What’s going on between Peter Dutton and Gina Rinehart?

With even right-wing media criticising Peter Dutton for taking time out from the Dunkley by-election to fly to Perth and spend 40 minutes at another Gina Rinehart party, the opposition leader’s slavish relationship with the mining heiress is garnering increasing attention.

Most prominent major party politicians have friends in business. It was only last month that the prime minister attended a private party hosted by Anthony Pratt in Melbourne featuring an appearance by Katy Perry. Pratt is a prominent political donor — increasingly to Labor — and his father was a big supporter of Albanese’s predecessor as Labor leader, Bill Shorten. But Dutton’s regular trips to Western Australia to spend time at Rinehart gatherings seem unusual.

In addition to Dutton’s trip to Perth (at his own expense) last Thursday via Melbourne (as revealed by Rear Window’s Mark Di Stefano), in the past few years Dutton:

• Travelled to the Pilbara as a guest of Rinehart (June 2022)
• Was flown to Sydney by Rinehart to, according to his declaration, attend a Bali bombing memorial (October 2022)
• Was flown by billionaire Tim Roberts to a Rinehart party at the Roy Hill mine (November 2023)

As a result of her regular funding of, and meetings with, Dutton, Rinehart appears to have been rewarded with a key role in developing what passes for Dutton’s policy positions. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: Dutton has been graciously permitted by Rinehart to use her policies.

After their June 2022 meeting, Dutton adopted Rinehart’s proposal to increase the threshold of income pensioners would be able to earn without losing payments — an outcome proudly announced on one of Hancock’s websites. Rinehart also spruiked nuclear power before the last election, ahead of the Coalition under Dutton embracing it in opposition. In August last year, Rinehart issued a full-throated call for nuclear power instead of “bird-killing wind generators and massive solar panel stretches”. Rinehart’s site carries a speech Dutton delivered to the minerals industry endorsing small modular reactors (a position now ditched by the Coalition) last year.

Rinehart and Dutton also appear on a unity ticket on migration. Last May, as Dutton was winding up his rhetoric about Labor’s “secret agenda for a big Australia”, Rinehart attacked migrants and linked them to “a housing shortage for Australians … rents are escalating, our hospitals are inadequate without adding more, police already can’t police crime and crime is escalating, electricity requirements will increase, adding to unreliability and increased costs”. This represents a significant change of heart for Rinehart: in 2012, the then Labor government gave Rinehart approval to bring in 1,700 foreign workers on temporary visas to work at Roy Hill.

And Rinehart’s support for the No campaign, which Dutton helped lead, is well known.

It seems that, with growing demands for the opposition to produce some policy beyond nuclear power and increasing house prices by allowing people to access their super, Dutton has a ready-made policy agenda at his disposal from Rinehart — albeit one that costs a lot of money to access.