Gina Rinehart, a worldwide warming denier and the wealthiest individual in Australia, can not defend the sports activities she sponsors from the affect of the local weather disaster. However ought to they be defending Rinehart’s fame from the condemnation that’s more and more directed at those that stand in the best way of local weather motion?
That’s the query on the lips of many Australian athletes following the announcement on Friday that Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting was changing into a significant associate of the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) in a four-year deal. Simply days after being appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for, amongst different issues, her distinguished service “to sport as a patron”, Rinehart has elevated her already appreciable involvement with Australian Olympic sport. However at a time of rising athlete activism round local weather motion, the appropriateness of the AOC lending its social licence to Rinehart and Hancock Prospecting is doubtful.
In 2020, the AOC turned a signatory to the United Nations Sports activities for Local weather Motion Framework. “We will definitely be advocating with our stakeholders the significance of conserving very important assets, decreasing and recycling waste, selling environmental stewardship and tackling international warming,” an AOC spokesperson stated final month, previous to the deal being introduced. Have they advised Rinehart, who has referred to as local weather science “propaganda”?
In recent times, the 67-year-old has poured cash into Australian Olympic sports activities. Her annual contribution throughout swimming, rowing, volleyball and creative (synchronised) swimming is estimated to exceed $10m, even earlier than Friday’s announcement (an AOC spokesperson refused to place a greenback determine on the brand new deal). Hancock Prospecting billboards dominate Australian swim meets, whereas Rowing Australia’s excessive efficiency centre in Penrith is known as after the iron ore miner. The sports activities usually describe Rinehart as their “patron” in official communications and have awards and occasions in her honour.
The billionaire’s selection of sports activities is noteworthy. Though swimming and rowing are each main contributors to the Australia’s Olympic medal tally, neither – nor volleyball or creative swimming – is a industrial heavyweight. Regardless of all 4 receiving federal authorities help to various extents (swimming is the best-funded, at over $9m this 12 months), athletes don’t sometimes benefit from the skilled salaries commonplace in different elite sports activities.
Rinehart, whose wealth is estimated at $31bn, has sought to fill this hole. She supplies a minimum of $1.4m yearly to rowing, which fits to a weekly wage of $525 for the highest 50 Australian rowers. Rinehart has an identical association with swimming, offering salary-style funding for athletes throughout three tiers, with the highest-tier receiving about $32,000 per 12 months.
“I don’t say this frivolously, however Gina Rinehart saved swimming,” veteran Cate Campbell advised the Australian Monetary Overview throughout final 12 months’s Tokyo Olympics, the place she received two gold medals. “Gina Rinehart stepped in [after sponsors had withdrawn funding in 2012]. She made funds accessible that went on to athletes. This allowed many athletes – myself included – to see that there was a future profession in swimming for us.”
Following the profitable Tokyo 2020 marketing campaign, Rinehart gifted earrings, designed by the magnate herself and made by Australian jeweller Paspaley, to feminine athletes in every of the sports activities she helps. Male athletes obtained Apple laptops. “The continued generosity of Mrs Rinehart in help of those Olympic and Paralympic groups is unimaginable,” Liberal senator Hollie Hughes advised parliament in November, updating the Senate on Rinehart’s post-Tokyo gifting spree. “So many athletes are capable of attain their goals due to her help.”
Rinehart’s annual funding is equal to about one-tenth of the Australian Institute of Sport’s complete excessive efficiency funding allocation this monetary 12 months. Underscoring the importance of her involvement, Rinehart-funded sports activities accounted for 11 of the nation’s 17 Olympic golds in Tokyo and 26 of Australia’s complete haul of 46 medals.
In a video revealed on Rinehart’s web site, Swimming Australia’s stars sung the praises of their benefactor following the Video games. “You could have been our primary cheerleader each step of the best way,” Campbell stated. Two-time bronze medallist in Tokyo, Alex Graham, added: “With out your help, in fact, none of it will have been attainable – and we’re extraordinarily grateful.” Different swimmers to characteristic within the video included Bronte Campbell, Jess Hansen and Ellie Cole.
