Table of Contents
As every good leftist knows, mining billionaires are the devil incarnate. Except for Twiggy Forrest. Somehow, he’s the establishment left’s ‘good mining billionaire’.
It’s a mystery why, though: I mean, he relentlessly panders to the communist dictatorship that makes him rich, even at the expense of his own country, preaches about slavery while making his entire fortune from said communist dictatorship, which just happens to be the second-highest slave-owning country in the world, and blatherskites about ‘climate change’ while fuelling one of the most carbon-intensive industries in the world, which, to you or I, might sound like a steaming hypocrite.
Ohh… now I get the left’s love-in.
Except, apparently there’s some hypocrisies that are a private jet flight too far, even for the card-carrying Marxists over at the ABC.
The ABC and the Guardian have been secretly toiling away on a months-long investigation into the mining industry with virtuous prospector Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, only for the billionaire’s iron ore outfit to be hit with a record $150m compensation bill for destroying hundreds of indigenous cultural sites on the eve of the special’s scheduled rollout.
The timing could not have been more exquisite. Right as the ABC was getting on its knees and tying its hair back, bam!, their Big Daddy has to go and get into a fight with some sainted ‘First Nations People’.
The federal court ruling ends a bitter 20-year dispute. Fortescue will pay the Yindjibarndi people the monumental sum for bulldozing rock shelters, burial sites and songlines to make way for its Solomon mine in the Pilbara.
Still, we hear that very same mine will feature at the heart of the Four Corners story – and is expected to be shown in a vastly different light.
Apparently the ABC’s Angus Grigg and the Guardian were already busy polishing the steaming propaganda turd, oops, joint investigation into Twiggy’s “crusade to decarbonise in the mining sector” for next Monday’s Four Corners when the landmark decision landed. Promos aren’t even out yet and early detractors are already calling it exactly what it is: a mining sector hit job with Twiggy as the hero.
“Twiggy’s company has taken Four Corners up to the Pilbara to show them around while claiming they do things more ethically than everyone else – but doubtless they won’t be showing the full picture,” one well-placed source told us.
“Instead, the premise seems to focus on decarbonisation and Twiggy’s advertising campaign against the use of diesel fuels on mines. From top to bottom, it promises to be a mining sector smash-up driven by Twiggy, who wants to prove he’s allegedly above the rest of the pack.”
In a leaked 48-minute interview, Grigg can be heard hammering the Chamber of Mining and Energy boss about diesel rebates while eagerly noting that “Fortescue is not just opposing your position: they’ve actually taken out an ad campaign – a multimillion-dollar ad campaign – directly attacking greedy miners taking money from the pockets of the likes of nurses,” which sounds about as believable as socialist multi-millionaires Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren railing against ‘the one per cent’.
Yes, indeedly: it’s funny how the ‘greedy miners’ line never seemed to apply to the man whose company just got pinged for cultural vandalism on an industrial scale. No awkward questions about irreplaceable rock shelters or songlines turned to dust. Just endless softballs about Twiggy’s saintly green credentials.
The hypocrisy is Olympic-standard. Only weeks earlier both the ABC and Guardian took potshots at Seven’s Spotlight for daring to question the ‘blood cobalt’ in electric batteries: the very stuff critical to Twiggy’s decarbonisation fantasies. Yet when their pet mining billionaire is caught destroying Aboriginal heritage on a biblical scale, it’s crickets followed by a glossy prime-time love letter.
This is how the game works. Mining billionaires are evil incarnate – unless they’re the right kind of billionaire. The kind who virtue-signals about not ‘taking money from the pockets of the likes of nurses’, while trousering tens of millions of taxpayer dollars for ‘green hydrogen’ projects that never happened.
Twiggy isn’t just a miner. He’s the left’s favourite fig leaf. A walking, talking example of how the establishment media will bend over backwards to anoint a ‘good’ capitalist who mouths all the correct pieties. The $150 million payout for cultural destruction? That’s just an inconvenient truth best left on the cutting-room floor.
The ABC’s Four Corners will air next week. Expect sweeping drone shots of the Pilbara, earnest voice-overs about ethical mining and zero mention of the court-ordered compensation for the hundreds of destroyed sites. Because in the ‘curated media’, some billionaires are more equal than others.
