A disturbing selection from factual news and magazine pieces about the Aussie Sheila who captivated Crowsnest Pass Mayor Blair Painter and his “no worries” council.
Warning: Includes links to images that may be upsetting
What kind of mother is sued by her children for cheating them of their inheritance?
What kind of monster cuts funding for a sports team because a player questions her father’s prescription for Aboriginal genocide?
What kind of magnate gets scammed on the purchase of a clapped-out coal mine in Canada?
For the answers, read on:
Famously one of the most private of family business heads, Gina Rinehart is unlikely to be pleased by the news that her life is to be dramatised on Australian television screens from 2014. The executive chairwoman of Hancock Prospecting and Australia’s richest person will be the main character in the tentatively titled Mother Monster Magnate.
The two-part four-hour series will focus on the acrimonious and ongoing legal battle between the Australian mining tycoon and three of her four children: John, Bianca and Hope.
The trio wish to remove Rinehart from her role as the sole trustee of the family's multi-billion dollar trust – which was set up by Rinehart's father, Lang Hancock, for his grandchildren in 1988.
CamdenFB, February 12 2013
Letter to Gina Rinehart from her dad, Lang Hancock:
After Hope Hancock died, in 1983, and Gina chose to contest her mother’s will, Lang saw Frank Rinehart’s hand behind the effort and was enraged. Worse, from Gina’s point of view, her father took up with Rose Lacson, a young housekeeper from the Philippines whom Gina had hired.
The Rineharts tried to get Lacson deported. In an exchange of letters between father and daughter that later surfaced in court, Gina told Lang that he had become a laughingstock. Lang bitterly asked Gina to “allow me to remember you as the neat, trim, capable and attractive young lady” that she had been, rather than “the slothful, vindictive and devious baby elephant that you have become.” She was “grossly overweight,” he wrote. “I am glad your mother cannot see you now.”
The New Yorker, The Miner’s Daughter, March 18, 2013
Peter Foss, a former state attorney general and justice minister, was personally unafraid, he said, but he had seen Rinehart in action in the fight against her stepmother and, when it came to ex-employees, he told me, “She will sue them for sure, and she’ll bankrupt them.
Ibid.
Rinehart’s obsessive storytelling about her father has two sides, which are at odds. One is the hero tale. The other is that she inherited a shattered, debt-ridden company. She actually maneuvered successfully, during his last weeks, to have him transfer control of his personal estate’s main assets and royalties to Hancock Prospecting and an associated trust, which effectively bankrupted his estate. This both helped her cause in the struggle with her stepmother and allowed Rinehart to dismiss the claims of the named beneficiaries in her father’s will. The best known of this shafted group was Ken McCamey, who accompanied Hancock through decades of prospecting. Old Pilbara hands tend to credit McCamey with finding the company’s most valuable claims, and Hancock himself named one of the greatest ore bodies they found McCamey’s Monster. But McCamey remained a modestly salaried employee throughout his career. Hancock left him five hundred thousand dollars in his will, but not a penny of that was paid. Indeed, Rinehart fired the aging prospector shortly after her father died.
Ibid.
Rinehart is uncomfortable addressing an audience. She was scheduled to give a speech to the Sydney Mining Club in August. Instead, she sent a ten-minute-long video, in which she simply read, verbatim, one of her columns, previously published, from Australian Resources and Investment. By normal standards, it was a snore—a tendentious, obtuse, finger-wagging lecture, poorly delivered. And yet it was fascinating. Her performance was so odd. She spoke in a high, highly unnatural voice, with an accent more Queen Mother than Western Australian mine boss. She wore a huge pearl necklace. The video’s production values did her no favors. Her face was shiny and her color unhealthy, and there were cuts so clumsy that they seemed like vintage Monty Python gags. At some points, her voice suddenly shot up so high, and became so breathy, that you half-expected an ambulance crew to rush into the frame. Rinehart’s message was pro forma: Australia was doomed if it did not lower taxes, cut regulations, restrict wages, and generally make things easier for business and foreign investment. Her tone was chilly, pious; there was an air of head-shaking concern. She deplored “class warfare.” Her speech, she said, was a “call for action.”
Ibid.
