What am I, Andrew Forrest, going to do today?

Going by his musings of the past fortnight, there is a non-zero risk that Andrew Forrest has been hitting the ayahuasca again.

Two weeks ago, the mining billionaire stood beside Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at a press conference in Shanghai forecasting “hundreds of thousands of new jobs … in both China for green steel and particularly Australia in green iron ore”.

Lapsing into his trademark homespun gobbledygook, and with otherworldly fervour burning behind his eyes, Forrest emoted: “I just speak today as a passionate Australian person who’s always been happy to cart the oranges out for our country, any time.”

Twelve hundred kilometres north in Beijing, you can picture the scene deep within China’s State Council building as the Communist Party’s elite powerbrokers exchanged bewildered looks. “I swear he just said oranges?” one queried. “This can’t just be a bad translation, surely?” wondered another.

In fact, let’s just walk in the shoes of the Chinese translator for a moment. She spent a decade at China’s most prestigious universities and another dozen years in Chinese embassies abroad. Nothing prepared her for this. She returns to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that afternoon and hands in her credentials. “That’s it, I’m done, I’m no good at this.” She has a case of the yips that will last another quadrennial cycle of the National People’s Congress.

Of course, no replacement can be found. The MFA’s English translator pool has been abruptly deserted – all the signs are of a stampede. The desk chief falsely confesses to being a Falun Gong practitioner, preferring banishment or even organ harvesting to being assigned to Twiggy’s next rapture.

Fast-forward to last week and Forrest’s Fortescue Metals Group announced that two of its three much-hyped green energy projects – one in Gladstone and another in the US state of Arizona – will not proceed. There were inevitable weasel words (“[our] project pipeline continues to be progressed and refined in a disciplined manner that reflects global market conditions and policy settings”), but make no mistake: this was Twiggy – like Abraham offering up his favourite son – forsaking his hydrogen dream.

The Albanese government responded by publicly asking Fortescue to repay the subsidies it has banked for this Gladstone electrolyser factory.

Just as Forrest was the previous week touting “hundreds of thousands of new jobs” in Shanghai with Albo, he had previously said that “manufacturing will come roaring back to regional Australia” thanks to this Gladstone project “creating many thousands of jobs”.

He bounces so quickly between undeliverable promises that scarcely anyone possesses the discipline or resources to hold him to them. I’ve certainly given up the tally, though I do remember Forrest warning in 2023 that we could all imminently die of lethal humidity, and hyping that his “major breakthrough” of discovering “the membrane” was the opening sortie to green hydrogen at commercial scale.

I also fondly recall Twiggy’s global PR blitz of 2021, pledging that Fortescue would invest “over $US100 billion developing the top hydro, solar and geothermal sites in Africa”. Ultimately, the totality of Fortescue’s investment in those projects was its investment in the press release.

The same year, Forrest painted London’s black cabs green, replete with the jingle that “hydrogen can save us”. Four years later he can’t even light his own farts with the stuff.

He is hardly the first businessperson who wanted to be early on a technological step change or megatrend, but you’ve got to have something to back it up. Manifesting is not an investment strategy. Unlike Elizabeth Holmes with her Theranos blood machines, Twiggy is not out to defraud people, but he was otherwise selling the same thing: nothing.

Forrest always gets his way with people, but it must be painful to realise that you can’t cajole, charm or just pay the global economy to accord with your fantasies, and that the laws of physics are not up for negotiation.

Notably in May, Fortescue’s co-CEO Mark Hutchinson – the man tasked with giving structure to Forrest’s messianic green vision – became only the latest executive to slink off into the mangroves. “Pull the ship over here, I’m just heading into shore for a minute … See ya f—en’ later!” Never to be seen again.

Forrest has meanwhile pivoted from talking about green hydrogen to talking about green iron and green steel, which is a fabulous bit of newspeak. Fortescue sells iron ore to Chinese steelmakers, whose production he has zero influence over. Twiggy might produce a few thimblesful of green iron at Christmas Creek, but the Chinese are not making green steel at scale any time soon.

Presumably to distract from this carnival of narrative incongruity, Forrest last week provoked a war of words with former prime minister Scott Morrison over the former government’s defiance of China, and heaped praise on Albanese and the détente he has achieved in the bilateral relationship.

I’m certainly not here to defend ScoMo, who again makes a compelling case for the reinstatement of a pension for ex-prime ministers. There he was last week before US Congress, whoring himself for the US defence industry not even four years since committing $400 billion of our money to eight dubious American submarines.

