NET ZERO ‘VERY BAD POLICY’: RINEHART

Gina Rinehart has delivered a ringing endorsement of the Liberal Party’s move to abandon net zero emissions targets and said retirement of the “very bad policy” is overdue.

Mrs Rinehart, who is Australia’s richest person, criticised politicians and business leaders who she described as wallowing in the green energy trough by accepting junkets paid for by taxpayers and shareholders to promote climate activism.

Her comments coincided with a deal brokered in Brazil for Energy Minister Chris Bowen to become president of the UN COP31 summit in Turkey. Mrs Rinehart’s iron ore mining rival and Fortescue executive chairman Andrew Forrest has been a prominent attendee at COP30 in Brazil.

Net zero was sold as a dream on the false hope of lower electricity prices but was a nightmare Australians could not afford, she asserted. The comments were made in a speech on Friday to mark agricultural day, an event sponsored by her private company Hancock Prospecting.

Mrs Rinehart did not mention Sussan Ley or the Liberal Party but sympathises with dumping net zero by 2050.

“Fires can be put out, floods are followed by feed and if you have to de-stock in drought then you can restock later,” she said in reference to some of the challenges already faced by farmers. “But you can’t avoid bad policy without leaving the country altogether. Net zero is very bad policy. “If government policies and net zero mean they (farmers) can no longer grow food and fibre here, we’ll be relying on imports from countries that care about their own people trying to earn a living, not about emissions.”