Gina Rinehart has a new foreign admirer.Credit: John Shakespeare
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FOREIGN HONOUR
While controversies follow Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart around on home soil, the iron-ore magnate has won the admiration of Norodom Sihamoni, King of Cambodia. His Majesty has bestowed The Royal Order of Sahametrei on Rinehart, the highest award for non-Cambodians, in a recent ceremony.
While she can’t avoid the adverse publicity that comes with long-running legal battles with some of her own children, John Hancock and Bianca Rinehart, Gina Rinehart rarely speaks publicly about her charitable efforts in Cambodia.
The gratefulness of the Cambodians received far less publicity than Rinehart attracted after she failed to have Vincent Namatjira’s portrait of her from the artist’s Australia in Colour series removed from display at the National Gallery in Canberra.
The award from the king comes after she received the Angkor Award back in February from Scott Neeson, founder and executive chairman of the Cambodian Children’s Fund.
Shocked by reports of the country’s child sex trade, Rinehart established the Hope Scholarship program to help young Cambodian women from poor backgrounds gain a university education. Five years ago, at an event in the Pilbara, she spoke about rescuing nine girls from extreme poverty in Phnom Penh in 2007 and treating them as part of her family.
“Please welcome Channat, Pum and Sopheak, three of my Cambodian daughters, having their first visit to West Australia, and their first to our north,” she said in remarks reported by the Australian Financial Review.
“They started their lives very differently to each of us. They had to scavenge from sinking rubbish dumps in Cambodia, some of them sadly without parents. The rubbish dumps are not safe places for young girls.”
“Pum, Channat and Sopheak have become an inspiration for us all, from these terribly poor beginnings to becoming graduates from their respective universities with the help of our Hope scholarships.”
It’s another sign that while Rinehart often bristles at a perceived lack of love from the current Labor government, she’s got plenty of foreign admirers. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi even personally launched her book on red tape in 2015.
TV writer and executive Bevan Lee.Credit: Seven
LEGACY LUXURY
It is cost-cutting season in Australian television and one of the biggest sequoias to topple in the forest is Bevan Lee, the TV drama executive who created Always Greener, Packed To The Rafters, Winners and Losers and A Place to Call Home. Back in the 1980s, he rescued the classic soap Home and Away, still in production today, by rewriting the first episode. He also worked on the TV classic Sons And Daughters.
Lee spent most of his career at Seven and said the call to leave came from the network but he left with gratitude.
“I’m 74 in November. I blinked and had turned into an old c—,” he told CBD.
“We live in the economic times we live in and they had to make choices. I had become a legacy luxury that had outlived its time. You can stay too long at the fair.”
He praised Seven drama mainstays Julie McGauran and John Holmes. “I hope those continuing the legacy of Aussie drama across all the platforms are lucky enough to share such warmth and fun as they ply their craft.”
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