GINA RINEHART: Our children are being let down at school. It’s time to teach kids facts, rather than propaganda

Mining magnate Gina Rinehart has spoken at a series of Bush Summits where the billionaire businesswoman outlined five key priorities for Australia.

Below is a transcript of one of Mrs Rinehart’s speeches in the series.

In this address, delivered in Bendigo, Victoria, Mrs Rinehart takes aim at the current state of the school curriculum in Australia. 

Hello and welcome to all our farmers, small businessmen, miners, and other regional Aussies, struggling with time-taking government paperwork, and policies that don’t consider the people of our outback!

It’s fantastic to be welcoming you to the Bush Summit in Bendigo, which has such a great agricultural and mining history. Indeed, my great grandfather on my mother’s side, who came out from the south of England, looked for gold somewhere around here, I don’t know exactly where, but I do know conditions were pretty rough back then. 

His son, James Nicholas, when a young teenager, took up work after his dad sadly died at stables that Cobb & Co had, about 11 or 12 miles away from their bush home. Cobb & Co’s work let James provide for his widowed mother and two younger sisters. For the younger ones in the audience, Cobb & Co was essential to open up bush regions, providing transport for mail, passenger, equipment and supplies to make possible mining and agricultural lives and businesses including in this region. 

An interesting and magnificent history, like Wells Fargo, which made possible the opening up of the USA.

Bendigo has certainly contributed, and can be proud of its contribution. In the early 1850s, Thomas McIvor – who I understand a shire near here was named after – was known for his discovery of gold in Bendigo. His discoveries contributed significantly to the Bendigo area gold rush, bringing settlers and investors to the area and the town of Bendigo to life.

And George Lansell, known as the ‘Quartz King’. Lansell was a prominent mining entrepreneur who invested heavily in Bendigo’s gold mines during the late 19th century. His investments helped develop and sustain the local gold mining industry, offering employment to many.

The Bush Summit has become increasingly important as I hope it is one that enables those in the outback to be heard, rather than taken for granted and overlooked. No matter how hard we work, no matter how much we contribute – we have developed primary industries that shine on the global stage.

Our agricultural produce is amongst the best in the world. Aren’t we fortunate to be able to enjoy it. And our mining companies are world leaders. Again, lucky us, as that is the engine room of Australia and massively contributes more than all other industries combined to give us the high living standards we currently have.

Mining magnate Gina Rinehart has spoken at a series of Bush Summits where the billionaire businesswoman outlined five key priorities for Australia. This speech focuses on education

Thank you to all members of our primary industries. And to the many businesses they support.

These standards of living are not an accident. They are the result of investment and our incredible people in our primary industries. Mining provides not only jobs that pay more on average than the national average of salaries and wages, but massive export earnings, the largest of any industry, and taxation revenue too. 

Yes, without the billions in taxation revenue mining provides, providing for 65,000 police and 210,000 nurses each year, Australia would simply not be the same.

And of course, mining provides much more than this. Too often mining is just thought of in economic terms, but mining and the businesses mining supports, helps to provide for our incredible veterans, people in trouble and needing emergency services, our hospitals and healthcare, our pensioners, even payments for uni students. And, overlooked in this housing crisis, mining provides the materials required for houses, for instance copper for electricity and pipes for plumbing. If minerals are in short supply, the price goes up.

It is upon these primary industries that all other activity is built. We cannot have manufacturing without mining and agriculture. We cannot have healthcare without mining, including oil and gas. And we cannot have defence, which is meant to be the governments prime responsibility to its citizens, without the wealth-creating industries and the many companies they support that contribute tax revenue.

It seems it is too easy for some to forget that every aspect of our lives is touched by either the mining or the agricultural industry. As you’d know, everything either has to be grown or mined, be it the food on our tables, the energy used to refrigerate and cook it, or the utensils used to eat it, and much more.

These Bush Summits are a refreshing opportunity to hear from those in the bush, and I hope with the help of the Bush Summit media, that our governments listen.

This is our time to let our politicians know we don’t want to go down as an industry or country, we want to go ‘up’. We want to see policies that don’t frighten away investment, that instead lead to increased investment, increased living standards, and more in your pocket after tax, to spend as you wish. We want to hear from pollies that they will be the leaders that deliver the ‘up’.

We’ve sure had enough of the ‘down’. The ‘down’ makes many parents worry for the future of their children and grandchildren. And many in agriculture worry if the agricultural industry can even survive.

‘Down’ will continue if we don’t cut government approvals and tape, that add costs and delays. But it’s not just businesses that are hurt, given these expensive government burdens, there’s less money available for wages and staff benefits, less money available for employing more staff, less for training and retraining, less for donating to charities or for research. And it worsens if expansions or new projects are delayed or lost thanks to government tape and slow approvals, as all of the above gets even worse. Let’s stop the view that government burdens don’t matter, they only affect businesses, they don’t, they add costs to all, and many people suffer.

