Gina Rinehart: The other Iron Lady

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We demand to be quality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of C-Foam Motor Treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

Safe home!

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire.

Each episode, we pick a billionaire and find out how they made all their money.

Then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Simon Jack.

I'm the BBC's business editor.

And I'm Zing Singh.

I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

And our billionaire this week, if you are Australian, will need no introduction whatsoever.

This is a rollicking story.

It is Gina Reinhart, Australia's richest citizen, the first woman to top the list.

She is worth about $30 billion.

In 2011, she was the world's richest woman.

She's now fallen to about eighth.

Still not bad going.

Her wealth is legendary these days in Australia.

There's a website called How Rich Are You?

And what it does is it compares Gina Reinhart's wealth with that of an average Australian.

And if you put in, for example, an Australian teacher's starting wage, you can learn that Gina earns the same money in 13.3 minutes.

So basically, by the time this episode finishes, Gina Reinhart will have earned, what, maybe twice, two and a half times the amount a teacher earns in a year.

It depends how long we spend talking about her, but put it this way, yes, several multiples, we think.

Her wealth comes predominantly from mining.

She is the daughter of a guy called Lang Hancock, an Australian prospector and miner who discovered one of the world's largest sources of iron ore.

When asked to define what she found beautiful, she replied, and I'm not going to try an Australian accent here, beauty is an iron mine.

Beauty is an iron mine.

As Michelangelo would put it.

Yes.

Of the 47 Australians who make the billionaires list, 10 of them made their money from mining.

So it's a big part of Australia's economy.

Now it's actually quite hard to find what Gina spends her money on.

But during the pandemic, she did give a flavour of what she likes to buy because she filmed a video from the deck of her super yacht complaining there were not enough spaces to dock them in Queensland.

And in her words, these super yachts need marinas too.

Quite right.

Gina Reinhart is known in Australia as much for her feuds as for her wealth.

And if you like family fortunes and family feuds, this is an absolute cracker.

She's had court battles with her former stepmother.

She's been sued twice by some of her own children.

And her willingness to go to court was demonstrated when she sued journalist Adele Ferguson over her unauthorised biography, even though she was a major shareholder of its publisher.

And Gina lost that court case, but we're very grateful for that because we found the book to be a very useful source for this episode.

So let's take it from the beginning.

How did Gina Reinhart, whose name, by the way, reminds me of a dynasty character, get to where she is today?

As we go from zero to a million, as we always do in this program, you could argue she already starts as a millionaire because her father had a private fortune.

Although technically it wasn't actually hers until he died in 1992.

But put it this way, when she was old enough to drive, her father bought 10 new cars to her school for her to choose one.

So it's safe to say say she had plenty of access to money.

10 new cars to school.

That must have been what?

10 drivers.

I mean, that's going to make you pretty unpopular at school, I would have thought.

Oh, it's going to make you absolutely despised.

And she was quite an unusual child with a kind of solitary upbringing, as we'll find out.

So she's born into a rich family.

She's born Georgina Hope Hancock in Perth, Western Australia, in 1954.

She's also the only child of her mother, Hope, and her dad, Lang Hancock.

And by this point, Lang Lang was already a really successful mining magnate.

Yeah he'd inherited a sheep station from his father but became an asbestos miner and a prospector in Pilbara which is a thinly populated wilderness in the north of Western Australia and is a huge centre for iron ore production.

So two years before Gina was born Lang made this discovery that would basically change his family's fortunes forever.

He was flying back from visiting his sister but he had to fly low through this gorge because of heavy rain.

And then he looked out the window and saw this kind of rusty red colouring of the rock and realized that it meant oxidised iron.

Mining is one of those things which is full of these fantastic folk tales about I was wandering around and I happened to pick up something that turned out to be a diamond.

But he did return to inspect further and he took some samples and realised it was a legitimate source of high quality iron ore.

And it was one of the biggest iron ore deposits ever, iron ore being essential for the creation of steel.

But Lang had to keep it secret because he was lobbying the government to change the laws around claiming mining rights and exporting this resource.

I can just imagine, what have you been doing out in the middle of nowhere?

Nothing, nothing.

Just having a walk.

Just having a walk.

So Gina's early years were spent on a little homestead by Nunyuri Station, which is the asbestos mine her father had worked at.

Okay, so this was 750 miles north of the nearest city, which was Perth.

Even her nearest neighbours were 150 miles miles away.

You could only reach them by getting on their small family aircraft.

And Gina had an upbringing that wasn't, you know, she wasn't living in mansions or anything.

I think a friend described this house that she lived in as being very small.

It resembled two dongas, which is apparently Australian slang for cheap temporary housing.

Two dongas shoved put together.

In other words, not a lavish establishment.

Australia's got some fantastic words like that.

All the ones I can think of are just slightly rude.

So we won't repeat those.

So two dongers put together, not very lavish, but they moved from there to Perth in 1960 because Gina's mother said there were no children for her to play with, only miners, which probably the way she would have wanted it, given how her life goes hereafter.

Yeah, she was probably pretty happy there.

But Lang Hancock was also a big influence on his daughter, Gina.

He was very right-wing.

He believed in small government.

He supported right-wing politicians.

And he also picked up a nickname for himself.

He was known as the Rogue Bull.

He had some pretty interesting ideas.

He thought nuclear weapons could be used in mining and that asbestos was perfectly safe.

Imagine nuking your way to an asbestos mine, I mean.

Exactly.

Just put a few nukes in there, blow it up, and there'll be asbestos in the atmosphere for decades to come.

He also said that the best way to help the poor was not to become one of them.

