The buzz from Gina Rinehart’s 70th birthday party was reportedly “so spectacular” that it drifted across the Swan River from the mining magnate’s Perth home, catching the attention of people more than a kilometre away.
Four hundred guests, mostly employees, had gathered to mark the milestone of the Hancock Prospecting head, who is deferentially referred to as “the Chairman” or “Mrs Rinehart”.
The gala event started with a horseback show as riders dressed in Driza-Bone jackets and Rossi boots carried Australian and Hancock Prospecting flags along the red carpet, accompanied by music from The Man from Snowy River.
Guy Sebastian sang the national anthem and multiple chocolate cakes were placed on podiums.
“It was a very special night,” said the now Liberal MP Basil Zempilas, who emceed the event. “To see the admiration of the staff and the loyalty, I guess, but how appreciative they were of the opportunities they have had [was] something really nice.”
Among the guests was the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, who had flown from Canberra to Perth to attend the party for just 40 minutes before travelling on to Melbourne.
His quick visit came on the eve of Victoria’s Dunkley byelection but Dutton was unapologetic when questioned about the trip.
“I was very proud to be at Gina Rinehart’s 70th birthday,” he said. “I consider her to be a dear friend, a great Australian and Australia’s most successful businesswoman.
“I was happy to go there at my own expense to her birthday, and I don’t resile from it at all.”
The night has since been immortalised in a sweeping mural which now hangs in the reception of Hancock Prospecting’s Roy Hill mine. It is painted in a nostalgic style, with smiling party guests looking on at a singing Sebastian. Dutton has pride of place next to the birthday girl.
Mine time
Rinehart has cultivated the relationship with Dutton since he became opposition leader after the Coalition’s 2022 election defeat.
Two weeks after that he boarded a flight to Perth. There was work to be done: the west had abandoned the Coalition, delivering the Liberal party its worst results in the country, with swings of more than 10% against it and the loss of five seats.
Dutton declared he was there to rebuild the party in the “great state” of Western Australia as he pledged to “come and listen to understand what happened”.
His Wednesday morning press conference made repeated mention of the pressures being faced by families and small business – but Dutton was also in Perth to meet with the city’s business elite.
He had a packed schedule. On the Wednesday night he mingled with the state’s A-listers at a dinner at Steve’s restaurant in Nedlands, hosted by his friends and former cabinet colleagues Christian Porter and Michael Keenan.
On Thursday morning he attended a breakfast function at the Hyatt Regency with the then state leader of the Liberals, David Honey, his deputy, Libby Mettam, and about 50 party faithful.
His diary was then clear for him to board another flight – this time on Rinehart’s private jet, a white Gulfstream G600 with red detailing that has an average purchase price of $80m (the jet is registered to the Bank of Utah as trustee).
The day trip was to take Dutton to the Pilbara to see Hancock Prospecting’s flagship Roy Hill iron ore mine. The vast operation delivers the company multibillion-dollar annual profits and exports more than 60m tonnes of iron ore a year. Opened in 2015, the project realised the Hancock family’s long-held dream of owning and operating its own mine.
Dutton, through a spokesperson, said at the time it was “an opportunity to see how the operation worked”.
But the trip was also an opportunity for Rinehart to spend valuable time with the newly minted opposition leader, building on the relationship she had cultivated within the Coalition over many years.
The time together appeared to quickly yield dividends for Rinehart.
Ten days later Dutton was back in Perth with a new policy announcement, heralded on the front page of the Kerry Stokes-owned West Australian with the headline “Gina’s grey army of workers”.
The “Rinehart-inspired” plan, which would encourage pensioners back to work by allowing them to earn more money before their payments were reduced, had been advocated by the billionaire miner. Dutton confirmed that the proposal had been inspired in part by his conversations with her.
“I had a number of discussions with Gina Rinehart including in relation to … this policy,” Dutton said at a press conference in Perth. “Gina Rinehart and many others have been pushing this for a long time.”
Going nuclear
Dutton’s early embrace of one of Rinehart’s pet policies was quickly followed by another.
In a tweet that August, Dutton suggested that it was time for Australia to “have the discussion” about nuclear power.
“Peak business groups and unions are calling for the moratorium on nuclear power to be lifted, amid a push to ensure Australia is ‘technology agnostic’ during its transition to cut emissions,” he said.
Rinehart, like her father, Lang, before her, has long been a proponent of nuclear energy, historically supporting the use of nuclear devices to blast mine sites in the Pilbara.
Dutton later “commended” Rinehart for her advocacy of nuclear power, telling a Minerals Week lunch at Parliament House in Canberra that as one of “our industry’s great leaders” she had shown courage in calling for Australia “to embrace nuclear power for a net zero future”.
