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Gina Rinehart’s celebration of Donald Trump’s victory has focused attention on her cultivation of a right-wing network with sympathy for her own political objectives. By Mike Seccombe.

How Trump’s victory emboldens Gina Rinehart’s political plays

Gina Rinehart at a gala in Sydney this month.

Credit: Getty Images / Saverio Marfia

Before she even opened her mouth, Jennifer Grossman’s attire spoke volumes about the nature of the event she was hosting in Perth back in April. She wore a biscuit-coloured outfit, unadorned but for an enormous, shiny brooch in the shape of a dollar sign above her heart.

Grossman, the American chief executive of the Atlas Society – a non-profit that promotes the ultra-individualist philosophy of mid-20th century author Ayn Rand – was there to present a lifetime achievement award to Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart. It wasn’t just Rinehart’s enormous wealth that was being celebrated. It was her persona.

“She is Dagny Taggart and Francisco d’Anconia rolled into one, and then some,” gushed Grossman, referencing two of the central characters in Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s 1957 dystopian book about the dire consequences that ensue when government and the plebs interfere with the virtuous pursuit of wealth.

Rand’s books have frequently been criticised as elitist, racist and badly written, with characters given to long ideological declamations. Rinehart told Grossman she had been a fan since she read Atlas Shrugged at age 13.

“The values that were in that book, I haven’t shied from, ever since,” she said. Rinehart has summarised the central message of Rand’s books as “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”.

Rand wrote of “the virtue of selfishness”. Her rejection of collectivist activity and government regulation in an embrace of laissez-faire capitalism has long resonated with right-wing politicians and captains of industry, particularly those with agricultural and mining interests.

Rand was disdainful of the relationship of indigenous peoples to the land. In March 1974, according to a transcript unearthed by journalist Ben Norton, she told the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point: “Any white person who brings the elements of civilisation had the right to take over this continent.” In her interpretation of those elements not as human rights but property rights, she provided her justification of genocide: “since the Indians did not have any property rights – they didn’t have the concept of property ... they didn’t have any rights to the land.”

Whether Gina Rinehart’s pastoralist/miner father Lang ever read Rand is unknown, but in a TV interview in 1984, he offered his solution to what he called “the Aboriginal problem”.

“I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in future,” he said.

In 2022, after members of the Australian national netball team, the Diamonds, led by First Nations squad member Donnell Wallam, objected to wearing the Hancock Prospecting logo, Lang’s daughter pulled out of a $15 million sponsorship deal.

It’s no surprise that mining and pastoral interests have long been major funders of right-wing politicians, think tanks and libertarian proselytisers, given their particular concerns over Indigenous land rights and increasing efforts to protect the environment and limit climate change.

The views of Rand – who died in 1982 – have been frequently criticised as sociopathic and have echoed widely down the decades, from Margaret Thatcher, who famously said there was “no such thing as society”, to Silicon Valley today, where Vanity Fair magazine declared Rand possibly the most important influencer. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is also a Rand admirer, and he, of course, gave an estimated US$200 million – and a great deal of misinformation and disinformation on his social media site X – to support the campaign of Donald Trump.

And there at the Mar-a-Lago election night party in Florida, beaming for the camera, was Gina Rinehart. In one photo she is sitting with Nigel Farage, member of the British parliament and leader of the reactionary Reform UK party, and Teena McQueen in a red jumpsuit branded with the name Trump. Rinehart hired McQueen, the former vice-president of the Australian Liberal Party and right-wing provocateur on Sky News, as a policy adviser in 2022. Ten days after the election victory, McQueen was still attending meetings at Mar-a-Lago, including the investor forum of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

And in a statement to The Sydney Morning Herald a few days after Trump’s win, she urged Australian politicians to “watch and learn” from his policies to cut taxes, red tape and the size of government.

Of course, Rinehart is not only cultivating close ties among America’s right-wing political elite. She has long been a highly influential, and increasingly obtrusive, figure in Australian politics, via her relationships with conservative think tanks and media.