And he also loathed unions and he was notoriously racist, particularly towards First Nations people.

Yeah, we should make this perfectly clear that these epithets are his words, not ours, but I think it's important to get a flavour of what he was actually like.

For example, there was a clip from him in 1981 talking about First Nation people.

He said that Aboriginal people have been accepted into civilized society.

They should be left well alone.

And in his words, again, half castes should be sterilised.

Not a very nice man to be around, particularly if you're from a First Nations community.

Yeah, so when Langer discovered the iron ore, there was virtually no mining industry in Western Australia.

By the 1960s, Western Australia was down to just one gold mine.

So after years of meeting with potential investors, Lang went to London to talk to the chairman of a company called Rio Tinto to come and visit Pilbara.

Rio Tinto is still one of the biggest mining companies in the world.

It's been around since the late 19th century.

Today is the world's second biggest mining company.

And Rio Tinto agreed to the deal.

They signed what's called the Hammersley Iron Ore Agreement, which stated that 2.5% royalty would be paid to Lang and his business partner, Peter Wright, for all the iron ore exported from Pilbara.

And this is important because they are prospectors.

So they go and try and find out where the stuff is, get someone else to dig it out, and they take a royalty on the actual mining.

So they're not miners, at least not yet.

They're taking a royalty on somebody else building the mine, extracting it, transporting it, and they skim a little bit off the top.

So Rio Tinto paid for pretty much everything.

So they paid for the mine, they paid for the extraction of the iron ore, and they even paid for the railway line to move the ore.

And Lang and Wright just took these royalties.

They split them 50-50.

And this partnership is key to a current court case against Gina.

Yeah, the deal was signed 11 years after Lang had first discovered the iron ore.

And at this point, Gina, the star of our story, was just nine years old.

But from then on, Lang's life and the life of his family changed.

Lang and Wright received at least $250,000 Australian dollars a month in royalties in perpetuity.

Forever.

Meanwhile, Gina was attending St Hilda's Anglican School for Girls in a posh suburb of Perth.

And she was smart.

She was, you know, academically, she was top of her class, but she was also seen as kind of aloof.

So she was at boarding school in the week, but you know, she was visiting her family's various kind of rural outposts on the weekends.

So she didn't really fit in with either the girls who were day boarders or the full-time boarders.

Yeah, she spent time alone or sitting in her dad's Rolls-Royce talking with him for hours.

I'm sure that made her very popular with the girls at school.

Another reason, though, the family had moved to Perth was Gina's mother, Hope, had been diagnosed with breast cancer the year after Gina was born, so she needed access to the hospital.

Her classmates said that Gina never talked about her mother's illness, but it showed in other ways, like she was shy and she was kind of messy and unkempt, maybe because her dad didn't have a clue about, you know, how to manage a growing daughter.

And her mum was too sick to sort of take care of those kind of things as well.

So at 12, she had a week off to film a BBC documentary about her dad called Man of Iron and she later said, I had a ball making that film.

I suppose from that moment I began to be aware of my special background and what lay ahead for me.

And her dad was definitely grooming her for power.

She's pretty much the golden girl, right?

She was the only child.

By the time she was 13, Lang was taking her out of school to join him on business trips like meeting steel company bosses in the States or bankers and politicians.

So she is destined to take on his mantle.

And after school she wanted to go straight into her father's empire but her dad felt she should go to university.

He didn't go to university but he thought times had changed and he wanted her to be prepared for the modern world and she started doing an economics degree at Sydney University.

Yeah, the teaching there followed the Harvard economist teachings of John Kenneth Galbraith whose famous book in 1958 The Affluent Society argued for a more equitable distribution of wealth, which is not an idea her dad really had much time for.

Oh no, Lang, I think, described it as a work of fiction and Gina pretty much instantly felt like her degree was a waste of time.

So this is an ultra right-wing family, which meant that Gina didn't really fit into the kind of liberal campus you would have found at Sydney University.

So she just quit.

She says, I came home and dad taught me far more than anything I learned at university.

I'm sure Sydney University was pleased about that.

So the dad is a huge figure, right?

She's the only child.

She's taken to the meetings with him.

So this is the central relationship of her life.

But even that becomes pretty complicated later on.

It's interesting that someone so conservative ends up picking a girl to be the person who inherits everything.

Well, he didn't have a lot of choice.

That's true, too.

He very much groomed her in his image.

Yeah, and his dream was to build and operate his own mine.

We're talking about prospectors.

They just find it and they take a commission of someone else's mine.

His dream was to build and operate his own mine.

So he started using the royalty income he was getting to scout out some new sites.

He was also trying to diversify into other mineral projects, property, aircrafts, the newspapers and by 1973 Gina was effectively his apprentice and personal assistant.

Or chief of staff you might even call it.

So Lang's friends became Gina's friends including former Australian prime ministers and other gold mining magnates one of whom remembers Lang used to call Gina fella.

It's definitely an unusual friendship group for a young woman.

Definitely.

Now Lang was a frugal, hard-working type, and Gina learnt to be the same.

You know, when we do the billionaire in numbers at the beginning, there's no kind of huge and utter ostentatious wealth being displayed.

No, there's no underground golf course or baseball court.

So Gina got married when she was 19 to a guy called Greg Milton, who worked for her dad, and they had their first child, John, in 1976.

But her work ethic, she was back at her desk within two weeks of giving birth.

Wow, I cannot imagine that.

I mean, Gina, God's sake, take some maternity leave.

She had her second child, Bianca, in 1977, and she was taking her children to work with her.

Actually, she built a double brick enclosure in her office for the baby so visitors couldn't hear them crying.