Two months later Dutton was back on the Hancock Prospecting Gulfstream, using it as a private charter to travel to a Bali bombing memorial in Sydney for which he had been unable to secure a commercial or special-purpose government flight.
Dutton later confirmed that his office had requested the jet to travel between Mackay, Rockhampton and Sydney but justified the move by saying it was cheaper than flying onboard a RAAF plane. The Gulfstream flight was taken “at zero cost to the taxpayer”, he said.
In the pink
The closeness between the pair appears to have only grown throughout Dutton’s time as opposition leader.
In October 2023 he attended a gala dinner for the Perth Telethon fundraiser, where he was pictured alongside Rinehart and Hancock Prospecting senior executives.
A month later he was invited to address Rinehart’s national mining day in the Pilbara, where guests donned neon-pink work safety vests and were entertained by aerial acrobatics and fireworks.
After video presentations from the Canadian opposition leader, Pierre Poilievre, and from Elon Musk, Dutton was introduced at the Roy Hill mine site by Hancock Prospecting’s Gerhard Veldsman. Veldsman, Roy Hill’s head of operations, said he had been privileged to spend “quite a bit of time” with Dutton.
“Peter is one of those guys that when you sit down and listen to him you understand this is a person that absolutely cares about Australia, a person that absolutely cares about our industry,” he said.
“Peter works tirelessly to actually represent our industry at a time when there’s not a lot in government that does.”
Much of Dutton’s speech was devoted to praising Rinehart and her family’s contribution to Australia but he also pledged to help grow the mining industry by cutting regulations and compliance costs.
He suggested that Australian children should be taught about the positive contribution the mining sector was making to society, saying: “Too many of our teachers are telling kids to be ashamed of the fact that their parents work in the mining sector.”
On the morning of Dutton’s speech – 22 November 2023 – an interview with Rinehart published in the Daily Telegraph propounded similar views.
The article quoted Rinehart as saying governments needed “to cut red tape to encourage business investment” and to stop pushing “woke” agendas that were holding the country back.
“We teach children far more about cutting emissions and woke agendas, than we do about mining that powers Australia’s economy, and enables those Australians employed in the industry to have some of the highest wages in the world,” Rinehart said.
The day before Dutton had sent a recorded message to Rinehart’s National Agriculture Day celebration held in Bali, in which he pledged to “have your back”.
“I’m seeking your support come the next federal election which will be a battle for the very soul of our nation and for the future of Australia,” he said.
“The Coalition government under my leadership will … reignite business and confidence, we will remove the chains of regulation which are restraining businesses and unleash the magic of what you do best to help build our economy and our country.”
Donations flow
During the 47th Australian parliament political donations flowed from Hancock Prospecting to the Coalition in unprecedented amounts.
The latest disclosures from the Australian Electoral Commission showed that the company donated $500,000 to the Coalition in the 2023-24 financial year, triple the amount donated the previous year, and more than the previous eight years in political donations from the company combined.
Most of the money went to Dutton’s home state of Queensland but Rinehart also donated $100,000 to the Liberals in South Australia and $75,000 to the Northern Territory Country Liberal party. She is known to have met and think highly of the SA conservative Alex Antic and the CLP’s Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
What is not declared through the AEC is the value of fundraisers hosted by Rinehart for Dutton that help boost the party’s coffers before the election campaign.
Rinehart invited party supporters to private functions at her riverside Brisbane mansion in Hawthorne and at her beach house near Noosa at Sunshine Beach on a mid-June weekend in 2024.
The Australian Financial Review reported that Hancock Prospecting’s Queensland chief, David Davies, had informed potential guests that the money raised at the functions would support the federal election campaign – “to wherever Peter nominates”.
Tickets were sold for a minimum of $14,000 a head – just below the AEC’s disclosure threshold for the year of $16,300.
In WA last December, Rinehart hosted a $3,000-a-head fundraising dinner for Mia Davies, the National party’s candidate for the new federal seat of Bullwinkel in Perth’s outer suburbs, which the Coalition is hoping will fall in its pile come the election.
Dutton is not required to disclose the fundraising assistance from Hancock Prospecting under parliament’s rules because these only require MPs to declare potential conflicts of interest arising from “personal” gifts.
When asked about Hancock Prospecting’s $500,000 donation, the company said it wanted to support the Coalition as it was “more attuned” to the concerns of Australians.
Rinehart has also given money to the conservative thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs, with documents released through her family court case showing she donated $4.5m to the institute in 2017 and 2018 – about a third of its total funding.
