Let's hear it for our billionaire mining magnates, the likes of Andrew ''Twiggy'' Forrest, Clive Palmer and Australia's richest woman, Gina Rinehart. Their howls of pain at the prospect of the federal government's new mining tax were wondrous to behold. -- Butch Carlton in The Silly
The mining magnate Gina Rinehart, down to her last $11 billion… -- Butch again
There's no one to touch a West Australian mining magnate when it comes to whining about paying tax. They never stop. Rinehart (fortune: $10.3 billion) claimed in July that the carbon tax and the mineral resources rent tax would leave bureaucracy the only ''growth industry in Australia'' and, bizarrely, wants any new taxes or tax increases to be approved by referendum. – Butch just can’t leave good enough alone
“ ‘… Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting, thanks to exploration costs, averaged a 10.6 per cent tax rate over a five-year period’ ” -- The AFR’s Neil Chenoweth, admiringly quoted by the AFR’s Laura Tingle, who won a Walkley for this column. A paragraph or two later Tingle puts Rinehart in her place: “…[this] has been the year of the rent-seeker.”
UPDATE: Annoying as he is to all but his personal trainer and groomer, who are paid to put up with him, mitigating the weekly annoyance that is Mike “Butch” Carlton may not be the only reason Gina Rinehart is investing some small change in her bid to become Fairfax’s largest stockholder. Could this recent profile in Good Weekend have been the catalyst that saw her reach for the cheque book? Take a look, imagine it is you being profiled and see if that perspective does not bring quite a few of the article’s deficiencies into a very sharp focus.
Perhaps Rinehart objects to unattributed quotes, especially when they are about her and unvaryingly bitchy. Or maybe, as with the article’s anecdote about her allegedly eye-poking hat, she objects to reporters repeating transparently obvious falsehoods. And then, after her PR person had demolished the charge of culpable headwear, she may not have appreciate reporter Jane Cadzow’s Parthian shot as she rode off to round up another herd of slurs and misrepresentations, including those of an estranged ex-husband.
If it was Cadzow’s profile that spurred Rinehart to action, praise the Great Bunyip that Fairfax published it.
