Originally published by Dr Daniel Mealey of Medium
09.10.2026
Gina Rinehart, the oil crisis and the peculiar Australian habit of resenting the people we may soon need most
There is a question buried beneath the recurring controversies surrounding Gina Rinehart that is much more revealing than the controversies themselves. It isn’t whether she’s wealthy. She plainly is. It isn’t whether she’s politically aligned. She plainly is that too. The question is why, when one of Australia’s wealthiest citizens repeatedly puts substantial private money into hospitals, medical research, rural medicine, indigenous education, veterans’ housing, sport and community causes, some Australians seem determined to make the donor rather than the recipient the moral object of the story.
If the answer is that she hasn’t given enough, the record makes that difficult to sustain. If the answer is that the money itself is somehow morally tainted because of its source, or because of the political opinions of the person giving it, then we have moved beyond an argument about philanthropy. We are confronting something older and more deeply Australian: the suspicion of exceptional wealth, the instinct to cut down the tall poppy, and a newer, sinister ideological belief that private wealth is itself evidence of social injustice.
Australia is entering an age in which capital is not merely a private economic resource. Capital, engineering capacity, industrial knowledge and the willingness to make very large long-term investments are becoming matters of national resilience. The oil crisis is the most obvious demonstration.
Australia is one of the world’s great energy-exporting nations. It exports enormous quantities of coal and gas and most of its crude oil, yet it imports the overwhelming majority of the refined products upon which its economy actually runs. In 2024–25, 80.8 per cent of Australia’s refined petroleum consumption was supplied by imports, while domestic refineries imported roughly two-thirds of their own feedstock. The Parliamentary Library has likewise described Australia as heavily exposed to international fuel markets and the global shipping chokepoints through which those fuels must travel.
That’s an extraordinary strategic vulnerability for a country whose farmers, miners, truck drivers, hospitals, defence forces, airlines, manufacturers and food distributors cannot operate without diesel, petrol and aviation fuel. After decades of the major parties capitulating to the fashionable nonsense of solar panels and wind mills, successive governments have fundamentally dropped the ball in preparing Australia for a very predictable oil shock from a chronically volatile Middle East. The Government now has a four-level National Fuel Security Plan, committing billions of dollars to additional reserves, emergency supply measures and feasibility studies for new or expanded refining capacity. The flaw of the Plan is glaring — a Government overconfident about oil reserves, at the expense of domestic refineries to make that oil usable.
On the night of 15 April 2026, a major fire broke out at Viva Energy’s Geelong refinery. The fire occurred in the alkylation unit within the refinery’s gasoline complex and took more than 12 hours to extinguish. The damage temporarily reduced petrol production to approximately 60 per cent of capacity and diesel and jet fuel production to approximately 80 per cent. Viva Energy said it had sufficient stocks to maintain normal supply while repairs and inspections proceeded.
The significance of Geelong is not that Australians suddenly ran out of petrol. They did not. The significance is that a sophisticated economy can continue functioning while the resilience underneath it is quietly being consumed (until it isn’t).
Without a doubt, there is simultaneous stress across military conflict, oil production and refining, shipping, inventories, strategic reserves, fertiliser, food, inflation and the global economy. Hormuz remains severely disrupted, tanker attacks have intensified, Black Sea commercial shipping has become increasingly dangerous, Russian and Ukrainian energy infrastructure remains under attack, and governments are drawing down emergency petroleum stocks to prevent physical shortages and crippling inflation.
The extraordinary feature of the present crisis is that the world has not yet reached systemic breakdown precisely because enormous buffers are still functioning. Saudi Arabia has restored East-West pipeline flows to approximately 5.8 million barrels a day, providing an alternative route around Hormuz, and bypassing the Houthi attacks on Bab el-Mendeb Strait.
But those buffers are being consumed. The International Energy Agency has accelerated the release of emergency stocks, with approximately 100 million barrels still to be delivered from the existing 400-million-barrel emergency programme. The very need to release them on this scale is evidence of an underlying physical market under extraordinary strain.
