My Gina Theory

Why does Gina Rinehart like to buy into media companies?

I have a pet theory about Fairfax, at least.  It might be as revenge for a far from complimentary profile that ran earlier this year.

Amongst other things I probably read at the time but had forgotten (I don't pay much attention to billionaires, as it happens):

*  she has a reputation for penny-pinching. One former employee tells of being instructed to phone suppliers of office equipment to haggle over even the smallest bills. Another says he got the impression that Rinehart personally scrutinised staff expenses claims. "She had a thing in the back of her mind that everybody, and I mean everybody, was out to do her down, to take a dollar off her," he says. "She trusted nobody and assumed the worst of everybody."

* [Talking of her fractured relationship with some of her children] "I'm not a psychologist, but I'm a close observer of the family," Singleton says. "It's because the business comes first. Being a parent is secondary. It's just, 'Where do they fit into the dynasty? Are they iron or are they coal or are they uranium?' If they don't fit into the company, there's no role for them."

*  "School was just a nasty interlude to put up with," he said. "Then she tried a year doing economics at Sydney University but she found out it was basically communist ..."Rinehart told Robert Duffield, author of the Hancock biography Rogue Bull, that the university taught "the wrong things". Duffield noted that she parroted Hancock's political views, "mastering all his stock tracts, phrase by phrase". Singleton was aware of this, too: "I mean, a conversation with Gina was a conversation with Lang. They both had the same fanaticism ... If Lang paused, Gina could finish the sentence."

* Rinehart's next husband was an American tax attorney almost four decades her senior. Gina was 28 when the couple wed in Las Vegas in 1983. Frank Rinehart was 65. [This was, however, a happy marriage.]

* Newspapers reported in 1997 that Rinehart had reached a confidential out-of-court settlement with her former live-in security guard, Bob Thompson, who had filed a sexual harassment complaint against her. In a long article in Woman's Day, Thompson said Rinehart became infatuated with him and wanted to marry him, despite his being engaged to someone else. "I told her over and over I wasn't interested," he said, but "she wouldn't take no for an answer". Thompson made plain that in some ways he felt sorry for Rinehart: "She's just incredibly lonely and isolated."

Singleton tells me Rinehart has no interests besides mining. "There is no social life," he says. "It's just work."

There is much more in the article.

It really is not a picture of a likeable person.   If anything, it reads a bit like a real life version of Citizen Kane, with unhappy adult children thrown into the mix.   In terms of political views it sounds like they were formed while sitting on her Dad's lap and haven't moved on from there.

I see Alan Kohler, who I assume has met a fair few people who have met Gina, calls her today "Australia's strangest rich person".

I know nothing of how much personal responsibility she can take for growing her father's fortune, but her promotion of climate change skepticism by sponsoring Monckton out to Australia (and welcoming Ian Plimer to talk to visiting foreigners) does not speak well for her general judgement (to put it mildly.)   If she genuinely wanted to know about the science, she could fly in the top scientists from around the world for her own private briefing.  Instead, the voice of the loner contrarian appeals to her personality, I suppose.

Sure, her works mean a lot of employment and income for the country, but especially that she was the heiress to her father's ideas and fortunes, you can't give her high marks for exactly being "self made" either. 

Some billionaires genuinely should be admired for their extensive philanthropy for the good of humankind.   Bill Gates in particular seems to combine a happy family with extensive good works, many benefiting the poorest of the world.   It would appear that Gina does not spend much proportion of her fortune in any similar way.

So is Gina buying her way into control of Fairfax an act of revenge for (perhaps amongst other things) what might have been a hurtful profile?   Making it a real vanity project to slavishly promote her single minded (and, in some cases, rather simple minded) views would no doubt hurt the papers and kill them off completely.   

Who knows?   But it's as good a pet theory as any.

Update:    I don't know if anyone else using Blogger has found this, but ever since their new editing layout for posts came out, I have a hell of a lot of trouble getting breaks between paragraphs right.  What looks right in the "compose" window often isn't when you post, and then you can have a lot of trouble working out which bit of HTML is causing the problem.  This did not used to be the case.   Annoying.