Article by Brad Thompson, courtesy of The Australian.
21.11.2025
Gina Rinehart wants net zero emissions targets sacrificed to protect farmers like herself from sharing their land with transmission infrastructure and said the retirement of the “very bad policy” is long 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 national agricultural day, an event founded and sponsored by her private company Hancock Prospecting since 2017.
Mrs Rinehart did not mention Sussan Ley or the Liberal Party by name but sympathises with dumping the net zero by 2050 target.
“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 or environmental standards.”
Mrs Rinehart, worth an estimated $45bn and one of Australia’s biggest players in agriculture in her own right, said net zero was making farming in Australia more difficult and more expensive.
She referenced the increasing backlash in the bush to governments ramming through wind and solar farms, and the construction of transmission lines across prime agricultural land.
“Australia has too much debt, too few in government who want to realise it and no plan to fix it,” Mrs Rinehart said. “Net zero is not a plan to fix, it is the very opposite, a massive problem. Farmers are saying ‘no more’.
“Do we want food security and higher living standards and less taxes, or the Paris Accord and net zero’s growing consequences?”
Dr Forrest and Mrs Rinehart have clashed over the climate target with the Fortescue founder and executive chairman criticising her rejection of emissions reduction goals on fiscal grounds. He remains convinced renewables will be a source of economic prosperity for Australia.
Mrs Rinehart said on Friday that Australians should stop listening to “the pro-renewables propaganda”.
“Australians were promised cheaper power, from wrongly called renewables, but instead we’ve ended up with the highest prices in the world, and massive government spending of taxpayers’ money, and companies spending of their shareholders’ money,” she said.
“We will have increasingly intermittent electricity, given the sun doesn’t shine overnight, or when lessened by clouds or volcanic ash, and the wind doesn’t always blow at the speed required.
“Even massive batteries can’t make up for this. The government hasn’t informed us about the real costs of net zero.”
As a big investor in onshore gas production in Queensland and WA, Mrs Rinehart said the alternatives in terms of electricity generation were not renewable. A single 3-megawatt turbine requires 335 tonnes of steel made with metallurgical coal, nearly 5 tonnes of copper, 3 tonnes of aluminium, and 2 tonnes of rare earths, she said. Wind turbines required about 18 mined minerals, solar panels required 20 and batteries required 14.
Hancock Prospecting has big investments in lithium and the rare earths needed in the energy transition but has made those on commercial not ideological grounds.
“Anyone who terms this ‘renewable’ energy, watch out, they are lying,” Mrs Rinehart said. “People are beginning to see through the short burst of jobs created during the green incinerator’s environmentally destructive construction. Once the ribbon is cut and the photo opportunities done, they generate very few long-term jobs – perhaps some people to bury the birds and bats wind towers kill. Or maybe that’s left to the farmers, too.”