The refined-product market is arguably more concerning than the crude market. Diesel has become particularly tight, and Asian refining margins have surged as China has restricted fuel exports beyond Hong Kong and Macau. Singapore’s gasoline imports from China have reportedly fallen by 62 per cent compared with the previous year, while Australia is among the major Asian importers exposed to reduced Chinese diesel and jet-fuel exports.
The National Fuel Security Plan declares that its minimum stockholding arrangements will “provide confidence to fuel users and government in our resilience to potential supply disruptions.” This governmental spin document fails to assess the uncomfortable reality that an energy-rich Australia can simultaneously be a fuel-insecure Australia.
And this brings us back to Gina Rinehart.
Whatever one’s opinion of her politics, it is difficult to examine the philanthropic record and conclude that she has simply accumulated wealth and refused to return anything to society. The Hancock and Rinehart Medical Foundation record includes support for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, hospitals, children’s health, cancer research, rural and remote medicine, indigenous education, scholarships, sporting organisations, veterans’ organisations and community initiatives. In 2023, the Rinehart Medical Foundation and Hancock Prospecting committed $16 million to the Royal Flying Doctor Service across Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia, including funding for aircraft and operational capability.
Her support for children’s health is equally concrete. The $5 million donation from Rinehart’s family on behalf of Hancock Prospecting was the largest single pledge in the 26-year history of the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation Gold Dinner, contributing to the Kookaburra Centre at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead. The event raised $19.2 million in total.
Her veterans’ philanthropy is on another scale altogether. In April 2026, Hancock Prospecting announced a $200 million commitment to acquire and repurpose properties as accommodation for homeless Australian veterans, following the $10 million Sir Valston Hancock House in South Perth. The latter had already provided approximately 3,500 nights of accommodation to veterans who might otherwise have slept on the streets.
Rinehart spends big on veteran homes, names them for Ben Roberts-Smith. Photo: Tom Rabe
The sporting contribution is similarly extensive. Rinehart and Hancock have supported Australian swimming, rowing, volleyball, artistic swimming and other sporting programmes, including direct financial rewards to athletes. The relationship with rowing and other Olympic sports has been particularly substantial, making her one of the most significant private supporters of Australian elite sport.
Then there is Indigenous education and regional development. Hancock’s Hanrine Futures programme provides scholarships, mentoring, work experience and employment pathways for indigenous students, while the broader philanthropic activities associated with Rinehart’s organisations have supported health, education and community initiatives in regional and remote Australia.
So the question becomes unavoidable.
Is the objection that Gina Rinehart has not given enough? Or is the objection that she has given it while remaining politically unpalatable to some of the people receiving it?
The Kookaburra controversy is revealing because the donor did not donate $5 million to advance a mining policy. She donated it to a children’s hospital. The Children’s Hospital itself describes the donation as part of the fundraising that made the Australian-first complex care centre possible.
Yet the political identity of the donor became part of the controversy. Her donation qualified for naming rights under the foundation’s established policy. Some doctors objected to the naming because of Rinehart’s political associations, particularly her support for One Nation.
Rinehart’s association with One Nation may well be legitimate material for political reporting. Her political donations and relationships can be scrutinised. But there is an intellectual distinction that seems increasingly difficult for parts of Australian public life to maintain: one can oppose Gina Rinehart’s politics while still recognising that $5 million given to a children’s hospital is $5 million that will help sick children.
If the political disagreement is so profound that accepting the money becomes morally embarrassing, there is an admirably simple solution.
Give the money back. Or better still, match it.
The Netball Australia episode makes the same point even more starkly. Hancock Prospecting agreed to a $15 million sponsorship, but the arrangement became embroiled in controversy after Diamonds player Donnell Wallam raised concerns about wearing the Hancock logo because of statements made 45 years ago by Gina Rinehart’s father, Lang Hancock. Hancock Prospecting ultimately withdrew the sponsorship of the Diamonds. ABC reported that the withdrawal left Netball Australia scrambling to replace a substantial source of funding, before Visit Victoria later supplied a replacement $15 million deal.
