Article by Jesinta Burton of the Sydney Morning Herald.
Gina Rinehart paints the town pink with West Perth HQ revamp.
It’s a quiet West Perth strip lined by innocuous office buildings and bookended by Parliament House.
But if billionaire Gina Rinehart gets her way, Ord Street will soon be home to a five-storey office building donning her mining giant Roy Hill’s hallmark pink.
WAtoday can reveal the City of Perth has quietly issued planning approval for $19.5 million in additions and alterations to the building at lot 53, which is set to become the miner’s new corporate headquarters.
Those plans include alterations to turn the existing facades pink, a new internal office fitout, a landscaped terrace above the existing two-storey car park and the office building, and landscaping around the site.
But a spokesperson at the City of Perth told this masthead it was yet to receive a building permit for the approved works.
The move paves the way for the company’s planned relocation from its site at Perth Airport, which was foreshadowed by the Hancock Prospecting chair after she purchased the complex for a whopping $60 million back in July 2022.
It is understood the iron ore giant’s new headquarters will accommodate about 1000 employees.
Details of the rumoured revamp were scant when 6PR Radio spoke with Perth Lord Mayor Basil Zempilas on Friday, but he told 6PR’s Gary Adshead he was aware Roy Hill was looking to create a “statement building” and welcomed the company’s move to the city centre.
“This is the injection of people that West Perth needs,” he said.
“This will be 1000 people in a little over 12 months or so injected right into the heart of West Perth – it’s going to have a profound impact.”
But the city’s spokesperson did quash speculation the initial planning permit included a helipad.
The building, constructed in the early 2000s and formerly occupied by oil and gas giant Santos, sits on more than 6000 square metres of land at the corner of Ord and Thomas Streets and features 235 car bays.
It is one of six office buildings Rinehart owns throughout West Perth, which have a combined value in excess of $100 million.
For several years, Roy Hill has been deploying fleets of pink trucks, locomotives, ore cars and mining equipment throughout the Pilbara, as well as a mammoth Wet High Intensity Magnetic Separator plant, as part of its commitment to breast cancer awareness.
A 294-metre-long vessel, owned by Hebei Ocean Shipping Co, was even painted pink and renamed in Rinehart’s honour.
The cause is one close to Rinehart, who lost her mother Hope Hancock to the disease in 1994 and founded the first Breast Cancer Foundation in the state.
Hancock Prospecting was contacted for comment.
