Michael Bradley
26 thoughts I had watching Gina Rinehart’s National Mining Day conference

For those of you not in mining inner circles (and I assume that means anyone outside the Liberal and National parties) some time back in 2013, Peter Dutton’s legally registered owner Gina Rinehart founded – wait for it – National Mining And Related Industries Day. Never heard of it? Don’t worry, I’d never heard of anal warts until a few years ago either.
And because she knows you’ve never heard of it, Queen Gina Of The Iron Ore Deposits And Arch Enemy Of Rose Hancock’s Lawyers, recorded her day of celebrating planet destroying emissions, and then uploaded it to the intertubes so we could all point and laugh at Pauline Hanson on a dance floor with Tina Whatshername and a man in a Crocodile Dundee hat. I’m watching on my laptop at two in the morning which helps the unfolding scene seem more like a nocturnal hallucination that anything that actually happened.
And we’re away:
1/ We start our video with the sort of royalty-free music they play through the speakers when your flight’s delayed and I’m immediately concerned that Gina can’t afford to pay the copyright fees on some decent background tunes and her staff are trawling YouTube for freebies.
2/ OH GOD. I think that’s Rita Panahi. My Sky News avoiding heart wasn’t ready for that in the early hours.
3/ The screen is filled with people wearing servo-station sunglasses and long pink skirts with Blundstone boots and I don’t know what’s going on, but something tells me this isn’t a fashion industry conference and we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
4/ Everybody’s now piling out of a chartered aircraft onto the Santos gas fields airstrip. The crowd vibe is a little bar-fighty, and now they’re holding signs up and dancing as a giant gas flame burns-baby-burns behind them. They dance like people who’ve been drinking for hours under the hot global-warming sun, and they haven’t even entered the conference tent yet. This is not good.
5/ One of the sign-holding men is wearing jorts with calf tats and I don’t know if he’s the kind of bloke Gina would let sit at her table, but his sign says Killing The Golden Goose and it has a picture of plane-cum-goose creature painted on it that’s dying, so no, he’s definitely not sitting with Gina.
6/ Suddenly we’re in the conference tent and a man with a strong South African accent who looks like the kind of guy who’d wear a piano-key necktie, is up on stage telling us that he’s our MC and yelling that he HAS A HAT and that we may be in gas country but ‘WE’RE BIG ON MINING AND WE’RE BIG ON RESOURCES, SO WELCOME EVERYBODY!”
7/ Somebody needs to tell Hat Man the microphone is working and the whole point of a microphone is that it amplifies your voice for you, because he’s SCREAMING ABOUT MINING AGAIN. They might be big on mining and ripping the earth’s resources out in these parts but not that big on basic tech.
8/ Hat Man tells us that his event is sponsored by every major emissions producing corporation in the western world (well, not in so many words) and that the chief sponsor will thrill us all now with her keynote speech, MRS GINA RINEHART!!
9/ The camera pans to the crowd who all look like people who’ve just been told the dentist wants to give them one more root canal.
10/ Hooray. At last, it’s our host Queen Gina Rinehart who very happily, has come dressed as 80’s Greek pop icon Demis Roussos. Gina does a faux catwalk walk, while Tina Turner’s “You’re simply the best” plays her on. Gina spins to show the crowd a sign on her back that reads Dig Baby Dig in bright red letters, and I genuinely do think I’m hallucinating.

11/ Gina stops twirling and leans into the microphone, speaking in that very soft, breathy private school girl voice, telling the crowd that “mahning” is essential to “Ustrayleeya” and that she was born one month before Santos was founded and I really do think that Gina is similar to gout if it was a person.
12/ While Gina speaks, the stage screens repeatedly flash the words: Now is not the time for RINOS or LINOS. Even the man in jorts looks confused.
13/ The camera is positioned straight through the centre of the room directly above Matt Canavan’s head which seems to be taking up most of the screen, but perhaps that’s just Matt Canavan’s head.
14/ Gina’s now showing us her travel pics. There’s Gina with the Donald Trump daughter whose name I always forget, (as does Trump). Gina’s wearing another sign around her neck in the photo – what’s with all the signs Gina? Is it a kink fetish?
15/ Gina tells us that people in the renewable energy cult should put their windmills and solar panels on their own property because nobody wants them and I fear she’s been standing far too close to the gas fields she owns that are on our property, Australia’s property.
16/ Oh look there’s Barnaby checking out the messages on his phone while Queen Gina is speaking and, coincidentally, Matt Canavan is checking out his messages at the same time as Barnaby and boys, we know what’s going on here. Share your memes later thanks.
17/ Gina’s been speaking about “mahning” now for almost 20 minutes and coincidentally, Pauline is really hooking into that wine.
18/ Now we have Gina telling us Australians need to emulate Elon Musk and create a department of DOGE. Gina spells it out for everyone as if they’re unbelievably stupid, although to be fair, Pauline is in the audience.
19/ Apparently Donald Trump’s election was a “too-sarm-ee” victory and I think Gina might mean ‘tsunami’ but I doubt anyone out there in the Sycophants Anonymous crowd is going to correct her.
20/ As Gina mispronounces words, endless, contextless photos of Trump and Musk flash up on the stage screens just in case people in the audience have never seen them before.
21/ Apparently Gina has “friends in buses” and no, I don’t know either.
22/ Thank god she’s finished but oh dear god, it gets worse. It’s Peter Dutton beaming himself in from Canberra. He tells us that mining should be taught to every school child in Australia which perhaps gives us an idea of Peter’s understanding of our education system.
23/ While Peter’s talking about “radical Labor Greens and elites” (yawn) I’m transfixed by the miniature figure on his office bookcase. It’s a tiny bald man in a blue suit with black shoes and I swear it’s a tiny Peter Dutton doll and now I can no longer concentrate on Peter while Tiny Peter sits in the background behind his left ear. Is this some sort of bastardised Dutton On The Shelf?
24/ Pauline takes another drink. This time the waiter fills her glass before she asks. They know.
25/ Peter finishes by telling us he wants to “eradicate indoctrination from our class rooms and much, much more besides.” He forgets he’s just told us he wants to teach school children about “the value” of mining, but nobody ever accused old Peter of being self-aware.
26/ After Peter, a little Scottish man pops up and repeats almost everything that Gina has said but in a Scottish accent, and after 40 minutes of Gina and Peter and the Scottish man droning about mining, the crowd is drinking heavily and looking like they’re going to reach for the flamethrowers and storm the stage.
It’s all getting so dirty, so, so grubby. The stench is almost palpable. I have been watching them now for more than an hour and everything I have learned about these people has been against my will. Some white bloke in a stained shirt gets up on stage and gives an award to another white bloke, Professor Plimer, who starts his speech by saying what a great friend he is of, god help us, Rowan Dean and that “climate change is a farce and a lie” and I decide that’s the moment to stop listening.
Where are all the intelligent people in this? Surely these same people visit their doctor, surely they use mobile phones and the internet and other advances in modern science? Damn, most of them would be vaccinated, too. How do they live in a 2025 world with all of the benefits of that science and yet refuse to understand the science of climate change? I restart the video, waiting for the heckler in the crowd, the Grace Tame of the moment, someone in the room with a conscience to leap up and scream: “Oh fuck all you people! You’re all fucking losers. I hope you all choke on your fucking grilled asparagus and Santos coloured wine before you kill the planet. Go fuck yourselves!”
But it never happens and we’re stuck with billionaires who think that funding pretty videos and buying friends and buying politicians is the responsible way to leave the planet, and I wonder if we are in fact – doomed.