It is understandable that an indigenous athlete could be offended by Lang Hancock’s historical remarks. It is also legitimate for athletes to have views about their sponsors. But the episode raises a separate question that Australia shouldn’t be afraid to ask: when a $15 million corporate sponsorship contribution disappears because the donor’s relative was racially offensive in 1982, who exactly has won?
While many Australians condemned the galling response of the Diamonds to Gina’s generosity, any demise of the netball team pales beside the consequences of a children’s hospital potentially losing $5 million or, more broadly, the possibility that Australia’s wealthiest private investors may eventually conclude that their capital is better deployed elsewhere.
What is it exactly that generates such contempt toward the generosity of Gina Rinehart? This is where the argument about ideology begins.
Karl Marx provided one of history’s most influential frameworks for interpreting society primarily through conflict between classes and for regarding the transformation of property relations as a central political objective.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that the immediate aim of communists was the “overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy” and the “abolition of bourgeois property”. They were not advocating merely a slightly higher rate of income tax. They were proposing a fundamental transformation of the property structure of society.
They were equally explicit about revolutionary confrontation, declaring that communists sought the “forcible overthrow” of existing social conditions and concluding: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution.”
Marx’s hostility toward religion was also explicit. In his 1843 introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he described religion as “the opium of the people” and argued that the struggle against religion was indirectly a struggle against the social world of which religion was the spiritual expression.
The Australian Census provides evidence that is relevant to the wider cultural environment in which these arguments now occur. Christianity accounted for 86.2 per cent of Australians in the 1971 Census, falling to 61.1 per cent in 2011 and 43.9 per cent in 2021. At the same time, the proportion reporting no religion rose from 6.7 per cent in 1971 to 38.9 per cent in 2021.
All of this matters in contemporary Australia, because Marxism drives a framework in which inherited religious, social, gender and property structures are to be treated as manifestations of a system to be dismantled. In 2026, as we continue to witness growth of anti-Christian, wealth-despising, gender dysphoric, abortion-craving, racially motivated antisocial activists, somewhere along the line the conclusion must be drawn that the DNA of Marxism has long been transcribed into our education system, and that those infected by that DNA are systematically dismantling everything.
Anarchist contingent in the March for Women’s Lives, April 25, 2004, Washington DC. Photo by Bunnie Diehl.
The historical record of communist regimes makes the romanticisation of class hatred particularly dangerous. Estimates of deaths attributable to communist governments is more than sufficient to establish that communist regimes produced deaths numbering in the tens of millions, alongside political terror, forced labour, famine, deportation and extraordinary human suffering.
That history should make Australians cautious about treating the destruction of a wealthy class as a moral achievement. And yet this is precisely where the Gina Rinehart story becomes more important than Gina Rinehart herself.
Tall poppy syndrome can be harmless when it means refusing to be impressed by arrogance. It becomes destructive when it means believing that somebody else’s success is itself an offence. The first is healthy scepticism. The second is envious spite.
Australia needs to decide which one it wants. Because the energy crisis has exposed something that ideological arguments cannot wish away. The Australian economy needs petroleum. It needs diesel to harvest food. It needs jet fuel to connect a continent. It needs petrochemicals to manufacture modern goods. It needs lubricants to keep machinery operating. It needs fertiliser inputs to maintain agricultural productivity. It needs shipping fuel, road freight and mining equipment. And it needs Australian workers in these fields, for their jobs to be protected, and for their work to receive a living wage.
This is precisely why One Nation’s current energy policy is relevant to the Rinehart story. One Nation explicitly advocates developing domestic oil and gas extraction, rebuilding local refining capacity, increasing fuel reserves and strengthening Australian fertiliser production. Its stated fuel-security policy argues that Australia cannot be genuinely self-reliant while relying upon overseas refineries and imported fuel. That is plainly consistent with why Rinehart supports the party.
It is also consistent with the strategic problem Australia is now confronting.
