22. 22.0 22.1 Willet, Megan, "12 Reasons Why So Many People Hate Australian Billionaire Gina Rinehart", Business Insider (9/14/12 at 5:07 AM).
  23. Spicer, David, "Gina Rinehart family feud over billion-dollar fortune to be heard in open court", ABC (Updated 25 May 2016, 8:55pm).
  24. Perlman, Jonathan, "Australia's wealthy Gina Rinehart's children describe her as 'fat' and a 'bully' in vicious lawsuit" Telegraph (2:25PM BST 28 Apr 2015). Bianca's Mom is a big fat bitch, she's the biggest bitch in the whole wide world, she's a stupid bitch, if there ever was a bitch, she's a bitch to all the boys and girls ♪
  25. Gina Rinehart Hopeful Of Repairing Relationship With Her Estranged Money
  26. "VINCENT NAMATJIRA: Australia in colour", National Gallery of Australia
  27. "Australia’s Richest Woman Demands Gallery Remove Her Unsightly Portrait" by Josh Fiallo, Daily Beast, 2024 May 15
  28. "An Australian Billionaire Tried to Suppress an Aboriginal Artist’s Unflattering Portrait of Her. It’s Only Drawn More Attention" by Kohewe, Time, 2024 May 18
  29. Mr Marks' website http://www.ginarinehart.info/