Two of Australia’s richest people, Gina Rinehart and Anthony Pratt, have taken out newspaper ads in the US declaring their unswerving affection for the president-elect, Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated on Monday.
Pratt’s advertisement in Sunday’s New York Times featured a map of the US (sans Hawaii and Alaska) and asserted Trump would revitalise manufacturing in the country.
“Congratulations President Trump,” it said. “I’m honored to support your call to Make America Great Again by bringing manufacturing jobs back home.”
It’s a significant rapprochement from just two years ago, when Trump described Pratt as a “red-haired weirdo from Australia”, after Trump was accused of leaking sensitive nuclear submarine information to Pratt.
Rinehart took out near-identical ads in the tabloid New York Post and the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, addressing her Post missive “To the Outstanding Leader”.
“Who understands that high government tape, regulation and taxes do nothing to encourage investment,” it said. “Investment being essential to raise living standards of a nation’s people.
“We well know you love your country and are exceptionally dedicated to its people.”
Antipodean billionaires appear to have enviable access to the president-elect. Trump dined recently with James Packer, alongside Elon Musk, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, according to pictures of the meal uploaded to Instagram.
But the guest list for Trump’s inauguration is being hurriedly recast after the event was moved inside because of an “arctic blast” – in the words of the president-elect sweeping Washington.
The ceremony will now be held in the rotunda of the Capitol building – the same building to which, in 2021, he incited a violent mob who were equipped with a gallows to hang the vice-president – urging them to “fight like hell” and overturn a free and fair election.
The indoor rotunda can host a fraction of the thousands previously expected to throng the National Mall to watch the inauguration outdoors. It’s unclear, with the last-minute change, who will be on the now-even-more exclusive list.
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Trump’s last inauguration, in 2017, became notorious for his administration’s persistent claims that it attracted the largest crowd ever, a position unsupported by evidence.
The last inauguration, of President Joe Biden in 2021, was muted and masked by a raging Covid pandemic. Trump’s 2025 inauguration will be the first moved indoors since Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration – also for cold weather – in 1985.
At an official level, Australia will be represented by the country’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, and by the foreign minister, Penny Wong.
“We are only one of a small handful of foreign governments to receive this invitation, a demonstration of the steadfast alliance between Australia and the United States,” Wong said.
Rudd, who has been critical of Trump in the past and whom Trump, in reply, described as “a little bit nasty” and “not the brightest bulb”, reportedly briefly met with the president-elect in recent days at a Trump-owned golf course in Florida.
“There has been direct contact, and that is a good thing,” the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said.
“Kevin Rudd has been very active in developing relationships with the new administration, and I am very confident Australia is showing the importance we place in the United States relationship by having a former prime minister as our ambassador.”
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