The country cannot simultaneously demand energy independence, domestic manufacturing, secure fertiliser, regional development and sovereign infrastructure while treating the private capital capable of financing those things as morally suspect.
Nor can Australia continuously ask wealthy Australians to give more while teaching them that every gift will become another opportunity for national humiliation.
This is the extraordinary contradiction at the centre of the Rinehart controversies. She gives $5 million to a children’s hospital, and the argument becomes whether the donor’s political affiliations make her and her money morally radioactive. She offers $15 million to Australian netball, and the argument becomes whether athletes should internationally humiliate the executive chairman of the company founded by her father.
She commits $16 million to the Flying Doctor, and an aircraft appears over regional Australia. She commits $200 million to veterans’ accommodation, and thousands of nights of safe housing become possible. She supports indigenous education and scholarships. She supports elite Australian athletes. She supports hospitals and medical research. She supports rural and remote healthcare. She supports veterans who have served the country. She supports organisations that many Australians would otherwise expect corporations, wealthy philanthropists or failing governments collectively to fund.
And still, the question returns to whether Gina Rinehart herself is sufficiently worthy.
Australia is already discovering what happens when it neglects strategic infrastructure. We export energy and import the refined products required to run our civilisation. We watch a refinery fire in Geelong and discover how little redundancy remains. We watch Hormuz close and discover that Australian fuel security ultimately depends upon events thousands of kilometres away. We watch China restrict refined-product exports and discover that even friendly Asian suppliers are not guaranteed to put Australian needs first. We watch fertiliser routes tighten and discover that the oil crisis can become a food crisis. We observe an ideologically captured political caste upholding windmills and solar panels as viable alternatives.
And then, remarkably, we turn around and sneer at one of the Australians with the greatest capacity (and an inspiring historical willingness) to deploy private capital.
That is the part that should embarrass us.
If Australia continues to confuse tall poppy syndrome with social justice, it will eventually discover the difference in the only way nations usually learn such lessons: through scarcity.
When that day comes, we may discover that the people we were so eager to cut down were the very people we needed to keep standing.
That would be a particularly Australian tragedy: not that we lacked the wealth, the talent or the resources to meet the challenge, but that we became so resentful of those who possessed them that we forgot to be grateful.
Gina Rinehart, the oil crisis and the peculiar Australian habit of resenting the people we may soon need most
There is a question buried beneath the recurring controversies surrounding Gina Rinehart that is much more revealing than the controversies themselves. It isn’t whether she’s wealthy. She plainly is. It isn’t whether she’s politically aligned. She plainly is that too. The question is why, when one of Australia’s wealthiest citizens repeatedly puts substantial private money into hospitals, medical research, rural medicine, indigenous education, veterans’ housing, sport and community causes, some Australians seem determined to make the donor rather than the recipient the moral object of the story.
If the answer is that she hasn’t given enough, the record makes that difficult to sustain. If the answer is that the money itself is somehow morally tainted because of its source, or because of the political opinions of the person giving it, then we have moved beyond an argument about philanthropy. We are confronting something older and more deeply Australian: the suspicion of exceptional wealth, the instinct to cut down the tall poppy, and a newer, sinister ideological belief that private wealth is itself evidence of social injustice.
Australia is entering an age in which capital is not merely a private economic resource. Capital, engineering capacity, industrial knowledge and the willingness to make very large long-term investments are becoming matters of national resilience. The oil crisis is the most obvious demonstration.
Australia is one of the world’s great energy-exporting nations. It exports enormous quantities of coal and gas and most of its crude oil, yet it imports the overwhelming majority of the refined products upon which its economy actually runs. In 2024–25, 80.8 per cent of Australia’s refined petroleum consumption was supplied by imports, while domestic refineries imported roughly two-thirds of their own feedstock. The Parliamentary Library has likewise described Australia as heavily exposed to international fuel markets and the global shipping chokepoints through which those fuels must travel.
