Rinehart’s media monitoring tests her commitment to freedom of speech

July 17, 2026 — 3:00am

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In this week’s On Background, a look at Gina Rinehart’s commitment to freedom of speech, a suspicious new player in Australian political media, more changes at Guardian Australia, and a rare meeting of major news outlet bosses.

Gina Rinehart has at least some of the outward hallmarks of a free speech champion. She has donated millions to the right-wing think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, which supports freedom of speech as a central tenet of its existence.

In April, she argued: “If we want to save our country, we need to love it so much that we have the character to stand up and speak truthfully, without hiding in fear of being derided, insulted or called names like ‘racists’.”

But underneath it all, Rinehart has one of the nation’s most prolific media monitoring operations that takes a rather assertive approach to defending her image in the public eye.

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While she urged Australians not to shy away from being called names like “racists”, less than one month ago, her team demanded a retraction and apology from a relatively minor independent podcast and substack operation New Politics for suggesting just that. And they got one.

At the end of June, New Politics, a reader-funded politics podcast, began an episode with an apology for a throwaway line suggesting Australia’s richest person shared One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s “racist ideology”.

“Those comments should not have been made. They are not true, and we retract them entirely and apologise,” said co-host and editor Eddy Jokovich on the following episode.

The following week, the pair told listeners they hadn’t published their next regular Saturday episode because they had been tied up in legal issues with “certain people trying to shut us up”.

It’s not an isolated example. Rinehart’s media team are known to send extensive responses to articles she takes issue with that........

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