Bulldozers, Bond and batsh–tery: We can only wonder what’s going on in secret

If Australia’s current political environment were a Bond film, we have reached the point where the villain feels comfortable enough to explain their entire dastardly plan to a restrained 007.

Gina Rinehart’s most recent public intervention into Australian politics not only had her saying the quiet parts out loud – let’s give away Queensland land to Israel for their weapons industry, and then find some Queensland islands to gift the world’s first grifting trillionaire, Elon Musk, she said it happily, pre-planned and in front of cameras.

Unlike a typical Bond villain, Rinehart had no quippy one-liners before escaping in a submarine. Instead she just forced some of the current most influential players in Australian politics to make bulldozer noises for her amusement, before presenting her current favourite, Pauline Hanson, with a toy orange bulldozer.

None of this should be surprising – Australia has always given away things for free to powerful vested interests (just look at our fossil fuel contracts). For Rinehart to suggest giving away sovereign Australian territory to foreign interests is just business as usual.

And Hanson, who – before adding stunts to her list of whinges – was a huge fan of stunting for power, having not only draped herself in the Israeli flag in the parliament (the obvious hallmark of a “proud Australian”) but attaching herself to any status quo establishment power that promised her personal advantage.

So standing next to a billionaire, who has cut off her own children,while she laid out ideas to give away parts of Australia to a country currently accused of genocide and a cartoonishly evil man, and accepting a garish kid’s toy is just a regular Thursday to Hanson.

But if this is what they feel comfortable saying out loud, in front of cameras, then what are they saying when they think no one is listening?

Because Rinehart suggesting giving islands to Israel and Musk is the sort of headline most investigative news reporters would need at least a month of back and forth with legal over, before getting it to a publishable standard.

That Rinehart just casually mentions it at a public summits suggests a new level of comfortable batsh-ttery that most Australians would not be familiar with.

But Rinehart too comes at this naturally. Anyone who has read any of the visions of her father, Lang Hancock, for Australia would not be shocked by anything she suggests.

One of Hancock’s more infamous quotes came from a 1984 clip, where the mining magnate said of Indigenous people:

“Those that have been assimilated into, you know, earning good living or earning wages amongst the civilised areas, those that have been accepted into society and they have accepted society and can handle society, I’d leave them well alone. The ones that are no good to themselves and can’t accept things, the half-castes — and this is where most of the trouble comes — I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in future and that would solve the problem.”

Less well known is the time when Hancock was strongly promoting the idea that nuclear explosives be used to create a Pilbara harbour, blasting Cape Keraudren.

In case you were wondering if anything at all is different between Australian political power and fossil fuel interests – no, it’s not.

Then prime minister John Gorton took the idea so seriously he announced a feasibility study in 1969. Then reality set in.

The idea was quietly shelved, and the committee set up to examine it was disbanded in the 1970s.

But for a moment, the Australian government seriously considered using nuclear explosives on Australian soil to create an easier way for mining magnates like Hancock to get their fossil fuel exports to harbour.

Hancock had no political aspirations himself – he knew he had enough power already to “advise” politicians of the day. And he did. Rinehart has not fallen far from the tree.

So yes, Hanson awkwardly beaming as she is handed an orange bulldozer by Australia’s richest person, while spreading Australia’s richest person’s ideas throughout mainstream politics isn’t a surprise.

The only question is about what they’re saying that they think we aren’t ready to hear just yet. That’s how Trump operated, it’s how the Atlas network still operates, and it’s how wealth and power have always operated.

Bond villains were always drawn from real life. And their plans have always been simple – maintaining wealth and power by any means. Hanson has always simped for both.

The trick is convincing those who have found solace in her grievance-harvesting to look for answers behind the permission to be angry.

So far, we have what seems to be what’s approaching a trillion dollars in false promises (back-of-the-envelope calculation on the defence policy of 5 per cent of GDP, cuts to productivity from migration and ending paid maternity leave, building nuclear and coal-fired power plants, reversing the transition to cheaper energy etc) and a billionaire making the vroom vroom noises of a bulldozer.

Emotion is a powerful unifier, but it has its limits. Chances are those limits are to be found in what Hanson and co don’t speak out loud just yet. You just have to ask yourself – how far are they telling the big money they are willing to go?