That’s an extraordinary strategic vulnerability for a country whose farmers, miners, truck drivers, hospitals, defence forces, airlines, manufacturers and food distributors cannot operate without diesel, petrol and aviation fuel. After decades of the major parties capitulating to the fashionable nonsense of solar panels and wind mills, successive governments have fundamentally dropped the ball in preparing Australia for a very predictable oil shock from a chronically volatile Middle East. The Government now has a four-level National Fuel Security Plan, committing billions of dollars to additional reserves, emergency supply measures and feasibility studies for new or expanded refining capacity. The flaw of the Plan is glaring — a Government overconfident about oil reserves, at the expense of domestic refineries to make that oil usable.
On the night of 15 April 2026, a major fire broke out at Viva Energy’s Geelong refinery. The fire occurred in the alkylation unit within the refinery’s gasoline complex and took more than 12 hours to extinguish. The damage temporarily reduced petrol production to approximately 60 per cent of capacity and diesel and jet fuel production to approximately 80 per cent. Viva Energy said it had sufficient stocks to maintain normal supply while repairs and inspections proceeded.
The significance of Geelong is not that Australians suddenly ran out of petrol. They did not. The significance is that a sophisticated economy can continue functioning while the resilience underneath it is quietly being consumed (until it isn’t).
Without a doubt, there is simultaneous stress across military conflict, oil production and refining, shipping, inventories, strategic reserves, fertiliser, food, inflation and the global economy. Hormuz remains severely disrupted, tanker attacks have intensified, Black Sea commercial shipping has become increasingly dangerous, Russian and Ukrainian energy infrastructure remains under attack, and governments are drawing down emergency petroleum stocks to prevent physical shortages and crippling inflation.
The extraordinary feature of the present crisis is that the world has not yet reached systemic breakdown precisely because enormous buffers are still functioning. Saudi Arabia has restored East-West pipeline flows to approximately 5.8 million barrels a day, providing an alternative route around Hormuz, and bypassing the Houthi attacks on Bab el-Mendeb Strait.
But those buffers are being consumed. The International Energy Agency has accelerated the release of emergency stocks, with approximately 100 million barrels still to be delivered from the existing 400-million-barrel emergency programme. The very need to release them on this scale is evidence of an underlying physical market under extraordinary strain.
The refined-product market is arguably more concerning than the crude market. Diesel has become particularly tight, and Asian refining margins have surged as China has restricted fuel exports beyond Hong Kong and Macau. Singapore’s gasoline imports from China have reportedly fallen by 62 per cent compared with the previous year, while Australia is among the major Asian importers exposed to reduced Chinese diesel and jet-fuel exports.
The National Fuel Security Plan declares that its minimum stockholding arrangements will “provide confidence to fuel users and government in our resilience to potential supply disruptions.” This governmental spin document fails to assess the uncomfortable reality that an energy-rich Australia can simultaneously be a fuel-insecure Australia.
And this brings us back to Gina Rinehart.
Whatever one’s opinion of her politics, it is difficult to examine the philanthropic record and conclude that she has simply accumulated wealth and refused to return anything to society. The Hancock and Rinehart Medical Foundation record includes support for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, hospitals, children’s health, cancer research, rural and remote medicine, indigenous education, scholarships, sporting organisations, veterans’ organisations and community initiatives. In 2023, the Rinehart Medical Foundation and Hancock Prospecting committed $16 million to the Royal Flying Doctor Service across Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia, including funding for aircraft and operational capability.
Her support for children’s health is equally concrete. The $5 million donation from Rinehart’s family on behalf of Hancock Prospecting was the largest single pledge in the 26-year history of the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation Gold Dinner, contributing to the Kookaburra Centre at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead. The event raised $19.2 million in total.
Her veterans’ philanthropy is on another scale altogether. In April 2026, Hancock Prospecting announced a $200 million commitment to acquire and repurpose properties as accommodation for homeless Australian veterans, following the $10 million Sir Valston Hancock House in South Perth. The latter had already provided approximately 3,500 nights of accommodation to veterans who might otherwise have slept on the streets.
