However, when you consider the relationships meltdown in the country’s richest family, the Rineharts, it has the hallmarks of MAD, complete with threats, promises and a steady ratcheting up of the rhetoric.
If the issues tearing a single family apart were confined within that family it would be unfair and unwise for anyone on the outside to offer an opinion or suggest how it might end. Family members might say unkind things about each other but they save their full strength vitriol for interlopers.
The Rineharts, unfortunately for them, are not a regulation Australian family; they are on their way to becoming the richest family in the world.
The reason everyone in the mining industry is watching with emotions varying from fascination to alarm is that their wealth is derived from mining, their expansion plans affect thousands of workers, and their future profits will affect the future tax revenue of federal and state governments.
In simple terms, it’s the money which makes the Rineharts different, and it’s the money which is tearing them apart, and possibly affecting major new iron ore and coal mines.
Roy Hill, a $7 billion iron ore development in the central Pilbara region of WA is the lightning rod for ill-feeling on both sides in the Rinehart v Rinehart dispute and while the head of the family, Gina Rinehart, says the project is proceeding there are others who doubt that it can before a legal argument over complex family trusts is settled.
A glimpse into the uncertainty factor can be gleaned from last week’s media reports into the fate of Roy Hill.
On Tuesday, March 13, The Australian newspaper carried a story headlined “Rinehart pushes on with $7 billion Roy Hill mine project”, with the central theme of the report being that a series of announcements would be made soon, and the family feud would not stop the 55 million tonne-a-year project.
The next day, the same newspaper carried a story headlined “Feud fatal to Gina Rinehart’s $7 billion dream”, with the central theme this time being that her own staff and outside lawyers had told the NSW Supreme Court last year that any publicity over the family feud could threaten corporate interests and even prove “fatal” to the project.
Perhaps the “fatal” claim was hyperbole, but it came straight from the MAD handbook of threatening other side with a disastrous outcome in the hope that they would back down – only to see the other side turn up the heat with its own threats, which is what happened over the weekend.
From Hong Kong came comments from John Hancock, only son of Gina Rinehart and leader of the rebellion, that he had secured much-needed financial backing. After repeated warnings from mother that he risked bankruptcy and lacked the firepower to fight her, the boy rolled out a mystery Chinese financier, provided a curious display of cash being handed over, and said he had the stomach for a long legal brawl.
Can John Hancock stop his mother’s mine development plans, and does he really want to? Those are the questions being asked at the highest levels of the mining industry, and by senior government ministers.
The answer, Dryblower suspects, is yes, because the nature of a MAD strategy is to continually increase pressure while fighting proxy battles. In the case of the real thing, that meant wars in places like Malaya and Vietnam. In Rinehart v Rinehart it means the courts of Australia.
MAD, the Cold War version, lasted the best part of 30 years, with both sides indulging in similar strategies of arming themselves to the teeth with bombs, missiles and armoured divisions, and while the heavy weapons were kept in check proxy wars were fought, and the warring sides stared at each other across the Berlin Wall.
What stopped the Cold War from becoming a hot war was that while both sides realised they had the power to destroy the enemy, they also knew that the other side had the power to do the same to them.
The light-bulb moment which kept the Cold War in the freezer is yet to occur in Rinehart v Rinehart, but at some stage it must because there are ways of both sides making life very uncomfortable for the other.
Without cooler heads and logical thinking it is easy to see a situation evolving whereby Mother Rinehart believes she has the money, power and authority to proceed with Roy Hill, whereas three of her children believe they have an entitlement to an indirect share in the project via the family trusts, and they could turn to a court to ask for the matter to be resolved before a sod is turned.
Until John Hancock made his weekend claim about having financial backing for a protracted dispute such a stop-the-mine legal step seemed unlikely. Now it might be possible and the MAD process of staring at each other across the legal equivalent of the Berlin Wall gets underway.
This story first appeared on ILN's sister publication MiningNews.net.
