ICB. Gina Rinehart – the world’s biggest troll?

chubby chaser says:

01:50pm | 06/09/12

XXOS?

Pedro says:

03:12pm | 06/09/12

I for one look forward to the mining bubble bursting. Who else is sick to the gills that the media has to report every bleat from bloated Clive, oxymoronic Twiggy (the man is FAT), neolithic nathan tinkler and I inherited free rights to dig minerals out of WA Gina???
Come on mainstream media - just because these fat fools talk some crap does not mean we the readers want to hear about it??? When they say something of relevance instead of conservative far right wing lunacy, then maybe tell us. Perhaps how they wish to give the marginalised a better go, reduce hospital waiting lists or reduce state government dependency on pokie revenue?? Until then, maybe Gina et al should do some exercise and get their snouts out of the trough.
I feel better now.

Nigel says:

05:09pm | 06/09/12

Pedro, you know when it bursts the governement only have you to tax to death. Hope you are ready for more and more taxes buddy….

colin says:

03:33pm | 06/09/12

@Baloo 01:14pm | 06/09/12

“Calling people a troll just because you disagree with them is, frankly, bullshit” “Agreed and some people on this website need to learn this.”

Tell me about it…

Borderer says:

04:29pm | 06/09/12

colin,
You’re trolling when you bung on the snobbery, don’t pretend you’re not.

Matt says:

01:44pm | 06/09/12

You’re a dead dingo’s kidney then.  The last bit is the key “...with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument.”  Just because Gina’s comments have caused arguments etc, does not make her a troll.. The defining factor is to do it for that sole purpose of causing disruption.  In this case, she made those comments to make her point.. Not to s**t stir, which is what a true troll does. 

LEARN2INTERNETS

marley says:

01:51pm | 06/09/12

I finally got around to listening to her entire speech - and most of it was actually pretty sane, pointing out things we all know - declining productivity, red tape, crap infrastructure, all as disincentives to investment.  People might argue her take on these and a few other points she raised (carbon tax, mining tax, 457 visas, skill shortages, etc) but it was all pretty standard stuff you’d get from any big investor/capitalist/miner. 

Where she went astray was with her nonsensical comment about Africans - I suspect, like both Rudd and Gillard, she’s a bit tone deaf when it comes to people’s likely reactions.  Those couple of sentences obscured the main thrust of her argument and earned her a deserved bollocking.

But, that said, I think that some of the criticisms are more in the nature of trolling than Gina’s actual comments were.  Her main point wasn’t about wages, so why is that the impression her critics give?

Markus says:

02:14pm | 06/09/12

If the statement that working in Australia is a bureaucratic nightmare when it comes to areas like taxation and OH&S (among others) is considered deliberately provocative, 90% of the nation’s population falls into your definition of Troll.

Mahhrat says:

03:27pm | 06/09/12

Are you seriously going to tell me that a woman smart enough to achieve all she had would suddenly get stupid enough to accidentally compare Africa to us in the crassless way she did?

Am I focussing on one thing to the exclusion of her argument?  Yes, I am.  Why do I do that?  Because Gina has tremendous power and influence.  With that comes great responsibility.

If you accept she wasn’t trolling with that comment - that the whole thing simply wasn’t her stroking her own ego and throwing that out there so we’d listen to the rest of her “oh, it’s actually not that bad” series of arguments - then she is grossly incompetent.

I’m sorry, but I don’t accept that.

She’s in the same boat as Don Trump, Paris Hilton et al - they all hold very carefully constructed personas.  She deliberately goes over the line so she can withdraw a little bit later and say, “Yeah, oops, see I am human after all.”

The act is deliberate, the words designed to get us to listen to her and cause controversy - probably to cover up for the fact that she really isn’t the altruistic answer to all of Australia’s (largely non-existent, at least financially) problems.

Babylon says:

03:31pm | 06/09/12

Talking about wages makes it an attack on the Australian people and their standard of living. So it’s good Leftie tactics to concentrate and extrapolate this out of context.

We cannot deny that Australian resources are expensive. Remember the Qantas job losses, we learned than an Australian based pilot was paid 50 percent more than a Malaysian one.

Problem is the high cost of living needs a high wage to survive. Experts tell us that the Governments $100 million per day borrowing is partly responsible for our soaring dollar.

I do not believe that the 457 visa intakes are to fill skill shortages. This is purely cheap resourcing. I know, I’ve indulged myself.

Remember, it’s Government policy that the 457 visa exists and it is the Government that awards the visa, not Gina. In Melbourne alone, last year we handed 13,000 jobs to overseas people on a 457. You’ll remember Combet stating recently that since the advent of the carbon tax, 14,000 jobs had been created in Australia.

Personally, I cannot fathom the Left’s hatred of our rich and in particular those Australians in the Mining Industry. With their war of words and taxes, the Government seems to have achieved one thing, the end of our precious Mining boom. Projects around the 50 mill mark are being canned and a team of consultants is now in BHP to cut costs. Job loss announcements pending.

Babylon says:

07:38pm | 06/09/12

I’ve heard 800 People market out the door at Fortescue Metals this week .... carbon tax and MRRT.

Babylon says:

07:39pm | 06/09/12

marched

meh says:

03:28pm | 06/09/12

There is no doubt she is a hard worker, but anyone who starts with one of the worlds biggest iorn ore deposits, a $9 billion dollar mine, before the start of the mining boom and doesn’t come out looking good, well imagine the stories how how much she blew would have been like.

RobJ says:

03:34pm | 06/09/12

Right place at the right time.

She inherited a large fortune ($75 Million) which has increased massively during a once in a generation mining boom.

On the other hand, how are her investments in Channel Ten and Fairfax looking.

