As Rinehart Seeks to Gift Stolen Land to Israel, the MAGA Playbook Is Well Underway

Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person, signalled that the MAGA playbook the Trump administration is reshaping the United States with doesn’t have to await a Pauline Hanson primeministership to be set in action here, when she suggested last week that parts of the country be handed over to Israeli weapons manufacturers and tech trillionaire Elon Musk for free.

The billionaire mining magnate casually made the suggestion to the audience at the 18 June 2026 News Corp Townsville Bush Summit, which is an annual event held on Wulgurukaba and Bindal land in the northern Queensland town of the same name. Sponsored by her company Hancock Prospecting, the summit serves to bring together industry and political leaders.

“Firstly, thank you. Pauline,” Rinehart said to begin, as she referred to Hanson’s address at the National Press Club the day prior. “You give Aussies across our country hope, never departing from values you have consistently held: cut bureaucracy, cut tape and regulations, cut government waste and exit the Paris Accord. A record tried overseas with very successful results – Australians first.”

These points on advancing small government that Rinehart extracted from the One Nation’s leaders 17 June speech have been prioritised “with very successful results” by the Trump White House since January 2025, and were the key measures that America’s richest person, Elon Musk, personally progressed when he headed up DOGE (the US Department of Government Efficiency) in early 2025.

And at the end of her speech, as Rinehart gifted a model bulldozer to Hanson to assist her in cutting Australian “government tape and bureaucracies”, in a similar manner to when Argentinean president Javier Milei presented Musk with a chainsaw to help him in cutting US red tape last year, the symbolism involved conveyed that One Nation’s reactionary agenda is already underway.

First Nation’s land free for foreign interests

In delivering her message about the future potential for Townsville, Rinehart affirmed that “massive government tape”, regulation and “high taxes” are delaying and preventing projects and investment in the coastal city. She too insisted these are impeding “exports”, “international cost competitiveness” and “struggling businesses”, and indeed, this applies to the country as a whole.

Rinehart considers that the nation cannot “sustain” its “massive government burden, with its record debt”, and she adds that a first step in improving this would be abolishing “all federal departments that overlap with state departments”, which is the aspiration the Trump administration held while it was laying off large numbers of its federal public service, with the aid of DOGE in early 2025.

“Empty federal offices could be changed to accommodation for homeless veterans, struggling pensioners and frightened women and children, who face horrendous unacceptable violence and rapes,” Rinehart said, as she envisioned the aftermath of the sacking of large numbers of the Australian public service.

The billionaire then turned her mind to the gifting of stolen First Peoples land to foreign business interests. She initially raised Dalleburra land around the town of Prairie, which she considers could be provided free to the Taiwan microchip industry and its staff. This should involve development of a regional airport and hospital. But if that “free land” isn’t suitable, then there is more to choose from.

The Hancock Prospecting heiress then projected a map of Queensland onto a screen with islands off the east coast highlighted, which she claimed are “sparsely or nonpopulated” and suggested they be offered “to Elon, at no cost, for his SpaceX satellite construction and launches”. These include the Nyawigi people’s Orpheus Island and the Manbarra people’s Palm Island group.

Rinehart then turned to her last suggestion, which was to offer “free land, be that near Prairie if suitable, or elsewhere near Townsville” to skilled Israeli weapons manufacturers and their families, so that they can “build their advanced war drones and or other advances in defence, and or improve upon their Israeli style domes, and manufacture them here to sell to our country”.

And in referring to large parcels of lands and islands in the north of the continent as “free land” to be able to be given away at will to foreign industries, the billionaire was also undermining and attempting to erase the Aboriginal land rights movement and the legal framework of Native Title.

“Dig, baby, dig”

Rinehart’s Townsville Bush Summit address asserted key preoccupations that the MAGA White House shares, which includes the cutting back of federal government bureaucracies and the undermining of Indigenous rights in order to provide a regulation-free environment to enable big business to advance its own interests.

