Tracing Gina Rinehart’s relationship with One Nation

Gina Rinehart’s staff won’t say if she has ever stayed with Keith Pitt at his official residence in Rome. They will confirm that she visited the Australian ambassador to the Holy See last year, at her own expense, and helped put together his birthday party because his chef was away.

Earlier this month, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson visited Pitt in Rome, after holidaying with Rinehart at the Grand Hotel San Pietro in Taormina. In Coalition circles, a story is circulating that Rinehart also visited and stayed with Pitt at his taxpayer-funded residence – although her team is adamant that did not happen on this occasion.

The story is telling for the way it articulates the shift in loyalties between Rinehart and the Coalition – and the willingness to share unflattering accounts of this. Hanson insists taxpayers did not cover her travel, although the details will not be revealed until she updates the Register of Senators’ Interests.

“Australians would be far better served by scrutiny of how taxpayer funds are spent across government than by attempted criticism of an Australian who has contributed tens of billions of dollars in taxes and invested billions more into the nation’s economy,” a spokesperson for Hancock Prospecting said in a long statement.

“For example, just this week it was revealed that the climate change department will charge Aussie taxpayers $4.2 million to put up foreign bureaucrats at luxury hotels in Fiji for a pre-meeting ahead of the COP31 gabfest. What a waste of taxpayer money!

“Mrs Rinehart is one of the nation’s largest private taxpayers, contributing $2.6 billion in total taxes in FY2025 alone, with nearly $15 billion paid over the last four years and nearly $23 billion over the past decade.

“These many billions in taxes contributed by Mrs Rinehart help fund essential services including police, firefighters, nurses, healthcare, pensions, roads, Defence and infrastructure, as well as government grants through which The Saturday Paper has received hundreds of thousands of dollars!

“Mrs Rinehart did not visit the residence of the Ambassador to the Holy See this year. Last year she was invited to her long-term friend Keith Pitt’s birthday, and flew over to Rome at her own expense, especially for this. As the ambassador’s chef was away, she helped to shop for, prepare the meal for and clean up after the birthday dinner.”

Pitt, a former minister for resources and water, is one of only a handful of National Party figures with whom Rinehart is known to be friends. The others are current Nationals leader Matt Canavan and One Nation defector Barnaby Joyce.

The Saturday Paper contacted the ambassador, who deferred to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. DFAT declined to comment. The Saturday Paper also contacted Pauline Hanson, but she did not respond. It is a longstanding practice that diplomats are encouraged to use their taxpayer-funded residences for official representation.

It is not simple to place the start of Rinehart’s friendship with Hanson, which this year saw the billionaire donate a $1.5 million Cirrus G7 plane to Hanson.

Links to One Nation go back more than a decade, but in interviews Hanson says she and Rinehart have only become close more recently.

“Gina has become a friend of mine, right? We’re of the same age, we grew up in the same era,” the One Nation leader told The Nightly website this week. “We both think very much alike.”

Since returning from their European holiday, she has made several attempts to paint Rinehart as an ordinary Australian.

“This is a woman that’s done it tough, and I don’t know if you know her story. I suggest you go and read it and understand it,” Hanson told a Perth business audience on Tuesday.

“You think that she’s come with a silver spoon? She didn’t. She had to borrow everything and was flat out in the very start to pay the bills.”

Michael Yabsley, a former NSW Liberal minister and major party fundraiser, worked for Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting from 1977 until 1998. Assessing Rinehart’s shift to One Nation, he says the billionaire has been perpetually disappointed in his party.

“She’s never been a great fan of the Liberal Party. She’s always considered the Liberal Party to be wet and wishy-washy, and that was certainly evident during the time that I was closely involved with her,” Yabsley tells The Saturday Paper.

“Her only real political hero during that era in Australia was Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Her real political hero at the moment is, not surprisingly, Donald Trump.

“She loves the company of people who are rusted-on political conservatives and is very intolerant of those who are not rusted on but are sort of occasional political conservatives.”

Yabsley believes Rinehart’s interest in Hanson is more about an arrangement of convenience.

“I think this is … What’s the female equivalent of a bromance? Whatever it might be called. Yeah, it has certainly blossomed.”

Some sources trace the friendship to 2022, when Rinehart started buying beachfront properties at Sunshine Beach, south of Noosa Heads. She bought four properties at a cost of more than $76 million. According to Coalition sources, Hanson became a visitor.

“I think this is … What’s the female equivalent of a bromance? Whatever it might be called. Yeah, it has certainly blossomed.”

“I’ve heard of Pauline at Gina’s for years. Gina’s got this place at Sunshine Beach, and they use it as a bit of a base to have functions and try and recruit people and have strategy meetings and all of these sorts of things,” one MP tells The Saturday Paper.

“So, the relationship was very strong before Barnaby went over.”

Political connections between Hanson and Rinehart go back to at least 2010, when Rinehart hired a former One Nation adviser for her staff. John McRobert advised One Nation for the 1998 election on a “revolutionary” Easytax plan to replace all taxes, including the GST, with a 2 per cent flat tax on all property, goods, income and services transactions. After strong criticism in 1998 and again in 2017, Easytax is not found on One Nation’s policy page.

McRobert later became a founding director of Rinehart’s lobby group, Australians for Northern Development and Vision, assisting her long-term aim for a “special economic zone” in northern Australia. McRobert wants to shore up and increase the capacity of the port system in North Queensland as, he told The Saturday Paper, “we need outlets for the enormous wealth that we’ve got there”.

A friend of controversial One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts, McRobert has been writing an authorised biography of Rinehart, but he says the project is currently on hold.

