Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart is not used to being upstaged, but an insistent horse left her in helpless fits of laughter as it kept interrupting her speech.
Mrs Rinehart stood in a paddock filming a speech for the Bush Summit being held in the north west Tasmanian city of Launceston on Tuesday when one of the two horses grazing behind her ambled her way.
As Mrs Rinehart, who is head of iron ore giant Hancock Prospecting, talked about the benefits of mining to the general community, the horse started nibbling on the sleeves of her Driza-Bone jacket.
Despite trying to gamely continue and ignore the farm animal, Mrs Rinehart eventually burst out laughing when the horse nibbled her collar leading to a sudden cut in filming.
On the other side of the abrupt edit Mrs Rinehart attempted to resume where she left off but the horse maintained an interest in the back of her jacket.
‘The housing crisis doesn’t stop on the mainland, I know it reaches Tassie too,’ Mrs Rinehart said while the horse started tugging on her sleeve causing her to shoot it an alarmed look.
The mining magnate broke out into another laugh but determinedly continued talking about the benefits of mining and agriculture.
As the horse nuzzled behind her, the animal at one stage caused Mrs Rinehart to pitch awkwardly forward, but she kept her feet planted.
Having sufficiently explored the back of Mrs Rinehart the horse walked around the side and then suddenly loomed up in the bottom right corner of the screen as the video cut away to pre-recorded stock footage to illustrate the themes of the address.
When the video focused once more on Mrs Rinehart the equine interloper had finally wandered off.
In the speech, the third she has given to the six-day Bush Summit, Mrs Rinehart urged those who valued agriculture and mining to ‘let our politicians know we don’t want to go down as an industry or country, we want to go up’.
‘We want to see policies that don’t frighten away investment, that instead lead to increased investment, increased living standards, and more in your pocket after tax, to spend as you wish,’ she said.
The things that drag Australia down are taxes, over-regulation and red tape, Mrs Rinehart argued.
She said the Minerals Council of Australia had recently estimated that the nation is missing out on about $68 billion of investment because major mining projects had been ‘increasingly put in the too-hard basket’.
Mrs Rinehart said only 20 per cent of projects that debut on Australia’s major projects list are completed ‘while 80 per cent are abandoned altogether’.
Despite record immigration, Mrs Rinehart stated there was a worker shortage.
She claimed that for every million migrants ‘this government has brought in’ there had only been about ‘approximately 40,000 added to the workforce’.
She called on federal and state governments to drop taxes as a way to ease the cost of living crisis that had left people deciding whether ‘to heat (their homes) or eat’.
‘We don’t want empty words, we want to know taxes that were to be dropped when GST came in, payroll, licence fees and stamp tax will be dropped,’ she said.
‘We want to hear that the federal government will drop its excise tax on fuel, not just lowering costs for our cars and other vehicles, but lowering the cost of all transported goods, and all goods that require fuel for their processing or manufacture.’
Mrs Rinehart’s Driza-Bone is one of the sponsors of the Bush Summit, which goes for six days in six different regional locations.
The regional centres hosting the summit are Townsville in Queensland, Bendigo in Victoria, Launceston in Tasmania, McLaren Vale in South Australia, Orange in NSW and Port Hedland in Western Australia.