And in another example of their very special and slightly unusual relationship, for her father's 70th birthday in 1979, Gina decided to gift him a whole political campaign called Wake Up Australia with a two-day campaign trip.

That's quite the present, but it did come from a good place.

Lang had tried and failed to bankrupt a secessionist party for Western Australia to be independent from the rest of Australia.

So this political campaign would be a chance to spread his gospel of pro-mining and free enterprise, which Gina shared.

Yeah, and I didn't know this, but Western Australia has tried, I've learned, to become a separate nation from the rest of Australia quite a few times since the Federation of Australia in 1901.

They, in fact, they won a 1933 referendum to split from the rest of Australia.

However, at the time of listening, Western Australia is still very much part of Australia.

Yeah, Gina took out a full-page ad in the National Times offering tickets to join this trip for $500.

Come with us on this unforgettable flight to see Free Enterprise Australia.

But despite all of that, in the end, Lang himself couldn't attend because he had heart problems, but 300 guests did, mostly mining people, far-right politicians, journalists.

And the trip received what you might call mixed reviews.

So many of these guests had dressed in suits and they were told they had to camp overnight in the bush.

But it was a very public moment for Gina, her first time really facing the media on her own.

on behalf of the company and Lang was very proud of the TV coverage she gained for what was essentially his political cause.

And Gina's own political views are an interesting blend of conservatism and libertarianism.

An early heroine of hers was Margaret Thatcher, who she met in 1977.

And she actually left quite an impression on Gina because, after that, apparently, Gina started wearing smarter clothes.

She got a new hairdresser.

She started to wear more makeup.

So that's one thing the Iron Lady did.

One Iron Lady to another, honestly.

There we go.

Another hero of hers was the free market economist Milton Friedman.

He was the kind of person who essentially coined this kind of greed is good.

Shareholders are the most important form of life.

Profit is the most important motive.

Businesses should not have social purposes or a social conscience.

That free market profit motive is the best way of unleashing capitalism and innovation, profit and wealth.

I also think Milton Friedman is the name of Javier Mille, the Argentinian leader's dog.

You're kidding.

I think so.

Yeah, he's named all his dogs after economists.

That is, I did not know that.

That is wild.

So we know where her dad and her are, sort of where they're coming from politically, economically.

They're pretty far right.

And you get the feeling that they're, you know, tight as thieves, right?

Because Gina spent so much time hanging out with her dad when she was in her formative years.

But then there was this moment in April 1983 that really was the beginning of the wedge between them.

So Gina's mother, Hope, died of breast cancer.

Remember, she was diagnosed just after Gina was born.

And Lang said she had a very painful death and the best is to leave it there.

Meanwhile, Gina had quietly divorced her first husband, Greg, in 1980, giving a one-off payment of $60,000, gave him very little access to his own children.

But Gina moved on quite quickly, and in 1983, married American lawyer Frank Reinhart in Las Vegas, changed her name to what we know her today as Gina Reinhart.

By the way, she was 28, he was 65, but the dad thought that this was all a bit too soon.

Oh, yeah, I mean, well, remember, this is the same year that her mother passed away, and Lang kind of saw this as a selfish act because her mother at the time was dying and also disapproved of Frank.

Yeah, Frank had a a colourful background.

He'd been convicted of tax fraud in the US and disbarred as a lawyer.

And Lang thought he had his eyes on Hancock prospecting, especially after he helped Gina contest her own mother's will.

So you can already see the fault lines emerging in this family.

Gina, Hope and Lang all owned one-third of the company.

And when Hope died, her third went to Lang.

But now Gina and Frank were arguing.

It was supposed to be split with Gina and her children.

Yeah, so we've got the beginnings of...

There's a lot of beginnings of the dynasty moment here.

Exactly.

So the bad feeling is festering already at this point.

Now, despite feuding with him, Gina knew her father would need support while grieving.

So he placed an advert for a housekeeper for him.

Oh, yeah, this is the beginning of the turns out well.

This is the beginning of a good twist.

So enter Rose Porteus, who was a 34-year-old Filipino in Australia on a work permit.

Now, Rose was the only applicant to take care of Lang, and within days, days of her starting starting work in 1983, Lang fell hard.

And Gina heard rumors of them sleeping together.

She hired a private detective who confirmed it.

So, Gina demanded Rose leave the house, but Lang just put Rose up at a penthouse down the street.

And this is the start of a long battle between Gina, Lang, and Rose.

So, Gina felt like Rose was going to steal her inheritance and, you know, essentially take Lang for everything he had.

And Lang felt exactly the same about Frank.

Nevertheless, Lang married Rose in a big, lavish wedding in July 1985.

Gina and Frank didn't come.

He also built Rose a mansion called Prix de Morgue based on the plantation house in Gone with the Wind.

I actually went and looked up some details of this house because I was really curious.

Apparently it has bulletproof bedroom doors and side-by-side baths so Rose's poodles can take a bath at the same time as she does.

You're kidding.

I mean is the word tacky a little bit strong here?

It's definitely quite kitsch I would say.

So we know that Gina was worried that Rose had got her eyes on Gina's inheritance, but she also soon feared for her role at Hancock Prospecting, which, by the way, you know, she's been groomed all her life to take over.

And those fears started coming true because in November 1985, she was removed from the board and replaced by Rose.

According to letters shown in court in 2023, just last year, Gina called Rose another health warning about the language used by the Lang/slash Reinhart family.

She called Rose an oriental concubine, a prostitute, and a zombie due to her on-off addiction to painkillers after falling downstairs at Prix d'Amour.

So the family is not in a good state, and Gina and Lang's feud went on until 1988 until they finally reached a truce.