Rinehart has a tumultuous personal life, which has been revealed mostly in court cases. Her long legal battle with her stepmother unearthed her grisly struggle with her father. She took to bulletproofing her car and office windows and hiring bodyguards. In 1997, one of them, an ex-policeman named Bob Thompson, filed a sexual-harassment suit against her. An article in Woman’s Day laid out his sad story. Thompson had accompanied Rinehart and her children to Hawaii, California, Europe, and New Zealand. Rinehart, he said, wanted to marry him, even though he was engaged to someone else: “I told her over and over I wasn’t interested, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer.” She insisted, he said, that he get an H.I.V. test and that he tell her about his sex life, past and present. He described Rinehart as “incredibly lonely.” Then he dropped the suit and disappeared, reportedly after an out-of-court settlement.
Ibid.
Family disputes have clouded the question of who will eventually succeed Rinehart. Her oldest child and only son, John Hancock, has a difficult relationship with his mother. (He changed his name as a young man, preferring to honor his grandfather rather than his stepfather, Frank Rinehart.) He joined the board of Hancock Prospecting at twenty-one and was seen as the heir apparent.
He grew uncomfortable, however, with some of the things he was asked to do. His mother’s fierce disputes with her lawyers, for instance, led her to dump legal work on him for which he was unqualified. He was also asked to deal with Hilda Kickett, an Aboriginal woman who had come forward, in 1992, to say that she was Lang Hancock’s illegitimate daughter. There were long-standing rumors of children fathered by Lang Hancock with Aboriginal women who worked for his parents in the Pilbara. Kickett’s mother was a young cook for the Hancocks. Hilda Kickett is a member of what is now known as the “stolen generation”—Aboriginal children who were seized from their parents by the state with little or no explanation and raised in orphanages under an openly racist policy that was in place until 1969.
Kickett claimed she did not want money, only family acknowledgment. She did not get it from Rinehart. Rinehart’s private investigator heard that Rinehart’s stepmother—this was during their epic court battle—might have contacted Kickett. Rinehart dispatched John to meet with Kickett and her husband. They got along, and a week later Rinehart sent her son back to Kickett with a statement to sign, attesting that she wasn’t Lang Hancock’s daughter, after all, but Lang Hancock’s father’s daughter. Kickett refused to sign.
Ibid.
John Singleton, a Sydney businessman who is friendly with Rinehart, told the Herald that her estrangements from her children flow naturally from her priorities. “It’s because the business comes first,” he said. “Being a parent is secondary. It’s just ‘Where do they fit into the dynasty? Are they iron or are they coal or are they uranium?’ If they don’t fit into the company, there’s no role for them.”
Ibid.
The details of the latest estrangement exploded into the courts in 2011, after the three older children filed suit to have Rinehart removed as trustee of the Hope Margaret Hancock Trust, which Lang Hancock had created for his grandchildren. The trust owns nearly twenty-four per cent of Hancock Prospecting—a holding worth billions today. Lang stipulated that Rinehart would control it only until it vested, on the twenty-fifth birthday of her youngest child, Ginia. But Rinehart had decided to extend that vesting date, ostensibly to avoid tax consequences, to 2068—when John will be ninety-two and the others not much younger. The children learned about this alteration of their prospects only when she asked that they approve of it, shortly before Ginia’s twenty-fifth birthday. She said that they faced bankruptcy if they didn’t sign documents agreeing to her terms. When they objected, Rinehart argued that they were “manifestly unsuitable” to control their own trust. She suggested that they “reconsider their holidaying lifestyle and attitudes.” Only Ginia sided with her mother. The three others accused Rinehart of “deceptive, manipulative and disgraceful conduct” and sued to gain access to their inheritance.
Ibid.
It soon became clear, as her children tried to gain control of their trust, that Rinehart would break Hope first. Hope’s e-mails to her mother, as disclosed in court, were full of painful desperation and financial panic even before the money from Mem, as she calls her, was cut off. Hope wants to stay in New York, to have a cook and a bodyguard and a housekeeper and send her children to private schools. But Rinehart wants them back in Australia, away from the family of Hope’s American husband, whom she does not trust. She will apparently accept, as an alternative, Singapore, a free-market tax haven of which she approves. Early this month, it was reported that Hope and her mother had reached an agreement. Hope would withdraw from the suit. “Two down, two to go,” an anonymous family insider told Adele Ferguson, Rinehart’s biographer and a business writer for Fairfax Media. After Ferguson’s story appeared, Rinehart hit her immediately with a subpoena, demanding to have the notes and recordings of her interviews with John Hancock going back to 2011.
