In 2026, The Big Issue celebrates its 30th birthday – the perfect time to revisit our fave stories from the past three decades. Like this cheeky challenge to cashed-up philanthropists, just in time for Anti-Poverty Week 2026.
Giving It All Away
By Alan Attwood
Across the world, the divide between poverty and prosperity is starting to look like an open-cut mine. But is there a solution? Does help for the very poor lie with the very rich – people like Gina Rinehart?
On a recent grey day in Melbourne, the gloom was temporarily brightened by some shameless showing-off. On the water in Docklands, two super yachts were moored side by side, thus enabling a public game of My Boat is Bigger than Yours … The clear winner was casino king James Packer, whose Seahorse, at 52m, is seven metres longer than Texas, owned by businessman Solomon Lew. But it’s likely that Lew wasn’t too bothered by this: the Property Observer website has reported that Lew actually has two boats; his other one, Maridome, is 54m long. Take that, Packer.
People flaunting their wealth always makes for good spectator sport. And despite gloomy economic news, redundancies, business closures and public hospitals closing beds because of budget cuts, there is still no shortage of conspicuous consumption. In the same week those two multimillion-dollar yachts came together, a barman at Packer’s Melbourne casino created what was billed as “the world’s most expensive cocktail” – $12,500 for one drink based on a prized 1858 cognac. The man who bought it, a casino high roller from New Zealand, didn’t even finish the cocktail. Perhaps he was saving himself for a Chinese New Year celebration at the same casino, where a $888-per-head banquet was on offer.
Meanwhile, of course, too many people go hungry and homeless. It has ever been thus. But recently a chorus of voices arose suggesting that what we have called ‘the Great Divide’ (Ed#391; October 2011) is getting broader rather than narrower. Writing in The Age in January, Australian National University (ANU) tutor John Passant argued: “The policies of neoliberal Labor and Liberal governments in the past 30 years have been to shift more wealth to the rich and business. The share of national income going to labour is at its lowest and to capital its highest since records began. Inequality in Australia has risen since the 1980s.”
Inequality was also the focus of a report released by the aid agency Oxfam in January. Commenting on the report, The Cost of Inequality, Oxfam’s London-based chief executive Barbara Stocking described extreme wealth as “economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive and environmentally destructive”. Ben Phillips, an Oxfam campaign director, told the Al Jazeera news agency: “We’re an anti-poverty agency. We focus on poverty; we work with the poorest people around the world. You don’t normally hear us talking about wealth. But it’s gotten so out of control between rich and poor that one of the obstacles to solving extreme poverty is now extreme wealth.”
Oxfam argues that inequality has grown dramatically in many countries in recent times, including the USA, the UK (“inequality is rapidly returning to levels not seen since the time of Charles Dickens,” the report says), China and South Africa (“significantly more unequal than at the end of apartheid”). But for the select few – 600,000 individuals, or 0.01 per cent of the world’s population – “the last 30 years has been an incredible feeding frenzy”, the aid agency claims. And Oxfam has a solution: sharing some of that extraordinary wealth around. It says that the world’s top 100 billionaires added US$240 billion to their wealth last year alone, enough to end world poverty four times over.
This is an appealing idea: the very rich bailing out the very poor. These statistics suggest it is feasible, though you only have to raise some basic questions to show it’s not as simple as it first seems. Where would the money be directed? To Oxfam, for example, or another international agency? All in one hit or in staggered payments? And who would decide priorities for handouts?
The fact remains, however, that giving on a grand scale is an idea that is gaining traction. Leading the way is Microsoft tsar Bill Gates, who, despite his relatively recent emergence as a born-again philanthropist, is still listed by Forbes magazine as the world’s second-richest individual, with a net worth of US$61 billion. Ahead of him is Carlos Slim Helu (and family), who struck gold with telecommunications in Mexico. With fellow billionaire Warren Buffett (third on that Forbes list), Gates founded the ‘Giving Pledge’ in 2010. Their goal with the pledge was to get some of their wealthy colleagues to promise to give away at least half their wealth within their lifetimes.
Signatories now number close to 100. Gates himself – hardly on skid row despite his own donations – has said the aim of the pledge “is to raise the visibility of philanthropy and the great things it can do … People are collaborating together quite a bit more than they would have otherwise.”
Buffett himself has pledged that 99 per cent of his wealth will go to philanthropy during his lifetime or at his death. “Measured by dollars, this commitment is large,” Buffett has said. “In a comparative sense, though, many individuals give more to others every day. Millions of people who regularly contribute to churches, schools and other organisations thereby relinquish the use of funds that would otherwise benefit their own families. The dollars these people drop into a collection plate or give to [charity] mean forgone movies, dinners out, or other personal pleasures. In contrast, my family and I will give up nothing we need or want by fulfilling this 99 per cent pledge. Moreover, this pledge does not leave me contributing the most precious asset, which is time.”
But the fact remains that Gates and Buffett have matched their words with their wallets. They have led by example, pledged large sums of money and, even more impressively, convinced many of their peers to do likewise. Businessman and former Australian of the Year Simon McKeon describes this as “amazing; the most positive development in philanthropy in recent times”. But there is a caveat to this: the Giving Pledge is largely an American phenomenon; Gates has had limited success trying to sell the idea in China and India, where there has been an explosion of middle- and upper-class wealth. And the idea hasn’t been picked up in Australia, where in 2011 McKeon said simply: “We really are not overly generous.”
