Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Letters to the Editor

by
December 2012–January 2013, no. 347

Letters to the Editor

by
December 2012–January 2013, no. 347

Denialism

Dear Editor,

Jan McGuinness is right to conclude that wading through two books on Gina Rinehart is not exactly one of life’s pleasures, but her review (November 2012) is a fine assessment of both Rinehart’s world of privilege, profits, and power, and of the qualities of Rinehart’s two biographers (Debi Marshall and Adele Ferguson) in capturing it.

Marshall and Ferguson, however, both bypass the opportunity to hold Rinehart’s religion of free market capitalism up to political and moral scrutiny. A negative judgement of whether the extreme inequality in wealth and influence between Rinehart and the rest of us is a good thing for society is at best implicit in both books, but they flub the chance to draw out this conclusion. Given that they are both business journalists with the mainstream press, the limits to their scrutiny are not surprising, and their awe and fascination with a capitalist titan, as well as large dollops of human interest padding and dynastic soap opera plot, do not help to make the case for radical economic transformation.

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.