Ibid.
I have often heard Rinehart grumpily described as “un-Australian.” Her raw, seemingly humorless veneration of money would be bad form almost anywhere. In Australia, it’s both offensive and unsettling.
Ibid.
Many critics have pointed out the conflation, in Rinehart’s political arguments, of what she insists is the national interest with her own commercial interests. Beneath that patent cynicism, though, and beneath her paranoia, her cunning, her crude self-promotion, her manipulations, both clumsy and deft, is a weird sincerity. She believes the mining gospel she preaches. She believes that she and her fellow-billionaires know best. She truly wants to own and operate an iron-ore mine, wants it more than anything. She would also like to be celebrated and thanked and hugely rewarded. And she wouldn’t mind pushing around governments the way that Rupert Murdoch does. But she lacks the belief that she can charm people, can persuade them, can do more than bully them. That, perhaps, is why she will not consent to an interview. She’s afraid of sounding foolish.
Ibid.
Australia's richest person, Gina Rinehart, is a long-time member of Donald Trump's female fan club 'the Trumpettes' — and that fandom dates back years.
Founded in 2015 by socialite Toni Holt Kramer and three other women, the group tasked its members with one mission: “Your job as a Trumpette is to help get the real Donald J Trump elected, not the one the press wants you to believe in.” Rinehart is listed on the group’s website as a member, and the Trumpettes’ social media accounts have chronicled Rinehart’s extensive history with the group.
Crikey Nov. 17 2020
“Sadly recent media does not help encourage sporting sponsorships.” With that — and an expression of their earnest desire to not “add to netball’s disunity problems” — Gina Rinehart’s companies Hancock Prospecting and Roy Hill took their $15 million off Netball Australia’s balance sheet.
The problem, Rinehart said in separate comments, is that sport should not be used to push social or political views, implying that must have been the motivation behind Indigenous netballer Donnell Wallam’s concerns about wearing the Hancock name on her uniform when she debuts for Australia next week.
It would help, of course, if we stuck to the facts and resisted the temptation to project; precisely what Rinehart failed to do when she threw her toys out of the cot. Her statements attempt to reframe the story as an objection to sponsorship by mining companies, but Wallam and her teammates who stood in support of her never raised an objection on that basis.
The issue, about which Wallam was explicit, focused exclusively on the Hancock name — because it comes from Rinehart’s father and company founder, Lang Hancock. Wallam has an issue, she said, with comments he made in the 1980s. In an interview, Hancock addressed the “Aboriginal problem” in these terms:
“The ones that are no good to themselves and can’t accept things, the half-castes — and this is where most of the trouble comes — I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in future and that would solve the problem.”
Crikey Oct 24 22
Link: Lang Hancock’s solution to the aboriginal problem
Despite Rio Tinto’s $3 billion write-off arising from its reckless 2010 purchase of Riversdale Mining and its landlocked African coal play named Benga, the mining magnate must have believed that this time she could trust the Riversdale boys.
She seems to have accepted the assurances of their reincarnated “Riversdale Resources” that the re-opening of its Grassy Mountain metallurgical coal property in the Canadian Rocky Mountains would surely be approved. (It also appears she may not have gotten the hint from Riversdale’s naughty naming of its Canadian operation “Benga” in homage to the Rio Tinto caper.) The property had been exhaustively mined until the 1960s and abandoned as uneconomical, leaving an ugly mess of waste rock and water-filled pits.
Unusually for Canadian mining schemes, the Benga application was denied by federal and provincial regulators in 2021. The grounds for denial were Benga’s lack of a credible plan to prevent selenium contamination of surface water and Benga’s exaggerated estimate of the property’s residual coal.
Now, five years after enriching Riversdale’s principals Michael O’Keeffe and Steve Mallyon with her $646 million takeover, Grassy Mountain remains a money pit.
Crikey, September 25, 2024