One Nation's single largest financial backer is the person behind the first Enterprise Migration Agreement in Australian history, a deal to bring 1,715 foreign workers onto a single project. For a party that runs hardest on immigration, that is a fact worth sitting with.
Last updated 31 July 2026, with the Pratt friendship, Truth API and defence turn sections added as those stories broke.
The deal that started an immigration war
In May 2012, Gina Rinehart's Roy Hill iron ore project was granted the first Enterprise Migration Agreement ever issued in Australia, a framework to bring in up to 1,715 foreign workers on a construction workforce of about 8,000.
Hancock Prospecting had lobbied for it. The immigration minister, Chris Bowen, signed it. The reaction was ferocious: Prime Minister Julia Gillard told furious union leaders she had only learned of her own minister's decision the day before, and the deal became one of the biggest immigration fights of that year.
Set the politics aside and hold one plain fact. The single largest financial backer of Australia's anti-immigration party personally pioneered the mechanism for importing foreign labour at scale.
What it looked like for the workers
The imported-labour story didn't end cleanly either. In 2014, the CFMEU alleged that 457 visa holders at Roy Hill, employed by the contractor Samsung C&T and many of them young Korean nationals, were being paid around $16 an hour for 84-hour weeks, and asked Canberra to investigate.
These were allegations, not findings, and should be read as such. But they were made, on the record, about the flagship project of the person now bankrolling the party of the Australian worker.
The wages philosophy
To understand why the money flows the way it does, read what Rinehart says about wages. At the Sydney Mining Club in August 2012, she argued Australia had become too expensive and uncompetitive, noting that Africans were "willing to work for less than two dollars a day" and asking whether cutting the minimum wage would prompt employers to hire more people. Gillard's reply: it was "not the Australian way to toss people $2… and then ask them to work for a day."
Cheaper workers. More of them. A lower floor under wages. That has been the consistent, publicly stated position for well over a decade, and it has not changed.
The turn: from Liberal patron to One Nation's paymaster
Rinehart was not always One Nation's benefactor. For years she was a Coalition patron. Hancock sharply increased its giving to Liberal parties (the ACTU, using AEC disclosures, has called her one of the Coalition's largest donors), and Hancock money flowed to the conservative campaigning group Advance, reported at roughly $895,000 in 2024-25.
Then came May 2025: Peter Dutton lost his own seat as the Coalition suffered its worst federal defeat on record. And Rinehart moved. In November 2025 she flew Pauline Hanson to CPAC, at Trump's Mar-a-Lago, on her private jet. In December 2025, Barnaby Joyce, twice Nationals leader, defected to One Nation, becoming its sole member in the House of Representatives.
The scale of the money
The shift is not rhetorical. It is measured in millions, and much of it is on the record:
- A Cirrus G7 aircraft for One Nation, gifted via a Rinehart-linked company and unveiled by Hanson herself.
- Hancock executives Adam Giles (CEO, Hancock Agriculture; former NT Chief Minister) and Ian Plimer, reported at $500,000 each, five times One Nation's previous record individual donation.
- Stockbroker Angus Aitken, $1.1 million to One Nation in 2026, months after giving $230,000 to the Liberals.
- Around 20 flights on Rinehart's Gulfstream and other company aircraft, per AEC records.
Reporting has framed it plainly: encouraged by Rinehart, some of Australia's wealthiest donors are shifting from the Coalition to a party that until recently ran on small donations, and Hanson has said she is racing to raise money before new donation-cap laws take effect in 2027.
The machine
Beyond individual cheques there is an apparatus: reported $15,000-a-seat dinners, several events a week, explicitly aimed at moving Liberal donors across. In December, aboard The World, the residential ship where Rinehart keeps a penthouse, a dinner with Donald Trump was auctioned. Three fund managers reportedly pledged $100,000 each to One Nation.
On Trump: a shareholder, not a fan
The Trump alignment is easy to misread as ideological solidarity. Follow the holdings instead. Hancock is a major shareholder in MP Materials, the US rare-earths company, and Rinehart is its largest private shareholder. When the US Department of Defense took roughly a 15% stake in the company, the stock surged and Rinehart's paper wealth jumped substantially in a single day. In the June 2025 quarter, Hancock also lifted its Trump Media (Truth Social) holding by 67%.
The Mar-a-Lago photograph, then, is less a picture of political kinship than of a shareholder visiting her position.
It is worth knowing what that alignment has meant for ordinary people on the other side of it. According to blockchain-analytics firm Nansen, nearly a million wallets that bought Trump's $TRUMP memecoin are collectively down about $3.81 billion (roughly two in three buyers underwater), with the coin off about 98% from its peak. Trump's own disclosure shows about $636 million in earnings. Entities tied to him hold most of the supply and collect a fee on every trade, up or down. The base paid; he didn't.
In July 2026 the company gave that position a sharper edge. Trump Media announced Truth API, a paid data feed that, from 1 August, sells institutional traders millisecond-fast access to posts from Truth Social's ten most-influential accounts, Trump's own among them. Its interim chief executive put the pitch plainly: "Markets already move on Truth Social posts." The president's messages have swung oil and equity markets before, and now the speed of reading them is a product. Rinehart is not running that till; she is one shareholder among many. But it is a clean illustration of what her Trump alignment is. Not fandom, a holding in a company that has found a way to charge Wall Street for proximity to the president.
