Article by Hannah Wootton, courtesy of the Australian Finanial Review.
31.08.2025
News Corp and Gina Rinehart’s nation-crossing Bush Summit wraps up on Monday in Darwin, after a fortnight of rabble-rousing.
Let’s hope it involves less drama than Friday’s session in Ballarat, where one attendee approached Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan with a noose and anti-renewables protesters heckled Anthony Albanese and then chased him out of town on tractors. The same tractors also blocked Allan from leaving (Nationals MP Bridget McKenzie turned out to be a passenger in one).
Rinehart spoke at several of the sessions, which is not surprising given she’s paying for it. Net zero targets were ruining agriculture and stopping investment, Rinehart said.
At the Broome gathering, she came up with a scenario of what net zero world would look like for farmers, which involved a family of 13 on a WA dairy farm in an unspecified period of history when there were “no shops”, you could only eat bread, hand-churned butter and wildlife. Electricity and hard work enabled the family to progress. But a return to “true net zero”, she suggested, would mean going back to this “tough as hell” world or exiting farming altogether.
Rinehart said she hoped the summit would “help people better understand” how net zero was hurting farmers.
And News Corp certainly heard her call.
In dozens of Bush Summit-generated articles, there are claims about investors leaving Australia, headlines on the “net zero siege” and “climategate” (a Rinehart quote). The Herald Sun ran a 1700-word opinion piece by Rinehart on “the net zero disaster”.
Advance Australia got a look-in. Rinehart played a video of farmers warning net zero could lead to food shortages, polluted crops, and dead bats and birds in one of her speeches. It was watermarked with Advance’s logo. It’s a group which Rinehart has studiously avoided any documented connection to, but which launched a sweeping anti-net zero campaign on Sky News in August with the help of “a generous donor”. (We asked Rinehart if it was her. She did not respond.)
So far, so predictable. A well-known conservative billionaire uses her money to purchase a platform to push her favourite hobbyhorses. Gina is entitled to her view.
What makes things interesting is that the platform in this case – News Corp’s publications – weren’t that long ago front and centre for the Murdochs’ high-profile pivot to promoting the benefits of a net zero economy.
It was back in 2021 when News Corp launched a company-wide campaign supporting net zero, marking a departure from an editorial line that had been generally been quite sceptical about the need for urgent climate change action.
The company’s “climate denialism”, as James Murdoch once described it, was on the nose five years ago. News Corp’s coverage of the Black Saturday bushfires put staff offside. In a (temporarily) post-Trump world, public support for climate action was booming. Advertisers were following suit.
News Corp aggressively pivoted. Its major tabloids ran 16-page wraps, declaring “Australia is the best-placed nation on earth to be the global winner in a net zero world”. Columnist Joe Hildebrand fronted the transformation. Conservative commentators reframed (if not fully reformed) their views.
Enter Rinehart and her Bush Summit cash, and News Corp is beating even the Nationals for net zero flip-flopping.
Other guest speakers included Pauline Hanson, who declared net zero was a “scam”, and WA Pastoralists and Graziers Association and Rinehart offsider Tony Seabrook.
He called on Australia to burn more coal instead of exporting it, and to “tell the people from the Pacific Islands saying [they] are drowning under the water” that there was “no chance whatsoever” emissions reductions in Australia will make a difference.
Nationals Matt Canavan and Barnaby Joyce took a break from tormenting Sussan Ley to tell the summit emissions targets were “artificial” (Canavan) and that net zero was “a crock” (Joyce). Though a debate between Joyce and Clean Energy Council spokesman Chris O’Keefe meant some views from the progressive side of the argument were aired.
When News Corp made its initial 2021 pledge to support net zero, Daily Telegraph editor Ben English said the climate debate for too long “been used as a political weapon, wielded by power players and vested interests and people looking to make a buck”. Imagine that.