The 2024 US election was a big win for the Randian philosophy that runs through the work of hundreds of conservative think tanks. Many of them combined under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation in Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project – essentially a policy road map for the Trump administration.

But the “mother of them all”, according to Jeremy Walker, senior lecturer in the social and political sciences program at University of Technology Sydney, is an umbrella organisation known as the Atlas Network. He described it as coordinating 515 “public policy research institutes” across 99 countries. The Heritage Foundation is one of 192 US affiliates, and there are eight in Australia. The two most prominent are the Centre for Independent Studies – which was central to the disinformation campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament – and the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), which was founded in 1943 by a group of prominent businessmen, including Sir Keith Murdoch, father of Rupert. Over the years it has campaigned against Aboriginal land rights, racial discrimination laws and measures to address climate change, among other things.

The IPA has always been cagey about who funds it, but in 2018, as a consequence of a long-running dispute in the New South Wales Supreme Court over the use of funds from a family company, Hancock Prospecting, Rinehart was forced to reveal that over the two preceding years she had given the IPA $4.5 million. That accounted for between a third and a half of its funding, by various estimates.

It’s not a lot of money by billionaire standards, but it is enough to fund a lot of tendentious research. And anyway, the IPA’s influence goes beyond mere money.

It maintains close links to the Murdoch media empire and also to the conservative side of Australian politics. Its 70th birthday party was attended by a host of senior Coalition figures and News Corp employees and featured speeches from Rupert Murdoch, Tony Abbott and Gina Rinehart.

Arguably the Murdoch media, Fox News in particular, were even more influential in the election of Donald Trump than Elon Musk. Long before Musk became involved, Fox sowed distrust of big government, spread lies about the integrity of the electoral process, vilified migrants, denied climate science, impugned minorities including transgender people, and generally promoted fear and division.

In 2011, Forbes magazine senior contributor Steve Denning wrote that Rupert Murdoch “displayed the requisite degree of selfishness to qualify as a genuine Ayn-Rand-style hero”.

The ties that now bind Rinehart, the IPA and the right-wing media as a political force are becoming clearer. In late August, not long after Peter Dutton announced planned Coalition cuts to immigration, Rinehart spoke at the Victorian 2024 Bush Summit in Bendigo, hosted by Murdoch’s Melbourne Herald Sun newspaper.

“Let’s not forget the approximately one million migrants this government has brought in, resulting in only approximately 40,000 added to the workforce,” she said.

Leaving aside the prejudicial terminology – no migrants have been “brought in” by the current government, although roughly that number has arrived on its watch – her assertion that only 40,000 new jobs had been created was rank fiction.

Rinehart’s claim included no timeframe, but Bureau of Statistics Labour Force data shows employment increased 64,000 just in the month to September. In the year to September, employment went up by 435,000. In the two years to September, it increased by 858,000.

So she was out by a factor of at least 20.

The Herald Sun duly reported the misinformation in her speech, as did other Murdoch mastheads and Murdoch’s online site, news.com.au. Rinehart’s own site, ginarinehart.com.au, also reported the Murdoch media reports reporting her. At no point, as the stories bounced around the right-wing echo chamber, was Rinehart fact-checked.

Last December, Rinehart told an audience of some 200 business leaders gathered for The Australian Financial Review’s Business Person of the Year awards, that one third of Australia’s agricultural land would have to be “sacrificed” to meet Australia’s 2050 renewable energy needs.

The claim was subsequently debunked by numerous credible sources. The Clean Energy Council, for example, calculated that replacing all of Australia’s coal-fired power stations with solar farms would take less than 0.016 per cent of the country’s land area, the equivalent of 0.027 per cent of agricultural land.

News Corp stages seven bush summits in various states, each sponsored by the relevant state masthead. Rinehart is a fixture at them, and her speeches are invariably favourably reported.

