As Jim Goad once wrote, I’ll take open borders spruiking from self-righteous elites when they hand over the keys to their gated compounds. And I’ll take holier-than-thou finger-wagging about dictatorial regimes from mining billionaires the day they hand back every cent they’ve made from crawling to dictatorial regimes.
One of the country’s most influential business leaders, Fortescue Mining founder Andrew Forrest, has urged the Albanese government to take decisive action to stop Russian-origin oil from entering Australia as he warns existing sanctions loopholes are empowering tyrants and undermining the nation’s foreign policy.
This, from the guy who owes his entire multi-billion-dollar fortune to communist China? The guy who deliberately undermined the nation’s foreign policy by sneaking in a CCP lackey to hijack a speaking event by a China-critical government minister?
Eff you isn’t strong enough.
“No family filling their car with petrol should have to wonder whether their money is helping bankroll Putin’s assault on Ukraine. This should ring alarm bells across Australia,” Forrest told this masthead.
And no one watching Forrest literally sell this land to a communist dictatorship, one shipload at a time, should have to stomach such towering hypocrisy. No more than they should stomach lectures from an ‘anti-slavery activist’ who willingly does business with the largest slave-owning state in the world.
And absolutely no one, but no one, should buy this particularly odious brand of tripe from the likes of Forrest.
“We must close these channels and align our values with our supply chains.”
Lead by example, then: stop doing business with China.
Then there’s this stomach-turning, two-faced lecturing:
Accelerating the shift to green energy would help cut off support for autocrats like Putin, he said.
And just happen to pour more money into this China-loving billionaire’s bulging pockets. Mostly, Australian taxpayer’s money, which we’ll apparently have to claw back from Forrest’s cold, dead hands.
Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue is still to repay the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars directed towards the company’s since-abandoned hydrogen projects in Queensland […]
Federal taxpayers contributed almost $50m towards Fortescue’s much-hyped plan to build a green hydrogen gigafactory at Gladstone in Queensland.
Because, clearly, the $33 billion wealthy Forrest just couldn’t afford to stump up his own money.
Or was it because even he knew so-called ‘green hydrogen’ was a ridiculous boondoggle, from the start?
The project was dumped by the iron ore heavyweight in July as part of a major winding back of the company’s hydrogen ambitions.
The Queensland government in August launched legal action against Fortescue seeking to recoup the $66m it had paid to the company under a $92.5m funding package for the same project.
And it was all for nothing.
Fortescue announced the end of its Gladstone ambitions at the same time as it ditched plans to spend almost $900m on a hydrogen project in Arizona.
The company’s $140m PEM50 hydrogen plant in Queensland was opened about a year ago but mothballed in May when some 90 staff were cut from its hydrogen division.
Just a reminder:
Fortescue last month reported a full-year net profit of $US3.4bn ($5.24bn) […] Dr Forrest and Nicola Forrest, who are separated but collectively control 36.7 per cent of Fortescue, are set to collect about $678m from the final dividend.
There’s a lot of money, clearly, in cosying up to communist dictators.
So, spare me the sanctimonious lectures about “empowering tyrants and undermining the nation’s foreign policy”. I’ve had as much as any Australian taxpayer ought to be expected to stomach.
