Article by Brad Thompson courtesy of the Australian Financial Review.
Australia richest person, Gina Rinehart, will give away millions of dollars a year to miners and other workers in annual random prize draws to mark her birthday and Christmas celebrations.
Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart has started randomly handing out $100,000 prizes to Hancock Prospecting workers as part of a multimillion-dollar giveaway that is part of celebrations to mark her 69th birthday on Thursday.
Australia’s richest person is set to give away 41 prizes in all, or $4.1 million, with about 4000 workers spread across her private company’s mining, energy and agriculture divisions in the running.
The Rinehart birthday raffle is expected to become an annual event on February 9 along with a similar random prize draw in the week leading up to Christmas.
It continues a remarkable round of life-changing generosity to lucky employees within the Hancock Prospecting group of companies and comes as Mrs Rinehart, once falsely accused of wanting to pay Australia workers $2 an hour, continues to rage against the Albanese government’s industrial relations changes.
The 41 prizes would represent one for each year Mrs Rinehart has worked at Hancock Prospecting, first under her father Lang Hancock and, since his death in 1992, as the private company’s executive chairman.
Since taking the reins, she has taken what was essentially a bankrupt estate and built it into Australia’s most successful private business and amassed a fortune estimated at $34 billion.
Hancock Prospecting declined to comment on any birthday giveaway or to confirm that it would become an annual event.
However, an email sent to thousands of Hancock workers, including about 3200 employed at the company’s flagship Roy Hill iron ore mine in Western Australia’s Pilbara, outlined the plans.
Employees have been assured the prizes will come free of what Mrs Rinehart has dubbed “nasty tax”.
She ran a similar surprise raffle about seven weeks ago in the countdown to Christmas, just 24 hours after paying out millions of dollars in bonuses to workers under one of the most generous profit-sharing schemes anywhere in the world.
The often misunderstood and sometimes unfairly maligned billionaire gave away at least 10 prizes of $100,000 each at a Christmas gathering for Roy Hill workers.
With hundreds of workers on site and not at the gathering, the first winners drawn out weren’t present. Mrs Rinehart opted to keep drawing out names until someone in the room won a prize.
“It was pretty insane being in the room, and she kept saying the prize money came ‘after nasty tax’,” said one worker who asked not to be named.
High wages
Similar raffles for other arms of the Hancock empire led to about a further 20 prizes of $100,000 being handed out before Christmas.
Mrs Rinehart has been paying out bonuses worth many tens of thousands of dollars a year on top of some of the highest wages in Australia to Roy Hill workers in the countdown to Christmas since 2018.
She first flagged sharing profits (something like 5 per cent) from Roy Hill with workers during a speech during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth in 2011 and long before the mine started shipping iron ore.
Similar incentives and profit-sharing schemes apply across the rest of the Hancock business empire but are more discretionary.
It is unclear if the number of birthday prizes handed out will increase each year in keeping with the length of time she has served at Hancock Prospecting, or remain fixed at $100,000.
It is understood Hancock Prospecting has reserved the right to suspend future prize giveaways if the iron ore price falls below a very low threshold, but otherwise the “Rinehart raffles” will happen at least twice a year.
They will be in addition to what is known as the “chairman’s profit scheme” for Roy Hill workers and other sweeteners spread across the year for the Hancock workforce.
Payments under the Roy Hill profit-sharing scheme can represent up to 30 per cent of base wages and, when introduced, were tied to Roy Hill hitting costs and production targets and safe operations.
Mrs Rinehart and other miners are up in arms over the federal government’s industrial relations changes and multi-employer bargaining provisions they say have no place in the already high-paying industry. “The mining industry pays by far the highest wages in Australia, close to double the average in other industries. Why would we risk this vital industry for our nation by reintroducing an unhelpful system that didn’t work the last time we had it?” Mrs Rinehart said in a recent response to questions from The Australian Financial Review.