It is not known if these donations have continued but her contributions have been sufficient for Rinehart to be appointed an honorary life member of the institute in 2016.
The IPA carries most of Rinehart’s speeches and articles, and the mining billionaire often quotes the thinktank’s research in her presentations.
Profits rise
Against the backdrop of complaints that the mining industry is being “stymied” by government, Hancock Prospecting’s profits continue to rise.
The company recorded $5.56bn in net profit after tax in 2023-24 on the back of $14.7bn in revenue and record exports from Roy Hill.
It is Australia’s largest private company – on par with Woolworths as a publicly owned comparison – and paid more than $3bn in tax last year.
But in notes accompanying its financial report, Hancock Prospecting said the company was facing an “increasingly difficult regulatory environment”.
“Addressing these burdens and making investment more welcome is vital for the resources industry to be able to continue to contribute to the prosperity of businesses up and down the supply chain.”
Hancock Prospecting has opposed industrial relations changes pushed by the Albanese government, including “same job, same pay” provisions and a shift towards union bargaining in the Pilbara, which was de-unionised in the 1980s and 90s.
The organisation has also strongly campaigned against proposed nature positive laws that would have established a federal environmental protection agency, with Rinehart saying the government was pushing “the biggest environmental related expansion since [the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation] act was created”.
Hancock’s lobbyists were active in Parliament House campaigning against the bill, which was ultimately dumped by Albanese after pressure from the WA Labor government and the mining industry.
A Doge down under?
In an advertisement in the conservative magazine the Spectator in December, Rinehart published her policy “wishlist” under the headline “All I want for Christmas is … to make Australia great”.
Warning that Australia was at risk of being “left behind” by a Trump administration, Rinehart repeated calls for the cutting of red and green tape, and blamed the “housing and crime and hospital crises” on “too many government selected immigrants”.
She called for the introduction of an Elon Musk-inspired “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to “eliminate government waste and significantly reduce government expenditure, tape and regulations”.
Speaking in Washington after Trump’s January inauguration, Rinehart repeated her call for a Doge, saying: “If we are sensible, we should set up a DOGE immediately, reduce government waste, government tape and regulations.”
Three days later Dutton announced the appointment of Price as shadow minister for government efficiency, “to cut government waste and ensure that government is operating as effectively and efficiently as possible”.
Rinehart has supported Price, attending Parliament House in Canberra for the senator’s first speech and praising her in an article in The Australian as one of Australia’s most influential people of the past six decades. No doubt Rinehart would have welcomed Price’s promotion to lead a mission so close to her heart.
Among other policies on Rinehart’s Christmas list was her long-advocated push for a tax-free northern development zone to encourage workers to move to northern Australia.
She has been pushing for tax breaks in a special economic zone for the north since she created a thinktank in 2010 called Andev – Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision.
Though the idea was raised through a parliamentary committee in 2013, the former prime minister Tony Abbott dismissed it out of hand. But at a press conference in Mount Isa last August, Dutton indicated it was something he had been considering.
“We’re happy to have a look at taxation arrangements,” Dutton said, adding that there may even be “constitutional restrictions” that needed to be tested.
“I think there are arguments for people who live in regional towns where you’re paying more for petrol, you’re paying more for your electricity, paying more for housing – there’s an additional cost that comes with it and you’re producing, in many cases, royalties and company tax that go to benefit people in capital cities.
“I just think they’re all commonsense discussions that we should have, and it should include a discussion around whether the current taxation arrangements are fit for purpose.”
Dutton has been vocal in his praise of Rinehart, thanking her for “speaking up on many issues that are in our country’s best interest”.
At a speech on national mining day in 2024 – this time remotely as it coincided with a busy sitting fortnight – Dutton said Rinehart had been “playing a pivotal role in contributing to our national debate”.
“It takes courage to speak up on these issues because you, like many of us, become subject to a torrent abuse from the vocal illiberal left and the keyboard warriors.
“But I know that it doesn’t deter you one inch; your courage speaks to your patriotism so thank you for being a patriot, thank you for voicing concerns which are shared by quiet patriotic Australians across our great country.”
At the same event, he pledged that a Dutton Coalition government would “be the best friend the resource sector in Australia will ever have”.
“I’m keen to rip up as much red and green tape as possible and that’s essential for our international competitiveness and making our nation a mining and manufacturing powerhouse again,” he said.
“I want to see more excavators digging, more gas flowing and more trucks moving,” Dutton said.
“We will have your backs and I hope that you’ll have ours as well.”
Know more? Email sarah.martin@theguardian.com