And in true succession style, they called this the June Agreement.

And that agreement said that when Lang died, Gina would control the company, 51% of mining assets for her, 49% for her children.

Rose would get nothing from the company, just a payment of $6 million from a separate pot of cash.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of it, because after the June agreement in 1989, Lang still felt like Gina was pestering him and actually wrote her a letter asking her to just stop.

He said in it, now that the dividends have started to flow and the arrangement itself is being executed, I would appreciate it if you would leave me alone and let me live the rest of my life in peace.

So quite the rift between the golden child and her dad.

That's really sad, isn't it?

Leave me alone and let me live the rest of my life in peace.

From father to daughter.

That's quite something.

And only child as well.

Bloody hell.

But is she a millionaire yet?

One of our first staging posts in this programme.

Although Gina had a third share of Hancock prospecting on paper, and she'd had it since the age of two, Lang had put his money into various trusts, including charitable foundations, to avoid paying taxes.

So he had always had control of the money and when and how it was drawn out.

And even though they were fielding, Lang was still paying for Gina.

So there's some notes from a 1986 meeting showing him assuring her that, yes, you can continue to charge against Hancock prospecting like always.

So although

this money wasn't officially hers, she probably always received enough to be a millionaire, certainly lived the life of one.

But it wasn't until 1989 that the dividends start to flow that she really had her own cash.

And that was at least about $750,000 a year.

And there were further dividends for stake in Hancock prospecting.

So it's safe to say in 89 or 1990, Gina Reinhart is officially a millionaire and also set to inherit all her father's wealth.

So there's a lot more money to come.

Hi, my name's Eddie Hearn and this is No Passion, No Point.

I'm excited to be back with this new series.

As always, I'll be talking to top performers about what drives them, how they gain an edge over competitors and whether their dedication to constant improvement comes at a cost.

I love golf.

I play it until my hands bleed.

I just enjoy going out there playing with no fear.

What makes them feel fulfilled?

It's not the money, it's not the trophies.

It's the friendships and the memories I've got.

And does that change as their career progresses?

Just a girl who grew up playing football and now I'm getting packs like without even seeing the camera like it's crazy.

From BBC Radio 5 Live.

No passion, no point.

Listen whenever you like on BBC Sounds.

When never thought this would happen actually happens, Serve Pro's got you.

If disaster threatens to put production weeks behind schedule, ServePro's got you.

When you need precise containment to stay in operation through the unexpected, ServePro's got you.

When the aftermath of floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and other forces that are out of your control have you feeling a loss of control, ServePro's got you.

Simply put, whenever or wherever you need help in a hurry, make sure your first call is to the number one name in cleanup and restoration.

Because only ServePro has the scale and expertise to get you back up to speed quicker than you ever thought possible.

So if fire or water damage ever threatens your home or business, remember to call on the team that's faster to any size disaster at 1-800SERVPRO or by visiting SurfPro.com.

ServePro like it never even happened.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of C-Foam motor treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer trusted by millions every day cfoam is safe and easy to use in any engine just pour it in your fuel tank

make the proven choice with cfoam available everywhere automotive products are sold

safe home

I'm Brett Ski and you're in California and I'm here to tell you about spinquest.com, my favorite social casino.

With over a thousand slots and table games, absolutely free with the ability to win real cash prizes instantly to your bank account, there's no better time to hop on our $30 coin package for only $10 deal.

Head over today.

I love you.

I'll see you there.

SpendQuest is a free-to-play social casino.

Voidwear Prohibited.

Visit SpinQuest.com for more details.

In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two.

What if you could have all three at the same time?

That's exactly what Kohir, Thompson Reuters, and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds.

How is it faster?

OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.

Cheaper?

OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.

Better?

In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.

This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.

Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free.

Head to oracle.com/slash strategic.

That's oracle.com/slash strategic.

What about a million to a billion?

Back to our story about Rose.

So in August 1991, seven months before he died, Lang decides to change his will to give Rose a 50% share in certain mining tenements, that's places where you have mines.

The other 50% goes to Gina, and that completely goes against the Juna agreement.

Old man fading, Sark changes will just before death.

Classic.

So this new will was signed in December 1991.

But at this point, Gina still thought she would get everything.

And by the end of 1991, she'd rejoined the board of Hancock Prospecting.

But then in February 1992, Lang faxes Gina to say Rose had broken promises about her drug, her pill addiction, and that marriage was over.

And then...

In March, a deed for the sale of mining rights in an area named McCamey's Monster was drawn up.

And this completely nullified the new will.

It put all the assets in the hands of Gina and her family.

There were 49% going to her children in a trust and 51% going to Gina.

So everything's back to Gina.

And also, it also wiped out any other bequests, such as Lang's sister's children, cousins' children, staff, including Ken McCamey, whom McCamey's monster was named after.

So Gina essentially gets the lot.

Now, Lang was very ill when he signed that deed, and some argue that he actually had no idea what he was doing.

You know, at the time, he was a shadow of a man, he'd shrunk to 62 kilos and you know the cardiologist treating him said he had gangrene in the feet, he had anemia, he's bed sores, he was not a well man.

And in fact, seven days later, aged 82, he died.

So Gina inherits the company and all the money it could generate.

And as her unauthorized biographer, Adele Ferguson wrote, Almost from the day she was born, her father had brought her up to be the successor of the Hancock Empire.

This helped shaped her personality and made her tough, ruthless, and single-minded when it came to getting what she believed was hers.

And she certainly did get that inheritance.

So Gina in this Rose versus Gina who's going to get the money, Gina comes out on top.

Now let's break down what Gina actually inherited.