“How can you write a story about someone who makes news every day?” he tells The Saturday Paper. “It’s a never-ending story, how do you finish it?”

Despite being underwhelmed by the Liberal Party, Rinehart dealt with the Coalition government in power, employing former Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella in a senior government and media relations role from 2016 until 2020.

She also hired former Country Liberal Party Northern Territory chief minister Adam Giles in 2017. Australia’s first Indigenous head of government is now the chief executive of Hancock Agriculture and S. Kidman & Co and is a firm One Nation backer through a car and a $500,000 donation that came with other big cheques on the same day as the new plane. Giles is being eyed for a return to politics as a One Nation candidate, but he has so far rebuffed efforts.

More recently on the payroll was former federal Liberal vice-president Teena McQueen. The prominent figure and Sky News commentator who died in June, a month after defecting to One Nation, was described in the media as “Gina Rinehart’s right-hand woman”. She had joined Hancock Prospecting in 2022 but left a year ago.

Perhaps Rinehart’s oldest relationship with the Coalition is now also her deepest relationship in One Nation: Barnaby Joyce.

Rinehart’s friendship with Joyce came into sharp focus in 2012, when it was revealed that he and the late Liberal MP Alby Schultz wrote to Rinehart’s children a year earlier in an effort to resolve their bitter family trust dispute. In 2017, Joyce also accepted and then declined a $40,000 cheque awarded to him by Rinehart for being a “Champion of Agriculture”.

The former Nationals leader has previously told The Saturday Paper he is proud of their friendship and her One Nation funding.

“She’s a friend. I don’t hide my friends under rocks. That’s number one,” Joyce said. “Number two, obviously, she’s not a goose. She’s the wealthiest person in Australia and one of the wealthiest women in the world, and she would only send money in the direction of someone she thought was cogent and worth the investment. She wouldn’t waste money and just throw it out the door mindlessly.”

One Coalition source says Joyce was “something of gatekeeper” between Rinehart’s wealth and the Coalition, while another said there were “others in the Coalition every bit as effective at facilitating some engagement with Gina”.

Such was Rinehart’s pull that then opposition leader Peter Dutton made a remarkable dash to Perth for her 70th birthday celebrations in late February 2024. Dutton was barely on the ground in the Western Australian capital for a few hours before he had to get back to Melbourne for the Dunkley byelection campaign.

Hanson was also at Rinehart’s 70th birthday and billed taxpayers for her flights. The parliamentary expenses authority cleared the travel, accepting Hanson’s claim that at the party she “engaged with key stakeholders and industry representatives to discuss matters relevant to upcoming legislation and issues of importance to her electorate”.

In early January 2025, Rinehart was seen having lunch with Hanson and McQueen in Thailand, just as Anthony Albanese and then Liberal leader Dutton were kicking off their unofficial election campaigns in Australia. A few months earlier, Rinehart and McQueen spent the United States election night at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, seated next to Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.

In late October 2025, Rinehart flew Hanson and Hanson’s chief of staff, James Ashby, to Florida on her private jet. Hanson stayed at Rinehart’s $100 million Palm Beach mansion and both attended Trump’s Great Gatsby-themed Halloween Party, where Rinehart was photographed with the US president. During the trip, Hanson addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Months earlier, Rinehart’s relationship with Dutton had started to sour. The Coalition’s gas reservation policy, announced with little detail in Dutton’s budget reply speech in late March 2025, was a big problem for Rinehart. She spoke of her continuing “respect for Peter Dutton, his character and integrity” irrespective of “our various differences at times”.

Hancock Energy’s website started posting news articles critical of the gas policy and a Nationals source tells The Saturday Paper this week that Rinehart was “pretty upset” and she and Dutton “had words”.

It was around February and March 2025 that a significant increase in funding and membership was noticed for One Nation in regional areas. The full details of this, and whether Rinehart was a significant donor, will not be revealed until the end of this year – in line with political donation laws.

As The Saturday Paper reported earlier this month, federal Labor MPs such as Kristy McBain experienced aggressive bot-like activity in their social media posts and feeds in the lead-up to the 2025 election. The activity has returned this year with the rise of One Nation in the polls.

Hanson admits she takes policy advice from Rinehart, pointing to the One Nation policy on pensioners being able to work unlimited hours without losing their pension or healthcare card.

“I listen to anyone who brings good policy to me,” she told ABC Radio Perth in June.

Rinehart is backing what she thinks is a winner, according to Australian National University political scientist and lecturer Jill Sheppard.

“What’s the chicken and what’s the egg?” she asks. “Has Gina Rinehart put money into Pauline Hanson and One Nation, and that has spurred this recent rapid increase in support? That kind of implies that voters are easily led by money, and Clive Palmer has shown us over many elections that that’s not necessarily the case.

“The egg scenario here is that Gina Rinehart has seen which way the wind is blowing, seen these declines in support, not just for the Coalition but for both major parties, and that there is an appetite for a third force, and one that comes from the right, not from the left.

“And if that’s the case, then she’s chosen very well,” Sheppard tells The Saturday Paper. She’s right in the crest of a wave. And even though Pauline Hanson probably won’t become the next prime minister, she looks like she has backed a winner.”

Michael Yabsley says he can’t see the Rinehart–Hanson relationship lasting indefinitely, but he can see what Rinehart is currently enjoying.

“I think what has happened in particular is Barnaby’s defection to One Nation but also the Farrer byelection,” he says.

“I don’t think Gina is someone to just persist for the sake of persisting if there are no apparent outcomes there, and in politics, the outcomes that matter are winning seats. And whilst One Nation is still a huge distance from making an impact on lower house seats, the signs are that that may well be happening, so I think that would be enough to get Gina excited.”