The mining magnate’s speech laid out another plank in the One Nation agenda that Hanson, who is increasingly being discussed as a potential next prime minister of Australia, hadn’t been focusing on during her press club address the day prior, as the Australian senator’s speech had instead prioritised ending mass migration, the rejection of multiculturalism and attacks on transgender people.

These points raised by Hanson are again key aspects of the MAGA playbook being rolled out in the States and they’re also the preoccupations of similar forces gaining steam in the United Kingdom. Indeed, all these movements across these nations are intimately connected, and that’s why what’s being rolled out in this country, appears as if a carbon copy of what has recently played out in the US.

Rinehart was a keen supporter of Trump’s presidential campaign in 2024. She adopted the Republican leader’s “drill, baby, drill” tagline, which portended Trump’s winding back of climate change policy and regulation in the United States to rejuvenate the fossil fuel industry for the benefit of big industrialists, despite the fact that it is cooking the planet for all.

In a similar manner, Hanson last week referred to “the hoax of global warming” that she blamed for the “increase in energy costs”, which foretold of a future One Nation government ditching climate action in the same way as the Trump White House. And Pauline even threw in her own tagline, “dig, baby, dig”, as she sought to clear the path for Rinehart and other fossil fuel moguls to profit from.

Why reinvent the MAGA wheel?

Somewhat unbelievably, One Nation’s Pauline Hanson has risen to the top of the political heap over the last six months in the Australian polls. This circumstance has not been overly scrutinised in the mainstream but rather accepted as a strange aberration. Although, the ABC has uncovered some AI social media engineering that appears to be microtargeting Australians.

This deceptive method of political campaigning was condemned when British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica was discovered to have employed it in order to target millions of US social media users with tailored messaging to garner their support for Donald Trump’s 2016 successful campaign for the US presidency. However, it did succeed and it appears to continue to be applied.

Another key aspect of Hanson’s rise to the top of politics is the support she’s been receiving from Rinehart, with the local billionaire class in tow. The Hancock Prospecting head had been backing Coalition leader Peter Dutton at the last election to progress a MAGA shake over of this country, but while that campaign failed miserably, her new interest appears to be moving along swimmingly.

Gina flew Pauline to the US state of Florida in her personal jet last November, so the One Nation leader could address a CPAC event held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, and Hanson spoke on a number of issues that ticked all the MAGA boxes, such as mass migration and the climate hoax, and she even went on to attend the president’s Halloween party at his estate.

The Trump White House has been agitating for Australia and all of its allies to replicate the MAGA agenda, and it now appears to be pushing for Hanson to propagate this down under. The fact that the most important US base outside of its borders is Pine Gap and northern Australia was the top overseas location for US military construction spending last year, tends to necessitate a MAGA PM.

But the issues that Australian billionaires are facing are similar to those their US counterparts had been facing and that is that in democracies, like Australia and the US, the popular vote secures governance. And that’s where Pauline comes in, as she’s been pushing the same white nationalist sentiment that underpinned the successful Trump presidential campaign for the last three decades.

So, when the “Australia First” marches that involved white nationalists rose up across this continent late last August, Hanson was already there waiting in the wings to assume a leadership role in the movement. And she has since rode this wave of white nationalist resentment, that appears to be capturing a huge section of Middle Australia since it commenced, just as Trump did in the US.

The key anomaly in the One Nation rise to the top is that whilst Pauline Hanson shares the same racial prejudices as her growing white low-income supporter base does, she and her key backers, like Rinehart, aren’t promising to deliver them a brighter future but rather simply a whiter one with loads of deregulation that will foremostly prosper the Epstein class.

This seeming contradiction is the exact same deviation that has seen Trump and the MAGA movement succeed in the United States. So, it appears that their type of divisive politicking is enough to ride into power and then maintain it. And as Rinehart asserted in her Townsville speech, this ambiguous MAGA playbook has been “tried overseas with very successful results”, so why fix it?

Main image: Gina Rinehart and the map of Queensland are from Shutterstock. Elon Musk at the Memorial for Charlie Kirk by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY – SA 4.0. The Israeli flag is in the public domain.