Various sources estimated Hancock prospecting to be worth about $75 million and the Rio Tinto royalties add roughly $12 million a year in 1992.

But Gina has regularly disputed the fact that she inherited that much.

She said that she inherited a lot of debt too and the company wasn't in such great shape.

Lang was seen to have squandered a lot of his wealth on outlandish gifts to his wife.

Don't forget those double bathtubs.

And ill-advised business deals.

There was an elaborate deal, for instance, to swap raw materials for railway wagons with the Romanian leader Nicola Ceaușescu.

That deal cost $25 million when Gina cancelled it.

So she'd sold off what she could to help pay the bills.

There was a struggling manganese mine in Thailand, a private jets and property, and she'd mortgaged the company's head office building.

So there was a little bit of repair work to do on the company after her father's death but obviously when she inherited the lot she got a reputation for herself right so gina was being called an heiress by journalists and you know she initially ignored it but then she started shooting back at the people who described her as just the richest girl in australia it's interesting isn't it because heiress has a certain bundle of concepts associated with it.

It's sort of like you came by it with no effort of your own and whatever.

Normally, do we talk about James Murdoch and and Lachlan Murdoch as being heirs?

It's true, yeah.

Heirs sounds more like you've inherited a kingdom and you're a prince.

Yeah, heiress,

there's definitely a pejorative sort of dimension to that word.

And I think she picked up on it.

And actually, it's quite interesting in the way she's described, you know, like she's highly litigious, she's hard as nails.

I think a lot of rich or successful business women, and I remember this when I worked in finance, there is a different set of adjectives used to to describe exactly the same qualities that you would find in male counterparts.

And it's an interesting one.

You know, and Gino would be inclined to agree.

She actually published an open letter to a journalist in 2009, which said, for those interested in accuracy, Mr.

Hancock's estate, that's her dad, was bankrupt.

Public domain information, which makes journalists who endlessly, wrongly state heiress where Mrs.

Gino is concerned, look rather stupid.

Okay, well, let's go back to the Gina versus Rose battle.

The animosity Gina felt for Rose actually really was dialed up after her father died.

There was actually one funeral, but two separate memorials.

And for those keeping score, 600 people attended Gina's and 200 people attended Rose's.

In fact, Gina argued her 82-year-old father's death was unexpected, and a police SWAT team was sent to the house with sniffer dogs to follow up on the implicit allegations that Gina was making about Rose.

And in an inquest nine years later, it was revealed that Gina actually spent $30,000 on private investigators to find quote-unquote dirt on Rose.

The same inquest ultimately revealed that Lang died of natural causes.

Yeah, so Gina's already in charge of the Hancock Empire, but she also wanted $30 million worth of assets that Rose had, things like a Bentley, the mansion we talked about, various homes in Australia and Florida.

So she's going after what Rose has.

And this kicked off an 11-year legal battle.

People have tried to analyse what Gina's legal tactics are.

Rose's lawyer has said that her tactic is to out-resource her opponents, then delay and make it virtually impossible to carry on.

She sets a litigation target that's unrealistic, but says it can be done and pushes on.

She gets the best lawyers in the country and then she delays.

Rose was lucky she didn't have the resources but she found a firm willing to take it on.

So Gina, even though she disputes the highly litigious claims, was pretty much fixated on destroying Rose.

So she often ended up disagreeing with her own lawyers.

The Australian, which is a newspaper in Australia, reported that in pursuing this case against Rose, she hired and fired 16 law firms and dismissed 30 barristers.

This is not just a legal case, is it?

You know, Rose sort of has become her nemesis and she's just directing seemingly bottomless legal resources to pursue her.

Eventually, Gina lost the case and Rose kept the assets.

But in Australia, the press were covering these court battles like a soap opera.

And it kind of laid this template for how Gina would become this obsession of the Australian press and culture in the decades to come.

If you talk to Australians about Gina Reinhart, they will know who she is.

Exactly.

There was even going to be a TV drama, but Gina, in her highly litigious description, she contests ways, she managed to get it pulled off air due to inaccuracies.

Yeah, she's actually written, I think this is something that some newspapers like to say if a female is involved in litigation, whereas they don't label males involved in litigation as highly litigious.

Yeah, similar argument to the ARS label.

But there was more litigation anyway, so she took on the mining giant BHP, who bought McCamey's monster for 30 million.

Gina's lawyers claimed it was worth 90 million, but they got a bargain because of Hancock Prospecting's dire financial circumstances.

Yeah, they got it on the cheap because Hancock Prospecting was on the back foot.

Quite a bold thing to take on BHP.

Still to this day, I think biggest mining company in the world.

So this is, although she's rich, this is a David versus Goliath legal battle.

And unfortunately for Gina, the Supreme Court of Western Australia rejected her claim.

And her lawyers also took her to court because they were trying to recover more than $213,000 in legal fees.

Yeah, if you're going to take people to court that often, you've got to pay the lawyers.

Yeah, I mean...

There was one case where Gina wasn't the one who started the proceedings, and this was a 1997 sexual harassment suit filed against her by ex-policeman Bob Thompson, who had accompanied her as a sort of bodyguard on trips across the world.

He said Gina wanted to marry him, even though he was engaged to someone else.

I told her over and over I wasn't interested, but she wouldn't take no for an answer.

It kind of reminds you of that show, The Bodyguard.

The bodyguard, absolutely.

But in Bob Thompson's case, he ended up dropping the suit reportedly after there was an out-of-court settlement.

Gina Reinhart herself has not commented on the matter.

So alongside the various court cases, she is also busy working shaping up Hancock prospecting.

