Curious how numbers are thought of in different ways. Gina Rinehart makes two million dollars an hour and spends it largely on self-indulgence and is mostly congratulated for it. Craig Thomson spends six thousand dollars in two years (if that’s what he did) on self-indulgence and is trashed and ruined for it. Rhinehart earns six thousand dollars in one tenth of a second. Does she spend it righteously? Does she pay for sex? Is it in any way our money she pays for it with? We do not even ask.
If we confiscated every three hours one hour’s worth of her earnings we would have sixteen more million a day, five billion six hundred and forty-four million a year to spend on the poor; on schools, hospitals, the disabled, the arts, on medical research. Why don’t we do this? A lot of her wealth comes from dirt that we, the people, own. Does she need that much? What does she need it for? Does she spend it here? Why should she be allowed to do this?
Gina Rhinehart earns in fifteen minutes what Barack Obama earns in a year. How can this be justified? Does she have a more difficult job than he? Does she make more testing decisions? Is she responsible for the welfare of more people? Why then do we put up with this?
We are told Class Envy is a bad thing, and we mustn’t question this rancorous fat bitch’s right to wealth others risk their lives to dig up and lay at her feet. We are told this by people who don’t want us to look at the figures and join the dots and follow the thread and form an opinion. We are told to leave off, it’s none of our business and to enquire how she gets it and if she deserves it is Class War.
Class War sounds to me like a good idea for Labor to look into. Taking half what Gina gets and spending it on worthwhile things would leave her still earning a million dollars an hour, twice what Obama gets in a year. Would that be an unreasonable sacrifice of what she gets out of soil we own? Can’t see why. Can’t see why there wouldn’t be votes in it.
Please consider.
Name:
Destroying the rich will not make the poor rich; it will just leave everyone poor. The politics of envy will always end in failure.
So the Arab Spring was a big mistake, you think? And the ending of slavery by Lincoln?
Please answer this.
So maybe, it would benefit everybody if the rich were even richer, had an even bigger share. We could take up a subscription in my street.
No, it doesn’t work that way. One man’s profit is another man’s loss. Gina’s gain of two million an hour comes from people paying electricity bills, say, in their hundreds of thousands. Gina gets in an hour what a Third World breadwinner wouldn’t get in five lifetimes.
Hard to catch up from there.
David, that’s as far fetched as media spin on the public.
Actually, it was Lincoln who said that about destroying the rich. The jury is still out on the Arab Spring.
Want Saddam back then do you? And twenty more years of Assad.
Why do you make thse stupid assumptions? Of course, I don’t want to see the pre-Arab Spring tyrants back. I merely said that “the jury is still out,” remembering the Robespierre phase of the Paris Spring nd the Lenin phase of the Petersburg Spring and the Khomenei Phase of the Teheran Spring.
So is the jury still out on Assad, or not?
Bob, you have been raised on the teet of the Australian taxpayer and suckled to obesity and irrelevance. Your envy of individual success and enterprise will endear you to no one, I’m afraid.
Yes I have. And I cost the taxpayer on average half a cent a year.
Want it back, do you?
Bob, I would prefer to have returned the little bit of dignity I lose everytime I log on to this blog.
How have I offended your dignity?
Give me a break! You are inferring that Bob is envious of someone successfull due to hard work or individual endeavour. She has not produced or invented anything. She is a billionaire by virtue of being born. She has sold bits & pieces of her inheritance at commodity boom prices and under a relatively high Australian dollar to Chinese and Indian buyers. The rest involves contracts whereby she gets a percentage of Rio Tinto profits for mining one of her old mans piles of ore. Such entrepreneurial genius!?
Yes, she is using some of these windfall profits to develop and mine some of the inherited pile herself, thanks to competition regulation allowing her to use BHPs railway and other infrastructure. Again, hardly entrepreneurial.
Until Roy Hill becomes productive she can’t even lay claim to have shovelled anything. And she is saying she needs 8000 workers on 457 visas because Australia doesn’t have enough skilled workers. She can get stuffed! People like her have never invested a cent in training or educating anyone. Tax her and tax her well I say.
The call to arms is a bit premature perhaps - I don’t think the peasants are quite rolling out the guillotines as yet. Perhaps when house prices bottom out in the new few years they might be more receptive to the references to ‘rancorous fat bitch’ in Paul Howe’s maiden Parliamentary speech. Will there be a place in the Conciergerie for Gerry Harvey, Frank Lowy & Solomon Lew ?
You can kiss your offer of work experience at Fairfax goodbye, I would suggest.
From $19 billion last year to just under $30 billion this year is a terrific amount.
The worlds richest woman they now say.
I can’t comprehend that amount of wealth. Gina can’t eat it all or drink it all or live in more mansions at once. I don’t know what she plans to do with it all. It won’t buy her love from her children who are already squabbling over it in court.
It certainly hasn’t bought her a seat on the board of Fairfax - yet.
Maybe she will gift it to Australia on her dying bed one day. Perhaps spend it willy nilly on a conga line of willing politicians.
Who knows…
But you can’t just take it off her. Its poor form. No manners.
If old Lang Handcock didn’t look out the window of a plane and wonder if that red mountain didn’t have iron ore in it, some other bugger would have come along…
Deserves it does she, more than the Fukushima survivors? The Chistchurch survivors?