Then on Tuesday this week, Forrest entered the fray a second time, raging in The Australian against a critique of his original sermon by Pentagon mouthpiece Peter Jennings (paired with a devastating Johannes Leak cartoon).

Forrest’s second harangue stands as a classic of his maniacal oeuvre. Fortescue, he claimed, is “Australia’s largest and most successful business” – untrue on a revenue, earnings, market capitalisation or headcount basis.

“I throw everything I have at heading off global climate change,” he said in the fortnight he’d massively scaled back his green energy ambitions.

“We can outlast warmongers like Putin on the battlefield,” he wrote, despite China’s ongoing supply of steel and military-use componentry to Russia keeping Putin on the battlefield in Ukraine.

And stung deeply by Jennings’ legitimate observation that he incessantly holds forth on human rights while overlooking China’s own stained human rights record, Forrest lurched into his customary overreach.

“China knows and respects that I live and breathe human rights. They are at the centre of Fortescue’s procurement process, where we go beyond the desktop checks others settle for by verifying conditions on the factory floor and ensuring traceability of raw materials through upstream supply chains.”

Andrew Forrest photographed with former Prime Minister Julia Gillard at the Boao Forum in 2013.
Photobomber: Forrest with then prime minister Julia Gillard at the Boao Forum, on Hainan Island, in 2013.

Wow-ee, Twiggy imagines there’s a special department in Beijing dedicated to studying how he feels about human rights. The blokes who drove the tanks through Tiananmen Square all work there, and they feed his personal enthusiasms straight into the party’s national policy objectives.

As for the “traceability of raw materials through upstream supply chains”, what’s he actually suggesting here? That when Fortescue floats a crusher in from China, it knows that no human suffering occurred in its manufacture, right down to the production of its base ingredients?! Not just that Fortescue was assured as much by Chinese officials, but that Fortescue actually verified that assurance!

It stretches credulity, and that’s being generous. In 2021, I revealed that the solar panels powering Fortescue’s Christmas Creek and Cloudbreak mines were fabricated by a Chinese supplier renowned for using Uyghur forced labour, which took me about 15 minutes of desktop research to establish. Passing Fortescue’s anti-slavery supply chain checks has historically been about as exacting as securing a Coffee Club card.

Forrest cannot countenance any criticism of himself and he applies the same standard to the authoritarian state upon which his wealth and his view of himself most depends. China is also above criticism and he alone can resolve this tension with its human rights record because he’s the human rights guy. He’s a Time magazine cover star. Don’t you know his daughter has a foundation?

No cracks can be allowed to appear in the heroic portrait Twiggy’s been furiously painting of himself. At the hint of any criticism, he seizes the pulpit to envelop himself in the cover of good intentions. Let me tell you why what I’m doing is not commercial, but principled, moral, intergenerational. Let me save you, I’m your hero, the time for peace is now!

His critics are “armchair warriors”, whereas he’s in the trenches and in the saddle – both footsoldier and general. He was born in the wrong era, because a man like Twiggy really needs a glorious army behind him. Welcome to Andrew’s world, where it’s a helluva responsibility being the unelected and uninvited leader of peoples.

Fortescue pays a shitload of tax – more than you or I would pay if we worked for 2000 years – and Forrest created Fortescue out of nothing. What’s more, his irrational exuberance for green hydrogen was born out of a need for someone to show leadership on climate change, and that much is actually laudable.

But Forrest proclaims as if he has some official role in public policy, and he just doesn’t. He’s like one of those teenagers waving in the background of live TV news crosses – a public policy photobomber.

You’re better to have a seat at the wedding for the mad uncle who’s bound to turn up anyway, but you sure as shit don’t put him on the bridal table and you keep him away from the microphone at speech time. That’s Twiggy. He thinks we’re all gratefully lapping up his main character energy but actually everyone’s just trying to manage him, from the prime ministers of middle powers right down to his own paid retinue.

When any one-time mortal turned plutocrat divorces his longstanding wife, he loses the one person in his world who can look him in the eye and tell him he’s being a goose. Nicola and so many of his lieutenants have legged it from his inner sanctum, but out here on High Street, the rest of us still have to endure his ministry, to be saved by the wild-eyed prophet.

In the course of each day, Forrest is delivering all of us from something – not just climate change. He’s ending slavery, restoring the oceans, liberating farmed salmon, playing Enya to cows in their final seconds. The weight of duty he must feel when he gets up each morning.

Imagine being present in that moment after he’s finished shaving, when he first looks into the mirror. What am I, Andrew Forrest, going to do today? The possibilities are terrifying.