She cleared out most of the old guard from her dad's era, poached some people from international mining companies, and also befriended the new premier of Western australia richard court she knew that lobbying was important so she was hiring political heavyweights as consultants to lobby for her cause so in 1994 there'd been a hole in hancock's accounts of about 28 million dollars but she'd done some cost cutting the company hung on made profits of four million dollars so turned it around

but the thing that really transformed the company and her fortunes was something very big that was happening in the world economy.

The prices for iron ore and coal start rising because of increased demand demand from China and other Asian countries.

This is one of the greatest transformations in the world economy ever because this is the rise of China.

From 1990 onwards, it becomes this inexorable rise to being the economic superpower that everyone always thought it could have been.

It now is unleashed.

The center of gravity of the world economy starts moving from west to east.

And China, as it's developing, has an insatiable demand for steel.

And the biggest part of steel is iron ore and Australia is the biggest place where that is and Western Australia is the biggest place in Australia.

So really Gina Reinhardt was riding that wave.

I think that the Gina Reinhart story is inextricable from the industrialization and growing economic might of China and the geographical usefulness of Australia being so much closer to China than the other big iron ore producer Brazil.

So in the 70s, for instance, production was 100 million tons.

By 2003, it had doubled to 200 million tons.

So that is an enormous amount of iron ore.

And China's becoming Australia's biggest customer.

In 2000, China bought 15% of all Australia's iron ore.

By 2009, so less than a decade, they were buying 70% of it.

And by the way, that's 70% of a much bigger amount of iron ore.

And this meant that the price of iron ore kept rising, right?

Yeah.

The early 2000s, iron ore was around $20, $30 a tonne.

They peaked closer to 200 a ton one of the biggest booms we've ever seen it's a bit like a gold rush really and gina reinhart was setting herself up to take full advantage of this kind of gold rush in iron ore in fact what she did was remember they always wanted to own their own mine rather than just take a commission or royalties from others so her father had bought a place called hope downs which was a you know ramshackle kind of place but gina had big plans that this was going to be their own mine.

They would own it.

They would operate it.

They would take all the money.

Yeah, I think she planned for it to produce 30 million tons of iron ore a year.

And she was willing to kind of bet big on this.

She put aside $10 million at the feasibility stage to kind of figure out if this could work.

But it had no railway line.

The company was facing reputational damage from the whole thing around the Rose dispute, Lang's death.

So people were pretty skeptical that Gina could turn Hope Downs into a functioning, reputable, legitimate mine.

So Gina had been trying to get Hope Downs up and running even before there was this huge boom in iron ore demand.

And it actually took her 13 years.

In 2005 there was a deadline to lodge a proposal for formal development of Hope Downs under a 1992 agreement.

And then in July 2005 Gina pulls a master stroke or a very significant one.

She signs a contract for one and a half billion dollars for a joint venture with Rio Tinto which took everyone by surprise.

Yeah Yeah, she was actually talking to quite a few people.

So she was talking to Asian and Australian mining contractors to build the iron ore operation, the railway, the port facilities.

But her lawyers were actually working secretly to line this thing up with Rio Tinto.

Yeah, and a lot of people said it wasn't illegal what they did, but it certainly wasn't in good faith.

Again, the deal had Rio Tinto doing the lion's share of the mining, but rather the royalty that they used to pay them, it's a 50-50 split of all the money.

Gina has described this as her greatest victory.

I will have a legacy to hand down to my children with certainty.

But as we'll see, her kids are not too hot on her right now.

Yeah, we watch this space.

But this is the deal that basically made her a billionaire.

By 2007, Hope Downs was exporting ore.

Gina first appeared on the Forbes list as Australia's first female billionaire that year with a net worth of a billion US dollars.

She's a billionaire.

So what's happening now that Gina has made it beyond a billion?

Well, remember she talked about that legacy she was leaving behind for her children?

Turns out she's actually been sued by her children twice.

Just because she's a billionaire doesn't mean her run-ins with the lawyers are over.

In fact, in many ways, they're just getting started.

In 2011, Gina's three eldest children, John, Bianca, Hope, sued her when they discovered that Gina had changed, and this is harsh,

she had changed the vesting date, the date when they can get the money of a family trust worth $4 billion.

They were due to receive it in 2011, and she changed it to 2068, so they had to wait just another 57 years for their money.

And also John, Bianca and Hope are not...

They're not spring chickens, you know.

Basically, Gina said they had to wait until they were all in their 80s and 90s to receive this money from the trust.

Gina said this was for tax reasons, but they claim their mum had acted deceitfully and with gross dishonesty in her dealings with the trust, which had been set up in 1988 by her father, with her children as the beneficiaries.

And they actually won.

They triumphed over their own mother.

In 2015, they won the court case.

Gina was ousted from the family trust's board and they received access to their assets.

And the main asset was a 24% shareholding in Hancock Prospecting.

But it's not done yet.

Just last year, the eldest children, John and Bianca, were part of a court case brought by the descendants of Lang, Gina's dad's former business partner Peter Wright, and he argued that the Wright family and others are due a share of the profits from Hope Downs.

In court hearings, it was claimed that there were letters that showed that Mrs.

Reinhart has known, at least since February 1986, that the position with these assets is that they are held jointly with the partnership.

That's a partnership between Lang and Peter Wright.

Her children also claim they're entitled to a hefty share in Hope Downs as assets their grandfather left them.

The judge, Justice Smith, is due to give a judgment in middle of this year, mid-2024.

Rio Tinto, quite sensibly, has negotiated a liability agreement, which is likely to cap its payout exposure if Gina loses this multi-billion dollar legal battle.

That's interesting.