Say why.
Do you deserve a $3,000,000 Palm Beach home Bob, whilst there are homeless people?
Hen did I say I deserved anything?
What are you talking about?
I bought it for 58,000 and still owe 200,000 on it.
I just love the slave mentality behind people who justify her wealth. Who cry “envy”, “democratic right”, the usual bleetings. How did these people ever arrrive at the point where they share the same indifference, lack of social compassion and responsibilty; lack of true moral courage. Didn’t they ever ask questions beyond what they were told? We need to seek out an answer to this. To find at what point their brains and hearts were/are neutralised. Rinehart could save the Victorian TAFE system a thousand times over. Leave her mark. So what is stopping her?
Her wealth is not a right. It is a trade off. The state runs into troubles with mines and offshore ventures with politics and liabilities. Vastly from human nature and public service type management and staling bureaucracies with the fat bums on seats, political cronyism ,jobs for the boys and rellies and gross expenditure matters. Highly damaging to the people whole and sometimes international relationships that the majority are left to contend with, sometimes for decades. It does and can work but in these years as other and WITH state run AS WELL as private, it is the same matter of class, elite and political interference and over empowerment that stuffs it for the nation. The troubles of the state are engrossed by elite and class.
When Gina’s and Clive’s get the power, the same forces intrude on the majorities people’s governance and politics. Corrupting and entrenching socially, business and family and political family etc and by peerage. This is where areas like the Laberal’s growth and communising of power distorts management of the whole and directions and create’s imbalances. It ends up a network and hardships and corruptions on the majority. As we reap. Stacking the bureaucracies etc in a class and crony matter and even those not agreeing with matters on whole having to go along for the sake of their working lives and peer pressure or as much media stacking, clapping for their fish to our detriment as a whole.
Gough ran into these troubles serving ALL in his time and government. The histories are documented. New Guinea and the personalities and the results.Fly River. Some say Independence was way too soon. The CIA head of the Sth Pacific, Jimmy Angels hated Gough. Terrified of him.
With the extra grunt of overseas power behind, this matter even led to invasions of the nations health stature by the support surge that had to get it’s water cut off. A minority power over empowering the whole that built up quietly through the sixties and the people whole were fooled.
The bureucracies of privatisation and by system nature and human mechanics, gets on a roll and power gets pumped to and from the community ruling powers and major trades.
Today, where the state would have, and in it’s nature to , attend to matters like the Soddam and Gomorah of Moranbah for one example, now the public and people are left to reap the social damage and bills of the matter that will, do and are extending through budgets to all nooks of the whole public’s lives who are not getting any benefit. The power situation and through media as the US, enables much to be hidden from the people. ALL of us,Liberal ,labourite, Kalithumpian.The top is rotten Roman headiness and increasing over indulgence.
While matters of environment have improved somewhat and mostly by nation community vigilance, the power stacking afore mentioned complicates matters greatly to extents of environment and government groups being infiltrated commercially.
Gina and Clive can end up very over empowered and fools who are even hurting themselves in the long run, tend and support the corrupt mechanics. Going with the flow.
Has it happened yet that a minority player with corrupt political stacking reaping billions of public whole’s money has walked out and left the whole with a war? An exaggeration to simplify the situation.
With internal mining , not international, the war zone is our communities and selves with minority over empowerment and stacking and suffering for a minorities comforts and distorted politics extending into all matters.
These mining matters at present are into matters of the nation wholes safety, monetarily and politically.
Open your eyes and look.
Clive and Gina’s get raised to heights and billboards when the stacking underneath them inflates the situation by the extent of their feelers into our political and commercial systems and community peerages by over empowerment of the people whole.
You do and can demand a say on balances in these matters to make sure it works fine for all of us, including Gina and Clive. As one.
If anyone will tell you the truth.
Do you want the US health system and streets here? that is the threat and support base of Clive and Gina. The stakes are much higher than you think.
Bob is right on this matter.
Come on Gina and Clive , mmmm mmm, just one more mint. Cum’n you can fit it in.yummy yummy.
Oh Bob, the glaring difference is that its Gina’s own money that she spends on self indulgence.
Craigy boy was using someone else’s cash - you know the low paid, under appreciated moppers and scrapers of other peoples excrement in public hospitals.
Quite.
No one living in the privileged world of the political or welfare classes would understand this very simple fact.
No, it’s our soil she makes a million dollars every half hour out of.
It’s therefore our money she’s spending.
Much more of it than Craig.
Tiny Dancer has been banned for life.
Yep TD, just like Paul Keating and Kristina Keneally are the right type of Catholic.
Perhaps it’s because Therese Rein made her fortune with a public service contract after a neat little insider tip-off, who knows?
O banned one, Ms Rein fortune started when the Gnome of Bennelong had the levers. So who knows indeed?
Will those who are banned kindly accept their fate and go elsewhere?
It is mere graffiti.
Tiny Dancer has been banned for life.
Really
Still here
So is shagger. Gollums little mates hey?
Damn helicopters again.
Golly gee
Whoppa choppa
Is that all you’ve got to say?
I thought so.
To Bob : Jim is worth his weight in gold - please unban him, even if you need to do a little editing . . .