Hanson’s biggest risk is Rinehart
Behind the orange paint: Gina Rinehart’s billionaire giveaways expose One Nation’s fatal contradictions.
Gina Rinehart’s headline-grabbing speech at the June 2026 Townsville Bush Summit has exposed a fatal contradiction at the heart of One Nation. Fresh from championing Pauline Hanson at the National Press Club, Australia’s richest mining magnate offered free islands to Elon Musk and free land plus taxpayer-assisted relocation to Israeli defence manufacturers — moves that directly clash with One Nation’s core “Australia First”, anti-immigration, and protectionist brand.
While Hanson speaks the language of looking after ordinary Australians against foreign interests and elite overreach, her biggest donor embodies the very billionaire globalism and selective foreign favouritism that One Nation claims to oppose. The Rinehart/Hanson alliance is a glaring example of why One Nation is not a genuine voice for the downtrodden, but a vehicle increasingly captured by elite interests, Trump-style foreign policy, and moral blind spots that its own base largely rejects.
Barely had Pauline Hanson finished speaking for the “downtrodden Australian” with her familiar language of exclusion, protectionism, and hostility toward foreigners at the National Press Club, when Gina Rinehart took the stage in Townsville. Rather than addressing vital rural infrastructure or the struggles of regional workers, Rinehart instead offered up sparsely populated islands off the Australian coast — for free — to foreign tech billionaire Elon Musk to build satellite and launch facilities.
To many in the rural audience at this “bush summit,” the contrast was jarring: a self-proclaimed champion of Australian workers handing over national territory to one of the world’s richest men. But it didn’t end there.
Rinehart then doubled down, offering free land near Prairie or elsewhere around Townsville to Israeli defence specialists — complete with transport for their skilled workers, families and equipment. She urged the Israelis to settle and “develop and build their advanced war drones, and/or other advances in defence, and/or improve upon their Israeli-style domes,” so they could manufacture them in Australia and sell them back to the country for national security.
She closed her speech by telling the crowd to imitate a bulldozer sound, showing similarities to the chainsaw wielded by anarcho-libertarian Argentinean President Javier Milei, via Elon Musk. And to the sound of engines, the mining magnate invited Pauline Hanson up on stage and presented her with an orange toy bulldozer, to symbolise cutting the bureaucracy and red tape that somewhat inhibits people like her from eating the entire world (instead of most of it).
The people at the Bush Summit were present to hear about economic development, attracting major investment and issues to do with regional growth and infrastructure, and the mention of free rocket pads for Elon and a free Israeli settler colony near Pallarenda perhaps didn’t fit into the scope of the subject matter for some attendees. Speaking with the voice of someone with the disconnected confidence of a bubble wrapped billionaire nepobaby, Rinehart openly strutted about the Townsville stage like she owned the people looking at it, and took them for granted offering up her idea of an Israeli militarised settler colony and a billionaire launchpad off the coast. Echoing an ultra-Zionist position of One Nation shared more broadly.
Hanson is a devout Zionist. She herself has repeatedly criticised the Albanese Labor government for insufficient support of Israel, claiming it is “quite evident” that Labor “does not support the Israel people” due to electoral concerns in Muslim-heavy seats. She has strongly advocated for the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, condemned pro-Palestinian protests as “un-Australian,” and called for stronger action against antisemitism in Australia. She has also championed Israel’s support for Israel’s actions following the October 7, 2023 (which a large majority of Australians oppose) whilst criticising calls for ceasefires that she views as weakening Israel’s position. Hanson is one of the most Zionist politicians in the country, and Rinehart’s position shared on the Townsville stage, was only validated by Hanson’s ascension at the the end of the spiel to the sound of bulldozers.
Gina represents the overfed elites of Australia, who have not felt the need to exude nuance or grace to hold their positions. Unlike the swagger of US and European mega rich, the Australian billionaire class lacks the preparedness and sheen of their friends abroad. While some of the more publicly curated billionaires like Zuckerberg, Gates and Bezos attempt to hide the diabolical nature of their wealth generation, rehearsing an outward facing figure that eludes some humanity and reasonableness — the rich in Australia are lavish and obscene.