So basically, Rio Tinto says, you can squabble amongst yourselves, but we're not going to be on the hook for this horror of this family feud.

Which is understandable.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, there's domestic Australian politics at work here as well.

In 2010, Australia's then Prime Prime Minister said he was going to milk the mining boom and proposed a $10 billion tax.

Gina was avoiding the press because of the tabloid uproar over her dad's death and the court battles.

But then she appeared very publicly at a rally wearing pearls, shouting, axe the tax on the back of a flatbed truck.

So quite the image.

That is quite the image.

Like that famous picture of Margaret Thatcher in the tank.

Yeah, still wearing the pearls and the hat.

So the miners go all out.

They waged an all-out campaign costing millions of dollars to try and axe the tax.

And some called it a constitutional coup.

It sparked strikes.

There were violent demonstrations, as well as reigniting discussions about whether Australia should become a republic.

And after all of this uproar, turns out the tax just never happened.

So Gina got to keep all that money.

Yeah.

So Hancock Prospecting, the original company founded by her father, has transformed under Gina from merely prospecting, which we talked about.

It's now got investments in copper, iron ore, potash, dairy, coal, cattle, property, etc.

She also is becoming a bit of a media magnate, not unlike one of our previous billionaires, Patrick Sun Cheung.

So she now owns a share of Channel 10, which is one of three major commercial TV networks in Australia.

She's also become the single largest shareholder in Australia's second biggest newspaper group, Fairfax Media.

It publishes the Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age, the Australian Financial Review.

And the suspicion among some journalists is that she will attempt to turn them into mouthpieces for her right-wing views.

Newspaper proprietors never do anything like that, do they?

Well, you know.

Some Australians would beg to differ.

Yeah.

Gina's also now Australia's second largest cattle producer, and she set her sights on lithium.

Now, this is a key component of electric car batteries, and it's going to be a massive scramble globally for that.

So that could be the next boom.

She's done a $1.1 billion deal acquiring an Australian lithium company called Azure in December 2023.

So keep your eyes on that.

That could be a whole new string to her bow.

She's still prospecting just like her good old dad.

So time to judge Gina Reinhart.

Is she good, bad, or just another billionaire?

We have several categories to go through.

Let's start with just her sheer wealth.

$30 billion,

49th richest person in the world and the richest Australian.

Oh, I think she kind of scores quite

reasonably here.

I'd say seven.

Yeah, I think this is seven out of ten.

Yeah, I mean, at one point she was the richest woman in the world world and uh you know she's in the top 50 so i think yeah seven i might even give her an eight she doesn't tend to splash it around though does she not that we know of no our next category is rags to riches how far did they come in life was it rags to riches was it silver spoon come on i mean even though what she grew up in was it two dongas two dongers taxes dongers put together i think that's the scene that will be with me is i can see it at the school gate you know behind the railings of 10 cars with her dad going pick one I think that's that seals the deal.

There's you know, all the Australian schoolgirls be like, who is this jumped-up little brat?

She lived like a millionaire from a very early age, so I'm only going to give her a one out of ten for this.

I agree.

I think one out of ten.

When you, when you get called the richest girl in Australia, yeah, she's not quite Murdoch kind of kids, you know, it wouldn't, if it was a Lachlan or a James, I would give them possibly zero, so I'll give her a one.

Okay, one out of ten for rags to richest.

Now, let's go to villainy.

On villainy, I think there are two separate categories in villainy here.

One is the sort of business side of it where, you know, she's hard-headed, she gets what she wants.

No one would call a male billionaire a villain for doing the kind of thing she did.

She pulled off a masterstroke with Rio Tinto.

So I wouldn't give a particularly high score on villainy for her business dealings.

She worked incredibly hard and built an empire, you know,

very hands-on basically.

But in her private life, it's a different story.

Oh, yeah some people have kind of questioned if gina reinhart's wealth is actually hers at all given that pilbara belongs to first nations people originally and that's only now starting to be recognized in the law and there's actually a really interesting story uh in that gina famously refused to legitimize a first nations woman called hilda kickett who came forward in 92 who said she was also lang's daughter.

Hilda's mum had been a young cook for the Hancocks.

And Hilda claimed that she didn't want money.

She just wanted Gina to acknowledge that they were half-sisters.

And Gina wanted Hilda to sign a statement saying she wasn't Lang's daughter, but was actually Lang's father's daughter, so that Gina and her were not actually half-sisters at all.

There is a very prevalent debate in Australia about land rights and what have you.

I remember being there in the late 80s when Australia was celebrating its bicentennial for 200 years.

And I remember First Nation people have t-shirts saying, by the way, we've been here for 40,000 years.

So there was an argument that the Hancock-Reinhart family actually

was not really the owner of that land.

It was actually the Martidja-Banijima people, and that Hancock could only stake his mining claim there back in 1952 because he was white, they were black, they had no land rights under something called the Flora and Fauna Act.

And this shocking act actually classifies First Nation people as basically the same as plants.

Oh my god.

So basically, the same way a plant doesn't have any right to own land or property.

Correct.

Right.

So Gina hasn't commented directly on the issue of land rights, but people argue that she doesn't own this money because the land never belonged to her in the first place.

Yeah.

And that is a very broad philosophical, legal, cultural point and could apply to anyone in any business which involves land property.

So that argument that has been used in her case because she's so fantastically rich, but it's a much broader point that would apply to lots of different businesses.

Especially in Australia, I think, and certainly also in, you know, some would argue the United States.

But, I mean, in terms of personal villainy, like she inherited that problem from her dad, but she's, in terms of the personal villainy stakes, you know, there've been plenty of other stuff that would rank her pretty high in my eyes.