JoniM says:

01:59pm | 06/09/12

Yep !
But she is a rich, fat chick who votes conservative, and she has more than me, so we can say whatever we want about her even if its not true!
Probably another case where the left would think gender politics is OK ?

dovif says:

02:12pm | 06/09/12

The biased media and the people who stuff up budget will always try to discredit people by not attacking the message but by attacking the messenger and nit picking

For example, Wayne Swann seems to think because she is right therefore she is not entitled to a view.

Mik says:

02:17pm | 06/09/12

Reading Martin Ferguson’s comments shows that he understands just how vulnerable Ausralia’s hold on the resource sector is. South Africa has vast resources and much of Africa’s hasn’t even been detailed yet.Indeed there are currently intensive Chinese and lndian exploration companies pouring in- some using Australian expertise. They are also being sort in central and far north west Asia.
Gina is correct to point out that labour and development costs could lure current investors away so Australia has to value add in some other way . Secirity is one but life is cheap in many parts of the world so more has to be added. It is also important that there is not a dependence only on one sector.

Shane From Melbourne says:

02:37pm | 06/09/12

Meh, Sir Otto Niemeyer said the same thing in 1930. History always repeats itself (although not exactly in the same forms). As long as the financiers get paid and the serfs don’t revolt, everything is ok. (depending upon Greece and the Eurozone)

Over here in Pilbara country says:

05:02pm | 06/09/12

Anubis, have you actually listened to Miss Breathless over the last couple of weeks, let alone the last 30 odd years ? it just goes to show that you can roll any character out in front of the camera and there will always be some people that take it seriously.

And on the economy, how come these Wizards of Industry only turn up when the commodity price drops to deliver a few pearls of wisdom on how we’ve been doing wrong all this time. Let the miners exploit the third world for a while if things are so tough here. Let them retreat to their compounds at night to be protected from the $2/day population that’s having their wealth stolen. This BS about “a good environment for business” in Africa is code for dealing with corrupt officials and leaving nothing behind that benefits the community or country. Do you think our reserves will go bad in the ground, a slow down could be a good thing, we might get some of the workers back into the industries they left chasing the almighty dollar. And when the third world achieve good governance and chase the pillagers away with real world rates we can stoke the fires up again.

This crap “boom” mentality, is bad for the community. It ramps up traffic and logistics the state struggles to cope with over the huge distances involved, the Premier goes into Dictator mode and then eventually paralysed with looming elections. I won’t even mention the state debt, how did that happen in the “boom”..... maybe I should ask Queensland.

Wayne Swan (just for today) says:

05:37pm | 06/09/12

Well said AdamC!

Thank you Gina for all you do for Australia. We are counting on you to bring us in to surplus. Your tax bill runs in to the billions.

Signed, Wayne Swan.

colin says:

03:36pm | 06/09/12

@Michael S 01:46pm | 06/09/12

“A troll is someone who deliberately tries to provoke outrage and cause disruption and argument…”

No, from what I have seen on here is calling someone a “Troll” is reserved for anyone who says something that one or more posters don’t see as valid in their (very narrow) worldview…

St. Michael says:

04:41pm | 06/09/12

Now, now, colin.  No need to describe yourself.

Little Joe says:

05:10pm | 06/09/12

Queensland Debt is $65B

Bear says:

06:04pm | 06/09/12

Amazingly, households mostly live on debt without implosion!

bananabender says:

03:54pm | 06/09/12

“She pretty much made the biggest amount of anyone in the world last financial year, with almost all of it coming from Australian investment.”

Completely wrong. Hancock Prospecting had revenue (not profits) of less than $820 million last financial year.

Most of Gina’s wealth is purely hypothetical and is based on totally unrealistic future earnings. The fact is that iron prices are falling and her income will plummet in the near future.

As they say in Texas she’s all hat and no cattle.

expat says:

04:21pm | 06/09/12

Cobbler, West Africa would be where she is referring to, where BHP, Rio Tinto and a large number of smaller miners such as Anglo American already have iron ore operations. Watch this space, but the money that BHP was going to invest into Australian op’s will be repackaged over the next 12 months in large scale west african projects.

West Africa in general has been unstable for the best part of the last few centuries however that is changing. Countries that were mostly dictatorships in the last 20 years are now democratic and eager for foreign investment. Gina’s comments are fair, the cost of doing business in Australia, from wages to red/green tape are simply too high to sustain.

Look at the big picture, Australia no longer has the monopoly on large scale ore deposits, its time to become competitive.

marley says:

04:14pm | 06/09/12

Maybe that’s why most of her speech was about Australia’s poor infrastructure, over-regulation, and declining productivity, and not about wages.

Lauren Bunker says:

04:45pm | 06/09/12

” It is quite easy to poke fun at her and it does seem that she puts in effort to appear as unlikable as possible.”

At the moment it looks like she spends her days actively jogging on the spot looking for ways to seem unlikable.  Unfortunately for her all that comes out of her mouth alternating putting down Australia and its people and whining because people don’t pity her with her fortune that she might have to pay at least minimum wage and she’s not allowed to create slavery.
Unfortunately the tone of her messages makes me think of a giant 5 year old chucking a hissy fit that she cant have ALL the lollies in the jar.

Yak says:

05:35pm | 06/09/12

Good post Andrew.

I may have taken this track before, but, the Mining Industry had been around for quite a few years before the Iron Ore and Coal Boom and I feel it will be around after the Boom is over. I certainly hope so as has been our families main form of income for the last 30 years. The world has always needed our copper, zinc, nickel, mineral sands, gold,et al, and will require said minerals into the future.

Australia will not collapse due to a restriction on the amount of Iron Ore China requires. Mr. Campbell has sacked more people in the last few months than would be employed in the whole Iron Ore sector; this is a vague assumption on my behalf but it would be about right.