It’s amazing it took this long. We looked back over the past 14 years of Crikey awards, allocating our readers’ choices for Arsehat of the Year and were shocked by a major omission: Gina Rinehart, the Trumpette, satirist and mining heiress magnate had never been directly nominated (she received a few honourable mentions), let alone won. (Not even the year she wrote a form-mangling poem about iron ore and plonked it on a great big rock.)
So in some ways our readers comfortably voting her Arsehat of the Year in 2024 is the equivalent of the Academy giving Martin Scorsese his first best director Oscar for 2006’s The Departed — solid stuff, no doubt, but hardly up there with the overlooked masterpieces.
That said, the award is a testament to what Rinehart can do without getting out of second gear. She used this year’s National Mining Day event to advocate for shutting down ABC TV, and to demand the public service “cut out expenditure” and “sell the pot plants and artefacts from all the departments and agencies offices”, suggesting they could instead “bring in their own” — so that people like her could have a tax cut, naturally.
That alone would garner at least a nomination for most people. As would the weapons-grade Streisand effect of her demanding the National Gallery remove artist Vincent Namatjira’s irreverent portrait of her, only to instead direct thousands more eyeballs its way.
When informed of the honour, a spokesperson for Rinehart told Crikey,
As you know, the selling of public servants’ pot plants (and artworks in their buildings, buildings which increasingly the public service don’t even turn up to work in) is a harmless little item, was not an item by itself, and not the issue, the record debt of government and need to cut government costs is the issue, an important one that your publication should at the very least understand.
They concluded their lengthy response (you can read the whole thing here) by observing, “Surely you can and should do better, instead of wasting your time and agenda proving you are the ones who should be the recipients of your own childish award?”
To ease the sting of that absolutely savage burn, they attached the following image.
And a very Merry Christmas to you too, Gina Rinehart.