Self-appointed gadfly Dick Smith has been more blunt, denouncing Australia’s wealthiest people as “appalling and greedy”. He tried in 2011 to establish a $1 billion foundation, encouraging wealthy people to contribute to it, but it seems not to have gained traction. In a speech in Canberra last November, Smith said: “What is the point of great wealth if it is not used for a good purpose? When I was growing up it was a given that the wealthy were philanthropists. In the US I know that attitude still prevails. Why not in Australia?”
Daniel Petre, a former managing director for Microsoft in Australia and thus one who has worked closely with Gates, has described the notion that the average worker gives away proportionally more than the very rich as “just appalling”. Petre, who has his own charitable foundation, was quoted by The Sydney Morning Herald in mid-2011 as saying: “Our wealthy in Australia are morally bankrupt. Generally speaking, they don’t see a moral obligation to give generously to the society in which they’ve built their wealth.”
But there are, of course, wealthy Australians who are also generous. In February this year, Graham Tuckwell, who made his money in the financial sector, donated what was reported to be $50 million to the ANU. “I suppose I could have bought a yacht, and then sat on it,” he explained. “Or I could have spent it on fancy holidays, and alienated myself from my friends, or bought half a dozen houses, but then how could I sit in church every Sunday?”
Tuckwell is doing nicely. But if the topic is wealth in Australia, one person dominates the landscape: mining heiress Georgina Hope Rinehart, Executive Chairman of Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd, based in Perth. How do you convey the extent of her wealth? Perhaps by stating simply that she is the only Australian on that Forbes list of billionaires (equal 29th; net worth US$18 billion). Last year’s version of BRWmagazine’s annual rich list estimated her assets as being four times that of the runner-up, commodity trader Ivan Glasenberg, and almost six times James Packer’s (presumably including his big boat).
Rinehart is on other lists, too. On its 2012 table of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women’, Forbes has her at number 35 – behind Lady Gaga (14) and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard (27), but ahead of Jennifer Lopez (38) and Shakira (40), both of whom are described as “musician, personality and philanthropist”. The latter is seldom a word used in association with Rinehart, now 59, although – to be fair – in 2011 she cracked the WA Women’s Hall of Fame, under the aegis of the United Nations. Her listing described her as “businesswoman and philanthropist”. And the citation read, in part, “Gina Rinehart has transformed her family company, Hancock Prospecting, from a small prospecting company to a global mining company. She has contributed financially to a wide variety of causes, from swimming to health and medical research … The Hope Educational Scholarship helps Cambodian women and she is a director of the South-East Asian Investigations into Social and Humanitarian Activities.”
Such things are seldom publicised, certainly not to the same extent as her internal family disputes, which, now that Larry ‘JR’ Hagman has died, remain Australia’s answer to Dallas. Rinehart’s personal story is fascinating; it features power, money and sweeping landscapes – which could explain why there are at least two TV biopics in the works. Yet Rinehart has an image problem. Sometimes her plain-speaking style sparks headlines, as happened last year when she suggested Africans were prepared to work for much less than Australians. More recently, in Australian Resources and Investment magazine, Rinehart wrote: “There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire. If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain. Do something to make money yourself – spend less time drinking, or smoking and socialising and more time working.”
There is some truth in such an argument, but it hasn’t helped Rinehart win friends and influence people. On the Business Spectator site last September, James Kirby wrote that Rinehart “endures the sort of disdain in some quarters not witnessed since the one-time ‘Queen of Mean’ [US hotelier] Leona Helmsley”, who once declared “only the little people pay taxes”. To Greens leader Christine Milne, Rinehart “really is the epitome of the greed and the abuse of the environment … characteristic of the mining industry”.
For this article, The Big Issue submitted some questions to Gina Rinehart’s office, seeking her personal views on wealth, business and philanthropy. There was no response, which was not surprising. Rinehart values her privacy and tightly controls any public statements: she would rather post a video or a statement online than engage in an interview.
But material accessible on the Hancock website gives an insight into her opinions, and also her reverence for her late father, Lang Hancock Through his development of the Pilbara region, she writes, “he also made money, and this made people jealous. There was nothing stopping others from taking the risks … and working hard like Dad did, but jealousy is easier, and jealousy leads to detractors, vitriol and hatred”.
Handouts do not help people, Rinehart argues; money has to be earned. ‘Tm not asking for anyone to cry for the rich,” she writes, employing a colourful turn of phrase, ‘‘but only a muffin would forget what it takes to earn the wealth that others like to spend”.
Rinehart believes that billionaires like herself are doing more than anyone else to help the poor by investing their money and creating jobs. “If you want to help the poor and our next generation, make investment, reinvestment and businesses welcome.”
This is true: investment creates jobs; jobs can certainly lead people out of poverty. But the question remains: what if Rinehart were to start singing from the Bill Gates songbook and lead by example, voluntarily and very publicly donating a sizeable portion of her vast wealth to an Australian philanthropic foundation?
McKean has no doubts about it – the impact would be extraordinary; 10 times the impact Gates has had on the US, “because’ Gates was rumbling about this for years and years when he was running Microsoft”. McKeon says of Rinehart: “She genuinely believes that the saviour of the world is commerce; it’s being industrious, and I give her credit for that: It’s better than her promoting hedonism. But if she were to make that gesture, so many heads would turn.
“It would be much more likely for [WA mining magnate] Andrew Forrest to make the gesture in Perth, but if she were to do it…it would be the biggest thing to ever happen in the community sector in this country by a mile.”
That’s big. Very big. But it’s her wealth; her choice. Whatever floats her boat.
First published Ed#426