The actual headline in The Australian Financial Review was
“Send miners to parliament and students to work, Gina Rinehart says”
Now, I can’t help but feel that even they found Gina Rinehart’s speech a little over the top, but it is hard to tell. Anyway, Ms Rinehart did have some pearls of wisdom in her sermon.
Apparently, “Platitudes and press releases move precisely zero tonnes of iron, copper, nickel, rare earths or any other mineral.” An observation that I found less than educational because I already knew that moving such things requires heavy machinery. However, as Gina was talking to a bunch of mining executives, it makes me wonder how out of touch they are.
Speaking of out of touch, did you happen to catch the transcript of Reserve Bank Governor, Michele Bullock’s, latest pearls of wisdom. Inflation is apparently now “domestically driven” and it’s the service industry that’s particularly showing this. To quote the RBA Governor directly:
“Hairdressers and dentists, dining out, sporting and other recreational activities – the prices of all these services are rising strongly…”
She went on to suggest that it was easier for businesses to raise prices rather than increase output. Call me economically ignorant but I fail to see how an interest rate rise will encourage dentists to pull more teeth or hairdressers to take more off the top.
Still, if people have no spare money, they may just decide not to dine out or get their teeth fixed. In the latter case, this may lead to them working less efficiently and losing their job. This would go some way of achieving Bullock’s aim of increasing unemployment to the sort of levels that would discourage workers from seeking pay rises that almost keep pace with inflation and stop them going out to dinner, going to sporting or other recreational activities, leading in turn to more lay-offs and more unemployment. While that seems like a shame, as the RBA head told us, she only has the blunt instrument of interest rate rises and she’s got to think of what’s good for us collectively…
Just like Gina who understands that getting rid of ridiculous red tape that stop people mining wherever they damn well please without having to check whether there’s some reason not to:
“Now I’m suggesting something in addition, encourage and support people from our industry, to put themselves up for parliament. We need strong people in government, not afraid to stand up for common sense, and for mining.”
She urged her audience to spend fifteen minutes a day advocating for mining. I think she could have added that they should also spend a further fifteen minutes praying to the god of production asking him to remove all obstacles to production such as politicians that she doesn’t own and laws that she doesn’t like.
Anyway, she went on to praise Peter Dutton as an outstanding leader, which is odd because all I remember him leading is the failed coup against Turnbull that led to Scott Morrison being elected Liberal leader and the current opposition. (Speaking of Peter Dutton I noticed that he recently argued that, unlike our current PM, Scott Morrison didn’t go overseas when he was needed here… Given that Scotty secretly snuck off to Hawaii during those bushfires, it does tend to suggest that Peter Dutton thinks that Scott Morrison was never needed here… or anywhere!)
She also attacked today’s youth for being work-shy.
“Too often today, youngsters who’ve been to uni don’t want to do work they think is below them, and want to jump into senior roles for instant success skipping the hard metres, perhaps with the feeling that their private education or time at uni means they should pick and choose what work they do. I think part of my success was, despite a private education and, with what was required back then, high enough marks to get into uni that this didn’t give me such an attitude.”
Now I’m sure that a part of Gina Rinehart’s success was having the right attitude. I mean plenty of people who inherit millions from their father and a trust fund worth billions don’t go on to become the richest woman in Australia. And it takes a lot of work to make sure all those politicians kiss your ring… I was going to say something about Gina working her way up from the bottom but maybe it’s the other way round.
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