In addition, Rinehart herself sponsors two big annual events, clumsily named National Mining and Related Industries Day and National Agriculture and Related Industries Day. The common themes to them all are political – Randian themes of smaller government, lower taxes, less regulation. The videos on Rinehart’s site frequently show Coalition media releases.

Rinehart also is a major donor to the Liberal Party and National Party, and is not always as open about it as is legally required. In 2023, an investigation by the ABC revealed a donation of almost $150,000 to the Liberal Party from Hancock Prospecting was routed through a third party, the Sydney Mining Club. Only after the ABC asked questions did Rinehart declare it, 444 days after the legal deadline of November 17, 2021.

The electoral commission investigated, but no action was taken. Rinehart did not respond to The Saturday Paper’s requests for comment for this story.

The conservative parties have cause to be grateful for all Rinehart’s help. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in particular appears to cherish the relationship with her.

On a Thursday evening in February, at the end of parliamentary sittings and two days before the byelection for the Melbourne seat of Dunkley, Dutton flew from Canberra to Perth to attend Rinehart’s 70th birthday party. After appearing for less than an hour, he got back on a red-eye and flew to Melbourne to campaign on the Friday. The Liberals lost the byelection on the Saturday. His office said he paid for his flights himself.

On several other occasions Dutton has hitched lifts on the private planes of Rinehart or her wealthy friends. In one case last November, Dutton was flown to Hancock Prospecting’s Roy Hill mine in Western Australia’s Pilbara, where he gave a speech closely echoing numerous of Rinehart’s.

“We need to hear more parents tell their children that the schools they attend, and the cities they live in, are only possible because of the mining sector,” he told the gathering.

“We need to hear more teachers tell the students that the roads, the bridges, the railways that we travel on have been constructed thanks to your sector. Too many of our teachers are telling kids to be ashamed of the fact that their parents work in the mining sector.”

He lauded the work carried out at the Rinehart mine as a “national treasure”.

Last month, an opposition attack on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for allegedly requesting flight upgrades from Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce (he denied having done so) was abandoned after the government counterattacked with details of Rinehart’s generous provision of her private jet to Dutton, including that he had asked her to fly him to a memorial for victims of the Bali bombings.

Some have queried the extent to which Rinehart’s largesse might have influenced policy, but so far there’s little evidence of that, largely because the Dutton opposition has released little policy.

For the most part, her role seems to have been to amplify opposition attacks on the government. She was linking housing shortages to immigration in May, as Dutton declared his intention to slash Australia’s intake as a way of reducing demand. Rinehart was championing nuclear before the Coalition embraced it.

The US election, and specifically Elon Musk’s appointment as the head of government efficiency to gut the public service, has raised the question of whether Rinehart might be granted a similar role in a Dutton government.

The question was put to teal independent MP Monique Ryan on breakfast television a week after the US election.

“I don’t think that politicians should be putting their friends, their dear friends, into positions of great influence in this country,” Ryan said.

Speaking later to The Saturday Paper, she ventured that Australia’s system of government would not allow a formal appointment, à la Musk. She worried nonetheless that Dutton would take advice, as prime minister, from his Randian friend.

“We’ve seen what happens when you slash and burn bureaucracy. Under the last [Coalition] government we saw what happens when public servants lose authority and their ability to act in a frank and fearless manner – robodebt.”

Ryan worried, too, about the promulgation of misinformation and disinformation. She noted the government is currently proposing legislation to force social media sites to take down material that is false, misleading or deceptive. But this, she said, did not cover “professional news content, which it defines as that produced by or for newspapers, magazines, television, radio and websites”.

No prizes for guessing why not. The political right has no interest in legislating truth, so long as there is money to be made and advantage to be gained from falsehood.

And the left – to the extent the cowed Labor government still qualifies as such – knows that to insist on the truth from people as rich and powerful and connected as Rinehart and Murdoch and the woman in the dollar-sign dress is political suicide.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 23, 2024 as "Gina’s arena".

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