Gina Rinehart: Australia’s freedom on the line

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 businessmen 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 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 licence costs.

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.

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.

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

The above is an extract of Hancock Prospecting executive chairman Gina Rinehart AO’s 2026 keynote Bush Summit address, delivered on her behalf by Adam Giles, chief executive, Hancock Agriculture. Hancock Prospecting is the national presenting partner of the Bush Summit.