By Noel Towell and Kishor Napier-Raman
We’re going to call this the “Rinehart” effect, when the mere presence of Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, sprinkles star dust – or maybe iron ore dust – over everything in the vicinity.
The latest beneficiary of the Rinehart magic is the National Gallery of Australia, subject of a recent campaign by the mining billionaire and her supporters to remove two portraits of her from display, but where attendance numbers have soared by 24 per cent since the furore broke out this month.
Gallery visitors view artwork by Vincent Namatjira at the National Gallery of Australia this month. Gina Rinehart’s portrait is in the middle row, third from left. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
Gallery website traffic has surged by 62 per cent since the story broke on May 15 and the page spruiking the exhibition of the Indigenous artist behind the two now-famous works, Vincent Namatjira, is the “top-performing” web page of the gallery, according to an internal gallery briefing.
Staff at the institution’s gift shop have been explaining to disappointed visitors that no, they don’t have Gina-themed mugs or tea towels in stock, as gallery managers kick themselves for not ordering in a job-lot of merch before all this blew up.
The Age revealed this month that Rinehart had a little help from swimmers sponsored by her, including Olympic gold medallist Kyle Chalmers, in lobbying the gallery to engage in a spot of portrait removal.
Rinehart had demanded the removal of a particular portrait in Namatjira’s Australia in colour exhibition in correspondence to the NGA’s chair, Ryan Stokes, and its director, Nick Mitzevich.
Nothing doing, the gallery replied.
But Rinehart’s intervention went global when the matter was raised on America’s highest-rated late-night talk show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and became a meme on social media.
CBD hoped to benefit ourselves from a little of that Rinehart magic when we gave Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting a shout on Wednesday looking for a comment, but we got about as much joy as did Rinehart from the gallery.
Gina Rinehart’s attempts to remove a portrait of her from the National Gallery have backfired spectacularly.Credit: John Shakespeare
In other, not unrelated news, comedian Dan Ilic, who crowdfunded more than $30,000 to broadcast one of the portraits on the electronic billboard at Times Square in New York on Friday night, has pulled the pin on his wheeze.
Ilic cancelled, and refunded more than 700 donors, after Namatjira’s people made it clear the artist wanted nothing to do with the stunt.
“Vincent didn’t grant permission, and he is not going to be in any way involved,” one of Namatjira’s associates said on Tuesday.
CRUISE CONTROL
Dean Hurlston, wager of “ideological warfare” against local government and good mate of this column, is thinking big this week, setting his sights on the state’s highest-profile municipal figure, Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp.
Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp.Credit: Jason South
Dean has written to Capp, who is set to cast the mayoral robes aside when her term ends in October, demanding answers about her jumping aboard that 12-day cruise from New York to Montreal last year to celebrate the 85th birthday of Capp’s mate trucking magnate Lindsay Fox, which reportedly cost the billionaire $5 million.
Among the lord mayor’s shipmates, on what sounds like an arduous voyage, were Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, Solomon Lew, property billionaire John Gandel, Seek founder Andrew Bassat, Rod Eddington, and Linfox board members Bill Kelty and the late Simon Crean, but we digress.
Capp declared the hospitality - valued at $15,000 - on the council’s public register of gifts, but Dean’s not happy about the lord mayor’s trip, insisting that it “appears that the $15,000 gift breaches the councillor gift policy on many fronts”.
Specifically, Hurlston suggests Capp has sailed close to the wind on the ban on councillors accepting “property or services for private purposes” and rules on taking anything that might raise the prospect of a conflict of interest, anything from anybody seeking to lobby the council or any gift that might bring the City of Melbourne into disrepute.
Remember that he speaks with some authority on the topic of mayoral conduct; his partner, Joe Gianfriddo, has been wearing the chains of office at Stonnington, dubbed the “council of war” by some unkind souls over the constant feuding among the alderpeople there.
Anyhoo, it doesn’t look like Capp or anyone else at Town Hall thought Hurlston’s concerns about the $15,000 gift were worth spending much time on, keeping their comments brief.
“This item was added to the Councillor Gift Registry on 30 September, 2023, which is a public document,” a and spokesman told us.
URGENT CARE
People can be so pedantic, can’t they? Premier Jacinta Allan and her Treasurer, Tim Pallas, certainly seem to think so as they urge everybody to just loosen up in their interpretations of the words “urgent” and “unforeseen”.
The duo, we’ll call it the Preasurer, tied itself in linguistic knots on Wednesday, suggesting all the 335 or so spending decisions from the 2022-2023 financial year chalked up to the so-called “treasurer’s advance” – worth $12.2 billion – were both urgent and unforeseen.
Sure, there were disasters and OK, there was a pandemic.
But CBD reckons it’s a stretch to suggest $284 million worth of Suburban Rail Loop spending that was put on the state’s contingency fund should be regarded “urgent and unforeseen”.
Daniel Andrews announced that project in 2018 to his then 800,000-odd Facebook followers, so it could hardly have come as a bolt from the blue last year. Perhaps if Jacinta had Tim had just asked around, they might have sensed that line item coming down the track.
Then there is the government’s flagship Level Crossing Removal Program. That, we are told, involved a trifling $1.2 billion worth of “urgent and unforeseen” spending in 2022-2023.
Well, what of it? Who among us hasn’t been blindsided by the existence of a project we’ve been working on for 10 years? Let them cast the first fiscal stone.
And for heaven’s sake, just relax.
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