Gina Rinehart stages rich private fundraisers for Peter Dutton

Mark Di StefanoColumnist

Jul 9, 2024 – 4.14pm

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Going on seven months, we’ve been struck by the sheer (and literal) distance that Peter Dutton would travel to attend events held by Gina Rinehart. It seemed obvious that Dutton’s grovelling at the side of the country’s richest person would bear tangible fruit. Now it has.

Rinehart hosted two private political fundraisers to directly assist the opposition leader’s tilt at the government at her private homes in Queensland last month, according to an invitation for the events.

A promotional video from Hancock Prospecting shows Opposition Leader Peter Dutton with Gina Rinehart and Roy Hill CEO Gerhard Veldsman last year. Hancock Prospecting

Hancock Prospecting’s Queensland chief, David Davies, told potential invitees they were invited to a private dinner at Rinehart’s Hawthorn riverside mansion in Brisbane on the evening of June 14.

They were told that if they couldn’t make the dinner, “we are also holding a lunch on June 15th, at Mrs Rinehart’s private residence” at Sunshine Beach. Dutton was billed as the special guest at the dinner/lunch double act.

How much is a dinner with Rinehart and Dutton going for on the private market? The invite said tickets were available at a “minimum of $14,000 per person”, with “all proceeds going towards the federal election campaign (to wherever Peter nominates)”.

One political insider estimated that dinners with Anthony Albanese (that is, the prime minister) are sometimes flogged to donors for a maximum $10,000 a head. Here’s a double act charging much more (at a minimum) plus flagging to guests there are no strings attached to the money. Peter can use it on any election he wants, and we’re sure there was no novelty cheque. After all, Rinehart gave one of those to Barnaby Joyce a few years back, and he had to give it back.

It gets better. There’s even a conceit to Rinehart’s gathering of rich donors laid out in black and white.

“As you may be aware, the donations rules are to be changed around the end of June for election campaigns, limiting donations to $1000,” it said. “We are advised the trade unions will be exempt from such upper limits for their contributions.”

That’s a stretch! The government has been working for a while on electoral donation reform laws, led by Special Minister of State Don Farrell. Yes, that could mean caps on donations, and yes, that could spell trouble for billionaire-democracy-pixx takers like Clive Palmer.

But nothing has been set in stone, and certainly not by last month. To think that the AEC is so hot right now for targeting the production and dissemination of “disinformation and misinformation”.

You really hate to see when it’s manufactured to cause Rich Listers to panic.

Donation nation

The opposition leader’s recent behaviour looks like he’s made a simple calculation: that his path to the prime ministership runs through Rinehart.

It bears repeating: in November, Dutton took a private jet to sit next to Rinehart as her star guest at her neon bush doof at Roy Hill, memorialised in oils. The day before, he’d apologised for missing the Bali leg of the trip, instead sending a slavish video message. In March, he scooted to Perth to drop in to Rinehart’s 70th birthday party for 40 whole minutes. He went Canberra-Melbourne-Perth-Melbourne (with staff) in a 12-hour period even as the crucial Dunkley byelection approached. He found time to drop in on Rinehart’s Rossi boots stand at the Beef Australia expo in Rockhampton in May, to be snapped with Hancock Agriculture CEO Adam Giles. Now he’s gone to her Queensland mansions for not one but two political fundraisers held to empty her rich associates’ pockets. Even then, these are just the ones we know about!

Is it any wonder Dutton pivoted the Coalition’s policy (and political fortunes) to a pie-in-the-sky energy transition embraced warmly by his undercover patron? Rinehart believes nuclear should be part of Australia’s energy grid. She’s also certainly no dunce. Stories of her grilling recipients for an ROI on her money abound in Perth and mining circles.

All this is frankly beneath someone who will soon ask voters to make him prime minister. You can be both dismayed, and wholly unsurprised.

There may be a time when he needs to make a decision in the national interest that directly goes against Rinehart. Will he do it?