Clear local weather views
So what? What does it matter if Australia’s richest citizen chooses to splash her largesse on in any other case underfunded sports activities? If Australia’s swimmers, rowers and volleyballers can practice full time because of Rinehart’s funding, and put on pearl earrings on good events, all the higher? And certainly a significant funding enhance for the AOC can solely be a superb factor?
Alongside her sporting passions, Rinehart has been outspoken in her views on local weather change and continues to help local weather change denial. In 2018, it emerged in authorized proceedings that Hancock Prospecting had donated nearly $5m to the Institute of Public Affairs, a conservative thinktank that has persistently promoted international warming scepticism. She additionally admitted to bringing distinguished local weather change sceptics Lord Christopher Monckton and Prof Ian Plimer to handle college students at a highschool after studying that that they had been proven Al Gore’s local weather movie An Inconvenient Fact.
In a speech in November, Rinehart described Australia’s official attendance on the Cop26 local weather summit in Glasgow as a “waste [of] taxpayers’ cash” and mocked the job-creating potential of renewable vitality. “I do know the miles of photo voltaic panels will want wiping to be efficient, and the tens of millions of useless bats and birds – lives claimed by wind energy infrastructure – will want gathering and burying,” she stated. (Whereas wind generators do affect wildlife, fossil gasoline manufacturing – and home cats – kill way more birds.)
Rinehart can also be an influential backer of the Nationwide occasion. She hosted deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce’s first fundraiser following his return to the management, and has beforehand flown Joyce to a marriage in India on a non-public jet. In 2017, Rinehart gave Joyce a private cheque for $40,000 at a gala dinner, though he returned the cash following criticism. The Nationals, as is well-known, are the most important blockers of local weather motion within the governing Liberal-Nationwide coalition. Joyce is believed to have opposed the Morrison authorities’s web zero by 2050 goal.
All of which sits uneasily with the rising local weather activism of Australian athletes and sports activities. The Campbell sisters are among the many lots of of athletes to have joined the Cool Down initiative, championed by David and Emma Pocock, which seeks to make use of sporting profile to advertise local weather motion. “If local weather motion was the Olympics, Australia isn’t successful gold, we’re not making the finals, in truth, we don’t even qualify,” its web site says.
In 2021, the Local weather Council, a number one Australian local weather NGO, revealed a report on sport and local weather change, titled Recreation, Set, Match: Calling Time on Local weather Inaction. Among the many high-profile athletes to talk out following the report’s launch had been Bronte Campbell, Australian cricket captain Pat Cummins, surfer Adrian Buchan and AFLW star Sharni Layton.
“Australia’s summer season of sport is below menace from local weather change,” Dr Martin Rice, the Local weather Council’s head of analysis, advised Guardian Australia. “Local weather change, pushed by the burning of coal, oil and gasoline, is worsening excessive climate occasions and disrupting Australian sport. By 2040, heatwaves in Sydney and Melbourne might attain highs of 50C, threatening the viability of summer season sport as it’s at present performed.
“Sport is a robust drive for local weather options,” Rice continued. “In terms of sponsorship, skilled and neighborhood sports activities ought to change from fossil fuel-backed corporations to ones that spend money on local weather options.”
Ongoing relationships
Rinehart just isn’t alone in each sponsoring sport and resisting local weather motion. Oil and gasoline firm Santos is a significant sponsor of the Tour Down Beneath biking and the Wallabies, whereas Adani – which is at present growing the Carmichael coalmine, anticipated to trigger 200m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions – has its emblem on the sleeve of the North Queensland Cowboys. Woodside, which in December signalled its intent to proceed with a gasoline growth that will launch 1.37bn tonnes of CO2, has been the Fremantle Dockers’ main sponsor for over a decade. Former Wallabies captain Pocock not too long ago described fossil gasoline sponsorship as “the brand new cigarette sponsorship.”
However Rinehart’s involvement is nearer, extra private and now, following the AOC deal, much more high-profile. She and her firm are usually not simply participating in a transactional industrial sponsorship, however shopping for an intimate relationship with these sports activities and athletes. Her private items to Olympians is indicative of that atypical involvement. By immediately paying athlete wages, usually bypassing the nationwide sporting organisation fully, Rinehart has additionally secured an ongoing relationship much less simply changed by conventional sponsorships.
