Mrs Gina Rinehart AO Keynote Address to the 2026 National Bush Summit, Dubbo

Fellow Australians,

I have always wanted to believe that the Australian people, when told the truth, will meet it with the courage that has never yet failed our nation.

I have looked to inspiration from great leaders I admire – Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – leaders who not only did so much for their own countries, but the free world. Their battles through very difficult times, I hope can continue to inspire us today.

We are told that what is now creating the crises around us, from record debt and record business failures, to falling real investment and falling standards of living, plus rising crime and too high immigration, is no coalition at all — merely a convenient arrangement, a passing accommodation of Labor, of the Greens – who are no longer the environmental party they used to be, and of those who campaign under the pastel colours of the confusing or confused Teals.

We are asked to believe that these are separate parties, with separate aims.

But are they held together by something far stronger: an appetite for your money; an appetite to kill agriculture, and kill the businesses that depend on agriculture; an appetite to kill small businesses; an appetite to kill investment and hence your industries; an appetite for the ordering of your private life and the policing of your public speech.

I would like to think that these appetites are confined to the parties that I have mentioned, but perhaps a closer look is warranted at the record of other parties while in office too.

And let us be clear about the character of the politics they bring.

It is a politics of huge expensive bureaucracy, huge expensive tape, climbing taxes, charges and costs, central direction, and compulsion.

It says to the miners bringing the bulk of the revenue supporting our country, to the struggling farmers providing our top-quality food, to the small businessman the largest provider of private employment in our country, that you are the problem, and we are the cure.

This is the oldest and most tried instrument in the manual of every socialist or communist who ever misled a people.

Let me set out the danger, plainly, as I see it.

They come first for our prosperity.

They massively regulate the industries that keep the lights burning and the refineries running.

They tax the productive to subsidise handouts, to buy them votes.

They drive the price of energy so high that a factory in Whyalla cannot compete with a factory overseas — do they care, or perhaps not understand?

They come next for our living standards.

Every family in this country now knows the arithmetic of the grocery bill, the mortgage, the electricity account, the license costs.

And to every family that asks why, they answer with a slogan, perhaps a temporary subsidy, and a fresh regulation. The bill is not paid by the minister. It is paid by the mother or father at the checkout.

They come next for our speech. They decide, from an office in Canberra, what may be said, what may be doubted, what may be laughed at. What may be called, racism. They call it safety. It has always had a pleasant name. But a nation that must ask permission before it may speak is a nation that has already surrendered something it will not easily win back.

And they come, for something vitally precious, the freedom of every Australian, a freedom that must be defended, or will be lost – our government’s prime responsibility, a responsibility they have dangerously neglected, our defence.

Without this freedom, we lose the freedom to build a life, own a home, raise a family, hold an opinion, and be left to raise our flag in peace.

Please do not underrate the gravity of the hour. Our opponents are organised, they are well-financed, and they are determined.

They have friends in the institutions, in the universities, in the schools, and throughout the press.

But let’s not forget our own history. We have the historic strength of a people who cleared this continent’s harshest country and made it yield. We have the strength of the diggers who went out from these shores. We have the strength of every pioneer who came here with nothing but a suitcase and a stubborn faith that with hard work they could provide a better life for their family. We have the strength of a nation of patriots.

And so I say to you, with the whole conviction of my heart:

We must stand up for our country, our freedoms and our future.

We must defend our future in the mines and in the paddocks.

We must defend our future on the farms and in the factories.

We must defend our future in the small businesses that are the largest private employers, and which open before dawn and close long after dark.

We must defend our country, for without providing the tools to defend our country, we may have no country.

We need to stand up for the family budget at the voting box, to be released from the heavy load of government.

We need to stand up for the right of every Australian to speak plainly, and not be concerned about the state at his or her wrist.

We need to stand up in the Parliament, we need to stand up in the councils, we need to fight what is mistaught in the classrooms and spread in the media, and we must fight the emergence of the deep state in our country.

We simply cannot afford to surrender our freedom and our future.

Thank you.