Clive Palmer and Gina Rinehart embody the Australian legacy billionaire. Over-encumbered in body, mind and soul — disconnected from the reality of Australians, brutally callous in the way they communicate their will to exert their power, and awfully assumptive of the people in this country. There isn’t much love or fandom for a Rinehart, no billionaire mystique that can be adored by a bunch of tech bros, or a rags to riches story that can endear, just barrels of money and strongarmed publicity from a woman who for some reason still can’t look presentable with the combined wealth of several developing nations. The Hanson/Rinehart alliance is the new national benchmark of money and politics. Only more concentrated, and potentially more consequential.
At a time when US President Donald Trump remains deeply polarising — reviled by many on the left and some of his own base — Gina Rinehart has spent more time swanning around the Mar-a-Lago social scene than most Australian billionaires could dream of. Whether at her Palm Beach mansion or Trump’s events, she stands out as one of Australia’s most prominent champions of Trump-style politics. It was Trump-style optics that tainted the backend of the Morrison government, Trump-style politics that helped deliver the Coalition’s disastrous 2025 election collapse under Peter Dutton, and it is the same Trump-style mania, bankrolled by Rinehart, that now drives One Nation’s ambitions and will likely shape its fortunes heading into 2028.
Many of those favouring One Nation don’t know the party from a bar of soap. And as it grows into a bigger political force, it faces real scrutiny. Most of its new support comes from protest voters — people sick of housing costs, childcare struggles, immigration chaos, and cost-of-living pain. But they aren’t signing up for what lies just under the fresh orange paint, or what comes out of Gina Rinehart’s mouth.
Aside from the money from billionaires who don’t give a fuck about marginalised Australians, One Nation claims to be tough on crime when its senior strategist and campaign director Sean Black is a convicted rapist who has seen prison, its SA candidate Aoi Baxter is wanted in the UK for failing to attend court for inappropriate touching, fellow SA Candidate Bruce Preece has a record of domestic violence, and another candidate Adrian Deeth has breached a family violence order fifteen times. From a lack of a cogent policy platform, and self-admitted small party problems impacting its big party ambitions, to unelectable and anti-social candidates, and a loudmouth billionaire with hugely unpopular takes; the party is set to wiggle under a microscope.
To take government, One Nation needs to fill around 70 federal seats with decent candidates. Even to hold the balance of power, it needs far fewer — but the quality (and criminality) of the people they’re pre-selecting barely get a mention. But people talk. The increasingly redundant media is too busy pumping up Hanson’s wheels to ask the obvious questions, while social media is figuring things out for themselves.
It is what lies beyond the protest vote that One Nation needs to realise. The friends it has made along the way, and the people it chooses to associate with, will ultimately determine its future in this country. The Rinehart/Hanson marriage acts as one of the reminders of why One Nation is a disingenuous political entity, born and motivated on the fuel of opportunism rather than the building blocks of pragmatism, and together they stand increasingly separate to the grievances they claim to understand and exploit to create division.
Gina Rinehart’s “free land for Israelis and islands for Musk” moment was more than a classic Gina whimsical speech, it has provided a revealing glimpse behind One Nation’s orange facade. Supporters drawn to Hanson’s rhetoric of protecting everyday Australians are increasingly discovering that the party’s biggest financial backer represents everything they claim to fight: unaccountable billionaire influence, foreign giveaways, and ultra-Zionist foreign policy at odds with mainstream Australian opinion.
As One Nation grows, the protest vote that fuels it will face harder scrutiny. The party cannot rail against foreign elites, crime, and broken trust while platforming a convicted rapist strategist, candidates with domestic violence records, policies of sovereign acquiescence, and a donor who treats sovereign Australian land as gifts for overseas billionaires and Israeli settler defence industries. Rinehart now has done the party a service by making the contradiction impossible to ignore, by reminding the electorate what the party is built on. One Nation’s future will not be decided by how loudly it attacks the major parties, but by whether voters decide its anti-establishment image is real — or just expensive orange paint over the same old elite capture.
A co-opted cluster of illogical contradictions. But saleable, apparently. Sadly. Your analysis, as always, is lasered.
Excellent article again, thank you, Joel! I really do hope that people will see PHON clearly as a party that will do absolutely nothing for them.