Cate Campbell, in her video message to Rinehart, famous that the billionaire had personally travelled to Cairns to farewell the workforce earlier than they departed for Tokyo. “Seeing you waving us off as we took off to go and tackle the world in Tokyo gave us that little bit of additional motivation that we would have liked to tackle one of the best on the earth,” stated the four-time Olympian. Rinehart has additionally reportedly change into shut with silver medal-winning seashore volleyballer Taliqua Clancy, who advised The Australian newspaper “Mrs Rinehart has been wonderful … and along with her help our journey up to now has been attainable. We’ve got missed her in Tokyo.”
Guardian Australia sought remark from Swimming Australia, Rowing Australia, Creative Swimming Australia, Volleyball Australia and the Australian Olympic Committee. The sports activities had been requested whether or not their acceptance of Rinehart’s help may inhibit athletes from pursuing local weather activism, whether or not the organisations had a place on local weather motion and web zero, and why that they had not signed as much as the Cool Down (organisational signatories embrace the AFL Gamers Affiliation and Skilled Footballers Affiliation, however no main sporting peak our bodies).
A spokesperson for Swimming Australia stated that it doesn’t at present obtain any direct monetary help from Hancock Prospecting or Rinehart. Hancock Prospecting was beforehand a major sponsor of Swimming Australia, together with as a headline sponsor for main occasions (the corporate’s signage was prominently poolside on the Olympic trials earlier this 12 months). Guardian Australia understands that the underlying industrial settlement was not renewed. “Our athletes usually voice their opinions on points they really feel passionately about, together with local weather motion,” the spokesperson stated.
The AOC confirmed that, previous to Friday’s deal, neither it nor its basis had obtained any monetary help from Rinehart or Hancock Prospecting. Nonetheless, in 2014, Rinehart was awarded the AOC’s Order of Advantage. An AOC spokesperson stated: “We’ve got no issues [about athletes being silenced]. Athletes with strongly held convictions on necessary points are entitled to specific their views with the identical freedom as any particular person.”
Not one of the different sporting organisations replied to requests for remark. Guardian Australia additionally unsuccessfully sought remark from Cate and Bronte Campbell by way of their agent.
In a press release revealed by the AOC following Friday’s announcement, Rinehart stated “our firm has been a long-term supporter of the summer season Olympic sports activities of creative swimming, rowing and volleyball for a few years, and particularly over 30 years for swimming. We’re so proud to assist our nice Olympians who’re such inspirations, via their exhausting work, most do not likely know the way exhausting they work, dedication, focus and self-discipline, as they endeavour to symbolize our nation to one of the best of their capability. The traits these function fashions present in my opinion, are necessary for us all, if we want to achieve life and enterprise.”
Steadfast help
With the brand new AOC deal and the 2032 Olympics confirmed for Brisbane, Rinehart’s involvement in Australian sport is just prone to develop. The billionaire has been a conspicuous presence at various occasions in Queensland celebrating the profitable bid. Rinehart made headlines at an Olympic lunch in late November, the place she appeared alongside the likes of Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, for her presentation complaining in regards to the lack of amenities to moor her superyacht alongside the Queensland coast.
“I’m booked into Paris [2024 Olympics] for all 4 sports activities that I’m concerned in,” she advised The Australian newspaper following an Olympic-themed Property Council occasion final 12 months. “I’ve been requested to proceed to Los Angeles [2028]. You by no means know I’m an aged classic however I fairly hope I’m round for 2032 as nicely.” She confirmed that intent on Friday, expressing her need to “proceed this all the best way till and together with Brisbane 2032”.
Rinehart could also be steadfast in her help for Australian Olympic sport. However except her place on local weather motion evolves, the sports activities and athletes that settle for her funding will face an more and more acute dilemma. What’s the value, to athletes and sports activities, of accepting cash from an influential denier of worldwide warming? And what’s the value to our planet?
Final winter, the enduring Manly seashore had been left battered following a significant storm – the type that now hits with better frequency and eroding drive. On the disturbed sand stood askew sponsorship banners for Hancock Prospecting, the mining firm owned by Rinehart, surrounding a seashore volleyball courtroom. The juxtaposition was stark. Friday’s deal solely underscores the dissonance. When growing warmth impacts Summer season Olympics and a scarcity of snow sours Winter Video games, the AOC is not going to be innocent.
