Carlo’s Corner: Rinehart’s poetry bad, politics worse

Now, I'll admit that my idea of poetry is watching Essendon’s Dyson Heppell, the AFL’s 2011 Rising Star award winner, float across half back, helping repel another opposition attack with his silky skills. But I like to think I know quality when I see it.

So I was especially pleased to see billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart put pen to paper and produce the poem "Our Future", which a glowing account in the Perth-based Murdoch-owned Sunday Times described on February 11 as “poetic swipe at her critics”.

Rinehart’s masterpiece includes such hard-hitting lines as: “Is our future threatened with massive debts run up by political hacks/Who dig themselves out by unleashing rampant tax?”

The scathing poem goes on: “Through such unfortunate ignorance, too much abuse is hurled/Against miners, workers and related industries who strive to build the world.

“Develop North Australia, embrace multiculturalism and welcome short term foreign workers to our shores/to benefit from the export of our minerals and ores.”

She concludes, concisely: “The world’s poor need our resources: do not leave them to their fate/Our nation needs special economic zones and wiser government, before it is too late.”

I cannot deny this charming poem has forced me to rethink many of my long-held views.

Explained in such a compelling rhyming fashion, I can finally see the logic in allowing, without any restrictions from “political hacks”, giant mining corporations to have open slather to destroy the local environment in order to dig up and sell minerals to feed a fossil fuel based-economy that threatens to destroy the entire planet — all while paying next-to-no tax on the super-profits reaped.

And her call for “special economic zones”, in which the mining companies can pay even less tax while importing a cheap, super-exploited workforce of “short term foreign workers” from impoverished Third World nations to undermine wages, conditions and trade unions, really rings true when “fate” is so cleverly rhymed with “late”.

And the bold originality of the poem! Who before Gina Rinehart would have dared speak out for multiculturalism, only in the next breath to define it as her right to transport brown people to work down her mines for a pittance?

Especially impressive is that this great artistic work is being displayed in public, for free, for the ordinary punter to enjoy. The Sunday Times explained: “Her words have been engraved on to a plaque fixed to a 30-tonne iron ore boulder that now sits as an artistic feature outside the new Coventry Square Markets in [the Perth suburb of] Morley.”

The paper reports that Greg Poland, chair of Strzelecki Group that owns the Coventry Square Markets, said: “Poetry was one of several creative ways Mrs Rinehart, who rarely gives interviews or speaks publicly, would communicate her views.”

Which really makes you wonder why Rinehart has bothered to buy a 13% stake in Fairfax media. Surely she could just donate giant lumps of ore to suburbs in cities across Australia with her views inscribed in poetry.

It could even become a tourist attraction if every Australian city had at least one big rock bearing lines such as: “I may be stinking rich, but I should pay no tax/For if I did, quite clearly, all hope for the world’s poor would at once collapse.”

Or: “There are so many dark-skinned and desperate people in poor nations nearby/They could come and work for next-to-nothing down my mines, if only those political hacks would let them apply.”

The irony of Rinehart’s poem is that the argument that open-slather mining by giant corporations is somehow essential to Australian prosperity (to say nothing of Rinehart’s claim that it is essential to the world’s poor) is taking something of a battering.

The mining industry employs little more than 1% of Australia’s labour force. At the same time as the mining giants are making super-profits, problems are growing in other sectors.

This year, companies that have announced lay-offs or planned lay-offs include ANZ, Westpac, NAB, Suncorp, Alcoa, Qantas, Air Australia, Telstra, Pacific Brands, Caltex, Toyota, Holden, Heinz, Billabong and Goodman Fielder.

But thank christ Rinehart and her cronies are out there digging shit up to make themselves richer.

With economic insecurity rising, it was up to the Murdoch media, so taken by Rinehart’s poem, to point the finger at the real economic vandals: asylum seekers.

The February 17 Daily Telegraph’s hard-hitting investigative article “Boatload of goodies” spelled it out. At the same time as Australian middle-income earners are so concerned for their economic future, the Murdoch tabloid exposed how the government has taken to housing some asylum seekers in ... houses. With furniture in them and everything.

Never mind that the claim asylum seekers were being “given” TVs and other consumer goods is entirely untrue (they temporarily stay in houses that happen to contain these things). The key message to readers is to look down, not up, to find who to blame for economic pain.

Here is a suggestion for a better policy than bashing the desperate: how about we stop bowing down to the mining giants and put the industry into public hands.

We could put the wealth generated to socially useful ends — to help counter the threat of economic pain in other areas, to improve services and living standards and undercut the fears on which racist media play. This could begin a process of transition away from environmentally destructive industries and towards publicly-owned green industries with well-paid, decent jobs.

No doubt Rinehart would react with horror at this suggestion for nationalistion, but really, she needn't worry. She has already accumulated more money than she could spend if she lived to be a 1000 and such a move would free her up to spend more time on her poetry.