Rinehart seeks $55m for huge grazing station to chase Wagyu strategy
13 November 2026
Originally published by Nick Lenaghan and Tom Rabe of The Australian Financial Review
Billionaire Gina Rinehart and her Chinese co-investor are selling a vast Queensland grazing property from the famed S. Kidman & Co portfolio that could fetch more than $55 million as they focus their investment effort on upmarket beef production.
The 623,000-hectare Morney Plains Station, spread across three titles, is in Queensland’s southwest near the South Australian border in an area known as the Channel Country.
It is the second Queensland cattle station that Rinehart, the majority owner of S. Kidman & Co, has put on the market this year, after selling the Rockybank aggregation to local farmers for about $60 million in June.
But the business rationale driving the divestment of each Queensland station is different.
China’s Shanghai Cred is the minority owner in S. Kidman & Co and because of that Rockybank is subject to the Queensland’s foreign land tax surcharge of 3 per cent, an impost that has drawn the ire of property investors in the state, including Rinehart.
By contrast, Morney Plains is held on a pastoral lease and does not attract the tax surcharge, which only applies to freehold land.
Nevertheless, it has been put up for grabs as the mining and agriculture magnate reshapes her vast rural holdings to focus on higher-value beef production.
At Morney Plains, about 230 kilometres east of Birdsville, the 15,000-head herd is mostly Santa Gertrudis, a breed developed to thrive in hot and harsh conditions. Wagyu bulls have also been introduced on the station more recently. Elders Real Estate’s Tom Russo has been appointed to handle the Queensland station in an off-market process.
Increasingly, the focus of S. Kidman & Co has been on higher-yielding beef such as the Angus-Wagyu cattle that are run on Jindabyne Station in NSW, which the joint enterprise bought last year for $36 million. Another recent purchase in NSW’s New England region by S. Kidmam & Co is the $70 million Wirribilla station.
“An opportunity has come up, and we’re seeking to repurpose some of our capital with different investments within agriculture to better diversify our approach,” said Adam Giles, the former Northern Territory chief minister who has run Rinehart’s Hancock Agriculture and S. Kidman & Co for almost a decade.
The S. Kidman & Co portfolio was bought by Rinehart’s Hancock Agriculture for $386.5 million in 2016 with backing from Chinese property tycoon Gui Guojie’s Shanghai CRED.
Rinehart, who tops the Financial Review Rich List with a fortune of $39 billion, has sold off portions of the portfolio as part of Wagyu strategy.
As part of that, three years ago about $200 million of S. Kidman & Co cattle stations – more than 2.4 million hectares of Queensland and Northern Territory grazing country – was divested.
But Rinehart’s agricultural interests extend well beyond beef production. For example, in the south-west corner of Western Australia, the billionaire has planted about 20,000 oak and hazel trees as hosts for truffles.