You know, there's the whole legal battle with roles.

She can nurse a grievance for a long time.

Yeah.

I think even she would agree with that assessment.

And also, she's got some strident views on climate change in that she denies it.

Yeah, she doesn't believe that burning fossil fuels causes climate change at all.

She actually wrote about it in the Australian Mining Magazine.

Yeah, in fact, in 2021, she slammed the climate change propaganda in Australian schools and insisted students do their own research on whether climate change was actually human-induced.

She's even sponsored speaking tours of Lord Christopher Moncton, who's a UK climate change sceptic.

And she's got climate sceptics on the boards of two of her mining companies.

So it's clear where she stands on that.

So her villainy would depend, I suppose, on where you stand on that.

I think I'm going to notch my original in my mind of seven on villainy up to an eight.

Oh, I would agree.

Climate change denier in this time and age.

Especially Australia, which has got some of the worst wildfires anyway.

I mean, for that alone,

I would give her an eight.

Okay, so eight for you, eight for me.

All right.

Philanthropy.

So Gina was actually awarded the Order of Australia in 2022 for philanthropic work.

Yeah.

Which is a tick in her column, I guess.

Yeah.

They support a number of medical, sporting, educational, health, community organisations.

She's the patron of Australia's internationally renowned Olympic swimming, rowing, volleyball, and synchronized swimming teams.

In fact, Australia is pretty good at all of those things, particularly swimming.

And she's received the Order of Merit from the Australian Olympic Committee.

Some would argue that...

Sponsoring Olympians while noble is not exactly changing the world.

And remember, she was very, very vocal and helped finance a campaign to get rid of a tax on Australia's vast mineral wealth.

So I think for philanthropy

a one.

Yeah, I'd give her a one.

A generous one.

Tax the tax.

That's not exactly the philanthropic slogan you want to hear.

No.

Okay, power.

I would say she's very powerful in Australia.

She often used political lobbying.

She's befriended past and, you know, past prime ministers.

She clearly

knows that political power is important when it comes to shaping things like tax policy.

We were just deciding.

So I don't know.

I'm going to give her a five because I honestly don't know.

My measure of this is, could she call up the president of the United States and demand an audience?

he or she pick up the phone?

I think Australian Prime Minister probably yes.

I think US President no.

Yeah, so I would give her a four out of ten.

Okay.

If the leader of the richest country in the world wouldn't take your call, she can't be that powerful.

It's a high bar that you've set there.

We're talking about billionaires.

Okay, I'm going to give her a five, you're going to give her a four.

And then we have a category called legacy.

If Gina didn't exist, would there have been another Gina to extract all that iron ore from Australia?

Probably.

That iron ore would have been extracted, mark my words.

There's no way it was going to stay in the ground when China had a voracious appetite for it.

So it's not like she's a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs or she hasn't invented anything.

No.

In the first instance, she built an empire which was based on land rights, which are hotly disputed by First Nation Australians to extract iron ore, which was already in the ground anyway.

So apart from a few massive holes in the ground, she hasn't left much of a mark on the planet in terms of what she's contributed.

I would give her a three out of ten.

I think newspaper editors will mourn, you know, will think fondly of her, of this era, because they've provided some of the best family squabbles and you power plays you've ever seen but i i would say one for legacy yeah oh that's a low oh okay all right two and then we've got to decide is she good bad or just another billionaire

well

the thing is climate change denier climate change stuff okay let's look honestly climate change denier in an industry that's probably contributing to climate change itself yeah which you know it would be hard for her to be a climate change um campaigner whilst being the the boss of one of the world's largest private markets.

No, but, you know,

she could always greenwash herself a little bit more effectively.

But she really doesn't seem to care.

A brilliant, intolerant attitude to the poor,

a

vendetta-like

pursuit of family

interests through the courts.

On the other hand, an enterprising, tough,

and resourceful business executive who took an empire and made it several hundred times what she inherited.

I think she tips towards the bad, I'm afraid.

The thing that sticks out to me is the fact that she changed the vesting date of the trust so her kids would effectively only get it when they were elderly.

Or possibly even

after they died.

Exactly.

I mean that was mean.

That was flat out mean, wasn't it?

And that was unnecessary.

She's a baddie for me.

A baddie for me too.

Sorry, Gina.

The highly litigious Gina.

Please don't come after us.

But I'm afraid you are a bad billionaire.

Shall we send that to the lawyers then?

I think we better get that legal.

That's legally radioactive.

I think we've got to send that to the lawyers.

So who have we got next week?

We've got the man with the need for speed.

One of the fastest wheeler dealers in the business.

Appropriate because he started out as a second-hand car salesman.

It's Bernie Eccleston, the former boss of Formula One.

Thanks for listening to Good Bad Billionaire.

This podcast is produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward.

James Cook is our editor and it's a BBC audio production.

And if you enjoyed this tale of family fortunes and family feuding, there's another Australian family you might want to check up on.

The episode is about a fellow you may or may not know of called Rupert Murdoch.

He's one of our good, bad billionaires.

Check it out.

Exciting times, Ellis.

Oh, is it?

Why?

Well, our brand new podcast is here.

Two releases a week, and we get to leave behind the shackles of live radio and draconian vaping laws of Broadcasting House.

Ellis, we are the pioneers of digital Britain, grasping the opportunity to redefine the audio landscape through powerful, impactful, dynamic conversation.

You and I will inspire the next generation of free thinkers.

What are your aims and aspirations for this new dawn?

I'll try to arrive on time and not eat manguane.

You know what?

I'll take that.

The Ellis James and John Robbins podcast, out on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Listen on BBC Sounds.