Mining magnate Gina Rinehart was last month declared the richest woman in the world. But it’s the family feuds, attempts to control the Australian media and bitter public disputes that are keeping her in the headlines, reports Tim Hume.
Two years ago this month, the world’s richest woman, Gina Rinehart, climbed on a flatbed truck before a hometown crowd in Perth, Australia, and launched herself into public life. The threat of a proposed mining ‘super tax’, designed to more equitably disperse revenues from Australia’s resources boom, had drawn out the usually reclusive iron and coal magnate to address a rally against the government. Dressed in pearls and heels astride a vehicle once owned by her father, the pioneering prospector Lang Hancock, Rinehart bellowed “Axe the tax!” through a megaphone until she was hoarse.
No one who knew Rinehart would ever doubt her passion for her industry, but such a public performance was uncharacteristic. While she had yet to trouble the global rich lists, Rinehart was none the less, by 2010, Australia’s wealthiest woman. But despite this, she had managed, until then, to maintain a low public profile.
“When I started the book over a year ago, people would ask, ‘Who is Gina Rinehart?’,” says Adele Ferguson, an Australian journalist and author of a forthcoming unauthorised biography on Rinehart. But since grabbing the loudhailer, Rinehart has not let go, rising in power and profile to become one of Australia’s most talked about and polarising figures: an “Iron Lady” who is a source of intrigue and consternation to the media she increasingly owns, and the political classes she seeks to influence.