She’s proposed nuclear explosions for open-cut mining, funded tours by climate deniers and called for bringing in cheap migrant labour to work her mines.
Now Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, has bought the largest individual stake in Fairfax Media, which runs the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Australian Financial Review, plus various radio stations and regional papers.
In 2010, Rinehart bought herself a seat on the Channel 10 board when she paid $166 million for a 10% stake in the television station.
Her expansion from mining baron to media mogul is most likely not a financial decision. Rinehart is spending less than 1% of her wealth on Fairfax, and media is far less profitable than mining.
An online video first posted on YouTube by the free market Mannkal Foundation helps explain Rinehart’s move. The video shows prominent climate denier “Lord” Christopher Monckton in a meeting hosted by Mannkal in July last year.
Monckton told the audience they should encourage “super rich” backers to invest in a Fox News-style media for Australia. He said: “Frankly, whatever you do at a street level … is not going to have much of an impact compared with capturing an entire news media.”
He said setting up an Australian version of Fox News “would be a breakthrough and give to Australia a proper dose of free market thinking”.
It appears Rinehart has taken Monckton’s advice. Rinehart is buying into media so she can further her pro-mining, anti-environmental outlook.
Rinehart was groomed to take over the family mining business by her ultra-conservative father, Lang Hancock.
Alongside former Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Rinehart helped launch Hancock’s 1979 book Wake Up Australia.
In words that resonate with Rinehart’s latest moves, the book said the power of government “could be broken by obtaining control of the media and then educating the public”.
Hancock continued: “Control of the press could also be obtained by several of the big mining groups banding together with a view to taking over one or more of the present giant newspaper chains which control the TV and radio channels, and converting them to the path of ‘free enterprise’”.
In a 1984 interview, Hancock said of so called half-caste Aboriginal people: “I would dope [their] water up so they were sterile and would breed themselves out. And that would solve the problem.”
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