The defence turn
The portfolio has a newer wing. In the first quarter of 2026, Hancock bought shares in RTX, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris Technologies and Lockheed Martin, worth a combined $97 million as of 31 March per a US regulatory filing. Set beside her MP Materials rare-earths stake, the direction is consistent: positioned for rearmament, whoever does the arming.
Then, at News Corp's Bush Summit in Townsville on 18 June 2026 (an event Hancock itself sponsored), she said what she would like built at home. Her published speech text proposes free land, "be that near Prairie if suitable, or elsewhere near Townsville, to the Israelis and transport here for their skilled people, immediate families and equipment," to encourage them "to develop and build their advanced war drones, and or other advances in defence, and or improve upon their Israeli style domes, and manufacture them here to sell to our country to help make our people and critical infrastructure safe." The offer of transport for personnel appears in the published text; the ABC's report from the room quotes the land offer without that clause.
The Israeli defence pitch was one of three free-land offers in the same speech: sparsely populated Queensland islands at no cost for Elon Musk's SpaceX, and land plus a tax holiday for Taiwanese microchip makers, pitched as a "safer substitute" for the island democracy. A proposal from a private citizen is not a policy, and nothing has been approved or built. But it is a concrete statement of what the country's largest political donor wants government land policy to do, made in public, in her own published words.
One Nation kept its distance. No direct comment from Hanson is on the record; Senator Malcolm Roberts, speaking on a party livestream reported by The Spectator Australia, said Hanson had told Rinehart she disagreed, and that giving land to any foreign entity "is not and never will be One Nation policy." That account is second-hand, but the distance it describes is itself a datapoint: on this proposal, the party publicly stepped away from its benefactor.
It's working
Whatever one makes of the money, the strategy is delivering. In May 2026, One Nation won Farrer, the first House of Representatives seat it has ever won at an election in the party's 30-year history (its earlier lower-house members, Joyce among them, arrived by defection). David Farley took roughly 60% two-party-preferred in the seat Sussan Ley vacated, defeating a Climate-200-backed independent. By July 2026, Roy Morgan put One Nation on 28% in that poll, ahead of Labor, with the Coalition in the teens to low twenties across most firms.
The friend who spends differently
It is tempting to treat Rinehart as an outlier among Australia's rich. She is not. Her closest peer is also her friend. She and Anthony Pratt, the cardboard billionaire, met at the Forbes Global CEO conference in Sydney in 2010, where Pratt says he was struck by how diligently she took notes, and they have been close ever since. Pratt joined Trump's Mar-a-Lago club and introduced Rinehart to it; she became a member too. Both attended Trump's January 2025 inauguration, and both took out US newspaper ads praising him, Pratt's in the Sunday New York Times, Rinehart's in the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal.
So when One Nation supporters hold Rinehart up as the good kind of billionaire, they are often comparing her to her own travelling companion on the same Mar-a-Lago circuit. The real difference between the two is not personal. It is what their political money is for. Pratt spreads his bets: he gives to both major parties, including $1 million to Labor, buying access to whoever happens to win. Rinehart's money is directional. She is not insuring against the result; she is trying to choose it. Two similar fortunes, two opposite strategies, and it is the directional one that should hold your attention.
Selection, not capture
Here the argument needs to be made carefully, because the honest version is stronger than the lazy one. Take Barnaby Joyce. It would be wrong to say he was bought: his politics (pro-coal, anti-net-zero, agrarian-right) predate Rinehart's money by a decade, and no one has shown him reversing a position after a cheque arrived. That is not a hole in the story. It is the story.
Capture is paying someone to change their vote. It is illegal, and it is rare. Selection is funding the people who already agree with you, so that they win, and their rivals don't.
Selection is legal, largely invisible, and the more powerful of the two. Nobody has to be corrupt for it to work. You do not buy a politician; you buy the odds. And a fortune the size of Hancock's can tilt a great many races at once.
In fairness
The case should survive its own counter-arguments, so state them. None of this is unlawful. Hancock reported paying $2.6 billion in tax in FY2025, by its own account Australia's largest private corporate taxpayer. Rinehart has put a reported $80 million into Olympic sport since 2012. And Hanson's answer is straightforward: Rinehart raises policy with her the way any other interest does, asking "Why shouldn't she talk to me?" Take all of that as read.
The question that remains
Then ask one thing. If Gina Rinehart finally gets what she has argued for since at least 2012, cheaper labour, more of it, and a lower floor under wages, who pays for that?
Not her.
Australia's donation caps take effect on 1 January 2027. Until then, the window is open.
Follow the disclosures yourself: One Nation leader Pauline Hanson's record and the Party donations tab, where Hancock Prospecting's giving is listed as disclosed to the AEC. Every figure above is drawn from public disclosures and reputable reporting, linked in-line; where a claim is an allegation or a single-poll result, it is labelled as such.