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Commentary courtesy of The Spectator Australia.

Gina Rinehart was correct to withdraw the extraordinarily generous $15 million she had donated to Netball Australia following a severe outbreak of ingratitude marinated in identity politics from the young women players she was keen to help. Having already donated huge amounts of money to swimming, beach volleyball and other sports, Mrs Rinehart can lay claim to having single-handedly revitalised many Australian sports, as was seen so spectacularly at the last Olympics.

On top of which Mrs Rinehart has long provided the funding to a plethora of other causes, most notably the Royal Flying Doctor Service which is so critical in the Outback, and a single mother’s shelter in Cambodia that has been an absolute blessing for the many young women and their children whose lives have been transformed beyond recognition.

In all her charitable donations, Mrs Rinehart emphasises key conservative values, seeking to encourage those who benefit from her generosity to take pride in entrepreneurship, self-reliance, individual ambition, skills, hard work and resilience.

The excuses for the netball players refusing to wear Hancock Prospecting logos are ridiculous. To condemn Mrs Rinehart for the regrettable and bizarre words of her deceased father uttered decades ago is absurd. To object to a company mining the fossil fuels that are the foundation of this nation’s wealth and prosperity shows just how perverted and out of touch with reality the public debate around climate change has become; and shows how damaging it has been for the Coalition to pander to the loonies of the Left and the eco-fascists of the renewables movement. Yet again, Scott Morrison’s unforgivable switch to net zero can be seen as a major contributor to the warped set of values that now hold sway virtually unopposed amongst Australia’s young after two decades of unrelenting global warming and anti-Western propaganda.

When all our leading politicians, most celebrities, most of the media, most of our major corporations and 99.99 per cent of our academics pay lip service to the doom-mongering of the climate extremists and the fantasies of the ‘green hydrogen’ snake-oil salesmen, it is little wonder that so many of our kids are convinced a raging hellfire awaits the planet a few years from now unless we all stop living a modern existence and instead retreat to eating bugs in caves.

That this fantasy is allowed to go unchallenged, particularly in light of the energy crises afflicting so many parts of the world where net-zero policies have been enacted, is verging on the criminal.

The cowardice of those business people, journalists and politicians who know better but stay mute is dispiriting in the extreme. Mrs Rinehart is to be applauded for never flinching from her own values and not pandering to or allowing herself to be cowed by the woke tyranny.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the women’s elite netball team, the Diamonds, is named after extremely valuable compressed coal. Perhaps they would prefer to rename themselves the Lithium Batteries instead.