Gina Rinehart: The Untold Story of the Richest Woman in the World
By Adele Ferguson
PanMacmillan, $34.99, pp 490
ISBN 9781742610979

This massive but unauthorised biography of Gina Rinehart — daughter of Lang Hancock and the Western Australian girl now reputedly the richest woman in the world — takes a bit of digesting. Everything about it is big.

It is easy to forget that in the early 1960s iron ore exports from Western Australia to Japan were banned (the early Hancock slogan ‘Wake Up, Australia!’ was understandable). While discovering the iron ore of the Pilbara was one of Lang Hancock’s great achievements, perhaps his more significant contribution to Australia’s wealth was to get federal and state embargoes on iron ore lifted.

Adele Ferguson points out that this took years of lobbying. Given the almost unimaginably vast deposits of iron ore, such delays seem inexcusable today. But Hancock and his partner Peter Wright eventually transformed not merely Western Australia but the entire national economy.

The most striking thing about Gina Rinehart is that she did not exactly walk into a fortune and an effortless life as a rentier. By the time she inherited, her father had run the family fortune well towards bankruptcy. To rebuild the Hancock empire seems to have been an almost superhuman feat. But Gina, an only child, grew up as hard as iron ore when necessary. Michael Wright, who knew her as well as anyone, commented:

Gina has always been a strong-willed individual. As a child, she displayed a single-mindedness and sense of purpose which we found impossible to deal with. When it comes to empathy she’s indifferent. I don’t think it worries her that you get upset because of what she says or does.

Hancock had at least one colossal thing going for him: using aircraft, he had discovered the vast, fantastic extent of west Australia’s iron ore deposits, and he thought big. It has been a long time since there was a strategic vision of this magnitude in Australia, or probably anywhere else.

Just why so many of Hancock’s plans, including a scheme to blast deep-water harbours with nuclear explosives, fell afoul of the Brand-Court state government and various federal governments is not entirely clear. What is apparent is that Rinehart, without the benefit of an MBA — indeed, with relatively little formal education in business management and handicapped by the eccentricities of her father’s final years — has shown literally world-beating financial skills. In July 2005 she was able to announce her ‘greatest victory’: a $1.5 billion joint venture with Rio Tinto. Rinehart, we are told, resents being called an ‘heiress’. After all, she has built up a huge empire by her own efforts. And like her father, she has unswervingly pursued a goal of turning holes in the ground into a great deal more. The consistent Hancock vision has been of northern Australia as something much greater than just a quarry.

Further, she has not born a paper miner or bond shuffler. Certainly, it seems, a large part of the secret of her success has been unremitting attention to head-spinning detail and an equally unremitting determination for litigation when she believes she has a case. She also learned from her father a business tactic that seems remarkably effective: always go directly to the top.

The author argues that the constant goal of the Hancock family has been to own mines and mills — perhaps to transform Australia — rather than being paid per truckload of ore.

After impressive, indeed overwhelming detail regarding both Rinehart’s business and family affairs (where did it all come from?), Ferguson’s book hits a more shrill note when describing her association with various conservative figures and her purchase of an interest in Fairfax Press. There is a gushing description of meeting the Queen which seems to have strayed from the Women’s Weekly on an off day; ‘Gina, head of the House of Hancock, met Elizabeth, head of the House of Windsor.’

Rinehart’s recent association with global warming sceptics such as Professor Ian Plimer and Lord Christopher Monckton is raised in a vaguely sinister context. Federal communications minister Stephen Conroy is quoted regarding the desirability of ‘stronger laws’ to curb her influence in the media. Lord Monckton is quoted as having told an ‘intimate’ group of people in Perth — actually, it wasn’t really intimate because I was there — of the need to spend the money to set up an Australian version of Fox News to counter the widespread greenish anti-development bias in the mainstream media.

Certainly she can be expected to take on governments enamoured of mining taxes, especially anything as perverse as the Gillard government’s Mineral Resource Rent tax. However, for Rinehart to now push the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald to the ideological right (especially in a crusade against taxation on mining super-profits) would be an extremely difficult task for a lone newcomer, however shrewd, without broad media experience. A distinctive sort of willingness to take advice would also be essential. Something is made of the newspaper, the Independent, which her father and Peter Wright started in Perth. This proved short-lived, of amateurish appearance, and probably had very little influence. Obviously, however, this extraordinary story is not finished.