ABC news reports the richest woman in the world, Gina Rinehart, on Wednesday more than doubled her stake in Australian newspaper group Fairfax to add to her shares in a television channel prompting questions about the mining magnate’s motivations.
Rinehart, nicknamed Big G, who owns a multi-billion dollar coal and iron ore empire has spent more than $500 million buying the media assets over the last year which commentators say she is able to do with “loose change.”
Rinehart, 57, inherited Hancock Prospecting from her father Lang Hancock who discovered the world’s largest iron deposit in the Pilbara region in 1952. When Rinehart took over 20 years ago the family firm was debt-ridden and struggling and she built it into the world’s number one private mining business.
Although she has never granted a media interview herself, after dropping $200 million on Wednesday, she now owns just under 13% of $1.75 billion Fairfax. As the largest shareholder, she’ll almost definitely be offered a seat on the board of the publishers of the influential Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Financial Review, the monopoly business daily. Fairfax controls about 30% of Australia’s newspaper market with Rupert Murdoch the rest.
ABC quotes Paul Barry of the Power Index, a business opinion website, who says her influence on the television channel has already paid dividends:
…she’s lost half her money [she invested]. So, I don’t think she’s doing it for business purposes. She’s doing it because she wants a say.
Writing in the Power Index Barry speculates whether Rinehart could be gunning for the whole of Fairfax and pushing her anti-global warming agenda and her opposition to Australia’s carbon and mining tax:
It was Rinehart, remember, who jumped on the back of a truck at last year’s anti mining tax rally in Perth with fellow mining billionaire, Andrew Forrest. It was also Rinehart who funded climate change denier Lord Monckton’s recent Australian tour. Rinehart revived the Lang Hancock lecture at Notre Dame University in Fremantle (which she sponsors) so his Lordship could give it.
ABC also interviews Tim Treadgold of Forbes magazine about Rinehart’s growing wealth and expansion into media:
The asset base she has is directly linked to the growth of China, so as long as China keeps growing, she’ll keep getting richer. What she now wants is more influence in the public debate in Australia, particularly when it comes to matters like taxation, land access, the ability to bring in low-cost labour to develop her mines and ports and she is gonna have a railway as well. She’s gonna be the whole shooting match and I think we’re just seeing the start of Gina the Skyrocket.
The Sydney Morning Herald itself weighs in on the likely influence of Rinehart on editorial policy and quotes from Rinehart’s father’s polemic, Wake Up Australia:
And some ideas from Lang Hancock in his book […] provide some hints, such as how “we can change the situation so as to limit the power of government”. “It could be broken by obtaining control of the media and then educating the public,” he wrote.
“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’,” he said.
Rinehart is predicted to become the world’s richest person as Hancock’s coal projects and the massive 100%-owned iron ore mines start producing by 2014 and earn her annual net profits of billions. She doubled her wealth from 2010 and last year her net worth was pegged at some $10.3 billion last year, although some estimates put it as high as double that.
While Rinehart’s business success has been mammoth, her private life has not always been a happy one. Earlier this month Rinehart handed her daughter Ginia (sic) directorships of three companies, including Hancock Prospecting which controls her empire.
Ginia who is 25 years old is the only one of Rinehart’s four children who are not currently suing her in court in a bitter dispute over control of the family fortune. The shake-up was the biggest in a long time at the Rinehart group of companies and elevates Ginia in place of her siblings – Bianca Rinehart, John Hancock and Hope Welker – to the top ranks in the world of mining.
Big Pond reports Western Australia’s premier Colin Barnett seized the opportunity Wednesday to highlight the economic power of the resource-rich state and its growing influence over the rest of the country.
‘The rest of Australia get used to it. This is where the money is.’
MINING.com reported last week Perth, one of the world’s most isolated capitals, ranks as Australia’s fourth most popular destination for the country’s super rich, and the city is climbing the rankings.
Image is a video capture of Rinehart receiving the 2009 Telstra National Business Women’s Awards
2 Comments
2ndOrion
She may as well purchase them, as they are now cheap with the Internet competition. Publication wise, they will be going out of business anyway if someone doesn’t rescue them. Those that go online will survive. -And why can’t she write her Opinion. Everyone should know her viewpoint if she wants to give it.
Biddulph Art
It is high time that someone may challeng the hyperbol global warming gang. The earth has been warming since the ice started melting from the most riecent major ice age.