The sporting contribution is similarly extensive. Rinehart and Hancock have supported Australian swimming, rowing, volleyball, artistic swimming and other sporting programmes, including direct financial rewards to athletes. The relationship with rowing and other Olympic sports has been particularly substantial, making her one of the most significant private supporters of Australian elite sport.
Then there is Indigenous education and regional development. Hancock’s Hanrine Futures programme provides scholarships, mentoring, work experience and employment pathways for indigenous students, while the broader philanthropic activities associated with Rinehart’s organisations have supported health, education and community initiatives in regional and remote Australia.
So the question becomes unavoidable.
Is the objection that Gina Rinehart has not given enough? Or is the objection that she has given it while remaining politically unpalatable to some of the people receiving it?
The Kookaburra controversy is revealing because the donor did not donate $5 million to advance a mining policy. She donated it to a children’s hospital. The Children’s Hospital itself describes the donation as part of the fundraising that made the Australian-first complex care centre possible.
Yet the political identity of the donor became part of the controversy. Her donation qualified for naming rights under the foundation’s established policy. Some doctors objected to the naming because of Rinehart’s political associations, particularly her support for One Nation.
Rinehart’s association with One Nation may well be legitimate material for political reporting. Her political donations and relationships can be scrutinised. But there is an intellectual distinction that seems increasingly difficult for parts of Australian public life to maintain: one can oppose Gina Rinehart’s politics while still recognising that $5 million given to a children’s hospital is $5 million that will help sick children.
If the political disagreement is so profound that accepting the money becomes morally embarrassing, there is an admirably simple solution.
Give the money back. Or better still, match it.
The Netball Australia episode makes the same point even more starkly. Hancock Prospecting agreed to a $15 million sponsorship, but the arrangement became embroiled in controversy after Diamonds player Donnell Wallam raised concerns about wearing the Hancock logo because of statements made 45 years ago by Gina Rinehart’s father, Lang Hancock. Hancock Prospecting ultimately withdrew the sponsorship of the Diamonds. ABC reported that the withdrawal left Netball Australia scrambling to replace a substantial source of funding, before Visit Victoria later supplied a replacement $15 million deal.
It is understandable that an indigenous athlete could be offended by Lang Hancock’s historical remarks. It is also legitimate for athletes to have views about their sponsors. But the episode raises a separate question that Australia shouldn’t be afraid to ask: when a $15 million corporate sponsorship contribution disappears because the donor’s relative was racially offensive in 1982, who exactly has won?
While many Australians condemned the galling response of the Diamonds to Gina’s generosity, any demise of the netball team pales beside the consequences of a children’s hospital potentially losing $5 million or, more broadly, the possibility that Australia’s wealthiest private investors may eventually conclude that their capital is better deployed elsewhere.
What is it exactly that generates such contempt toward the generosity of Gina Rinehart? This is where the argument about ideology begins.
Karl Marx provided one of history’s most influential frameworks for interpreting society primarily through conflict between classes and for regarding the transformation of property relations as a central political objective.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that the immediate aim of communists was the “overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy” and the “abolition of bourgeois property”. They were not advocating merely a slightly higher rate of income tax. They were proposing a fundamental transformation of the property structure of society.
They were equally explicit about revolutionary confrontation, declaring that communists sought the “forcible overthrow” of existing social conditions and concluding: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution.”
Marx’s hostility toward religion was also explicit. In his 1843 introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he described religion as “the opium of the people” and argued that the struggle against religion was indirectly a struggle against the social world of which religion was the spiritual expression.
The Australian Census provides evidence that is relevant to the wider cultural environment in which these arguments now occur. Christianity accounted for 86.2 per cent of Australians in the 1971 Census, falling to 61.1 per cent in 2011 and 43.9 per cent in 2021. At the same time, the proportion reporting no religion rose from 6.7 per cent in 1971 to 38.9 per cent in 2021.
All of this matters in contemporary Australia, because Marxism drives a framework in which inherited religious, social, gender and property structures are to be treated as manifestations of a system to be dismantled. In 2026, as we continue to witness growth of anti-Christian, wealth-despising, gender dysphoric, abortion-craving, racially motivated antisocial activists, somewhere along the line the conclusion must be drawn that the DNA of Marxism has long been transcribed into our education system, and that those infected by that DNA are systematically dismantling everything.