The Minerals Council of Australia has recently estimated that we are missing out on some $68 billion of investment because our major mining projects are ‘increasingly put in the too-hard basket because of the challenging investment environment in Australia’.

The MCA found that only five per cent of projects at the feasibility stage will move to a favourable financial decision each year, and that only 20 per cent of projects that debut on Australia’s major projects list are progressed to completion, while 80 per cent are abandoned altogether. Not the pipeline of projects list our media or pollies talk about, when 80 percent are abandoned!

Without lessening government tape and abandoning negative policies, this situation will only get worse.

And we all know of the rising costs of living. I especially feel during these rising costs for all those trapped in poverty on pensions of one type or another, our 2.5 million pensioners, veterans, uni students and disabled, not permitted to work without onerous paperwork, and then only permitted a few hours per week. Each of these people should be permitted to work as long as they’d like, so they are not trapped unable to cope with the rising costs crisis. I repeat, only if they choose to work.

Too many in our country are with these government restrictions wrongly facing ‘heat or eat’. This is unacceptable; our politicians should act immediately. And we have a worker shortage crisis, scarcely helped by expensive immigration, while making it difficult for our own Aussies to work if they choose. Let’s not forget, the approx. one million migrants this government has brought in, resulted in only approx. 40,000 added to the workforce. Yet, causing many disadvantages, the nearly one million people adding to our housing crisis, increasing the cost of rentals, straining police and resulting in more crime, and increased delays at hospitals, some even being turned away from emergency, as our doctors, nurses, medical facilities simply can’t cope.

If only our governments would truly consider the farmers and many struggling, instead of nice sounding words, even saying they like visiting here and meeting country people. We don’t want empty words, we want to know taxes that were to be dropped when GST came in, payroll, licence fees and stamp tax will be dropped. Wouldn’t that help the cost of living. 

We want to hear that the federal government will drop its excise tax on fuel, not just lowering costs for our cars and other vehicles, but lowering the cost of all transported goods, and all goods that require fuel for their processing or manufacture! Removing excise duty on fuel would actually help the cost of housing crisis, rather than the government building housing, when the record of government building infrastructure yells, “big mistake, too inefficient, too expensive!”

We are unfortunately on the ‘down’ path. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that we have now seen five consecutive quarters of negative economic growth per person.

Let’s instead lift our country ‘up’.

Please use your time and voices, at every opportunity, for Australia to return to this ‘up’ path.

In Townsville where the bush summit opened, I called for ANDEV (Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision) style policies, less tape and less tax, to help the Townsville region establish much needed defence industries, defence being as I see it a priority for our country.

With the number of defence personnel dwindling and our school curriculums teaching our children to be ashamed of our country, not proud of our history that has actually led us to have one of the greatest standards of living in the world and created primary industries that shine, the question should be asked: why would our school children want to defend our country in future, a country they’ve learned not to like, even to hate?

Some years ago the Victorian government adopted the slogan ‘The Education State’ on car license plates, so 622 kilometres away from Canberra let’s tackle what I think should be another important priority of our government: fixing our national curriculum.

Unfortunately, our children and grandchildren are being let down in their schools. Even for those as young as three in pre-schools, are being taught our police are bad. Plastics, essential in hospitals, are bad. They and others in school classes are no longer taught to be proud of our country, quite the opposite. They are taught that it is wrong to say there are two genders, indeed even told off if they say that. They are being taught propaganda rather than facts, and woke causes instead of understanding rationale and logic.

Can you believe that in the entire high school economics and business curriculum mining, coal, and iron ore do not receive even a single mention? From the gold rush in Bendigo to the iron ore exports of the last five decades, our country has been underpinned by mining. So how can we call this an economics and business curriculum if our school children don’t learn what underpins so much of our economy, so many of our businesses, indeed our living standards.

Mrs Rinehart says the legacy of mining, coal and iron ore should get more of a say in the school curriculum

In the entire high school national curriculum iron ore is referenced only twice. Yet climate change and renewable energy are mentioned 48 times. School children are anxious that the world will end and they will die – some think within five to ten years. They ask, why should they do their homework if the world will end? Such curriculums are revealing of the generation of young Australians we are quite frankly letting down.

I’m told that anti-Australia, woke and human induced climate change topics, now take up approximately one third of our school curriculums. No wonder we are falling behind.

I hope mothers concerned for their children and their future, will take up their own version of ‘Moms for America’, and help to battle this here.

I’ll continue with the other priorities as I see them, as the Bush Summit travels to each destination.

And please don’t forget to join us at this year’s National Agriculture and National Mining and Related Industries Days, this year to be held at Penfolds and Santos, with more information on the screen. These are important national days, they are your days, November 21 and 22 each year, please make sure they’re in your calendar. Hope to see you there.

Thank you.