Georgina Hope Rinehart

Georgina Hope Rinehart (born February 9, 1954, Perth, Western Australia, Australia) is an Australian business executive and political activist who built a fortune as the head of her father’s privately held Western Australian mining company, Hancock Prospecting, by increasing its holdings and influence in the Australian iron-ore market after his death. Known for her pro-business activism on issues such as taxation and government regulation, Rinehart had become Australia’s wealthiest person and one of its most powerful women by the early 21st century.

Gina Hancock was the only child of Langley (Lang) Hancock, a Western Australian pastoralist who became a mining magnate. She was educated at St. Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls in Mosman Park, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, and briefly studied economics at the University of Sydney. In 1973 she became her father’s personal assistant at Hancock Prospecting, a company that had its origins in his 1952 discovery of previously unsuspected iron-rich soils in the Hamersley Range, in the state’s Pilbara region. After exploration and testing, he realized that he had found one of the world’s largest iron-ore deposits. His company eventually entered into a lucrative royalty agreement with British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto to exploit the Pilbara iron.

After the death of her father in 1992, Gina Rinehart (by then widowed by her second husband, American attorney Frank Rinehart) took ownership of Hancock Prospecting and became its chief executive. The business was in poor shape, however, as it carried a significant amount of debt. She kept tight control over the company’s operations and built a new iron mine in the Pilbara. Under Rinehart’s direction Hancock grew into one of Australia’s largest exporters of iron ore, a multibillion-dollar empire encompassing domestic and international joint ventures as well as prospecting and exploration for other minerals, especially coal. She diversified her holdings in the early 21st century with her purchase of shares in media companies, including Australia’s Fairfax Media and Ten Network Holdings.

Although Rinehart kept a low public profile and rarely spoke to the media, she made a number of public statements on government policy issues, warning especially against excessive regulation and taxation in the resource sector, which she said would be damaging to the country’s economic growth. In 2010 she came out forcefully against the federal government’s proposed Resource Super Profits Tax aimed at the mining industry. Owing in part to a boom in commodity prices, her fortune doubled between 2010 and 2011, and in February 2011 Forbes magazine named Rinehart Australia’s wealthiest person; it was the first time a woman had held that position.