The historical record of communist regimes makes the romanticisation of class hatred particularly dangerous. Estimates of deaths attributable to communist governments is more than sufficient to establish that communist regimes produced deaths numbering in the tens of millions, alongside political terror, forced labour, famine, deportation and extraordinary human suffering.
That history should make Australians cautious about treating the destruction of a wealthy class as a moral achievement. And yet this is precisely where the Gina Rinehart story becomes more important than Gina Rinehart herself.
Tall poppy syndrome can be harmless when it means refusing to be impressed by arrogance. It becomes destructive when it means believing that somebody else’s success is itself an offence. The first is healthy scepticism. The second is envious spite.
Australia needs to decide which one it wants. Because the energy crisis has exposed something that ideological arguments cannot wish away. The Australian economy needs petroleum. It needs diesel to harvest food. It needs jet fuel to connect a continent. It needs petrochemicals to manufacture modern goods. It needs lubricants to keep machinery operating. It needs fertiliser inputs to maintain agricultural productivity. It needs shipping fuel, road freight and mining equipment. And it needs Australian workers in these fields, for their jobs to be protected, and for their work to receive a living wage.
This is precisely why One Nation’s current energy policy is relevant to the Rinehart story. One Nation explicitly advocates developing domestic oil and gas extraction, rebuilding local refining capacity, increasing fuel reserves and strengthening Australian fertiliser production. Its stated fuel-security policy argues that Australia cannot be genuinely self-reliant while relying upon overseas refineries and imported fuel. That is plainly consistent with why Rinehart supports the party.
It is also consistent with the strategic problem Australia is now confronting.
The country cannot simultaneously demand energy independence, domestic manufacturing, secure fertiliser, regional development and sovereign infrastructure while treating the private capital capable of financing those things as morally suspect.
Nor can Australia continuously ask wealthy Australians to give more while teaching them that every gift will become another opportunity for national humiliation.
This is the extraordinary contradiction at the centre of the Rinehart controversies. She gives $5 million to a children’s hospital, and the argument becomes whether the donor’s political affiliations make her and her money morally radioactive. She offers $15 million to Australian netball, and the argument becomes whether athletes should internationally humiliate the executive chairman of the company founded by her father.
She commits $16 million to the Flying Doctor, and an aircraft appears over regional Australia. She commits $200 million to veterans’ accommodation, and thousands of nights of safe housing become possible. She supports indigenous education and scholarships. She supports elite Australian athletes. She supports hospitals and medical research. She supports rural and remote healthcare. She supports veterans who have served the country. She supports organisations that many Australians would otherwise expect corporations, wealthy philanthropists or failing governments collectively to fund.
And still, the question returns to whether Gina Rinehart herself is sufficiently worthy.
Australia is already discovering what happens when it neglects strategic infrastructure. We export energy and import the refined products required to run our civilisation. We watch a refinery fire in Geelong and discover how little redundancy remains. We watch Hormuz close and discover that Australian fuel security ultimately depends upon events thousands of kilometres away. We watch China restrict refined-product exports and discover that even friendly Asian suppliers are not guaranteed to put Australian needs first. We watch fertiliser routes tighten and discover that the oil crisis can become a food crisis. We observe an ideologically captured political caste upholding windmills and solar panels as viable alternatives.
And then, remarkably, we turn around and sneer at one of the Australians with the greatest capacity (and an inspiring historical willingness) to deploy private capital.
That is the part that should embarrass us.
If Australia continues to confuse tall poppy syndrome with social justice, it will eventually discover the difference in the only way nations usually learn such lessons: through scarcity.
When that day comes, we may discover that the people we were so eager to cut down were the very people we needed to keep standing.
That would be a particularly Australian tragedy: not that we lacked the wealth, the talent or the resources to meet the challenge, but that we became so resentful of those who possessed them that we forgot to be grateful.