15.
I honestly think he can be prime minister.
—MARK CARUSO, Perth mining identity
Andrew Forrest tries desperately to project an image of being an ordinary, knockabout Aussie bloke whose wealth hasn’t changed him. That may have been true once, but it’s a much more difficult argument to mount these days.
After making his first $2 billion in 2007, Forrest said: “I still walk around barefoot with my kids on the weekend, I drive a car old enough to vote [a 1986 Mercedes], I don’t gloat.” A year later, when his fortune was approaching $10 billion, he continued to insist that money wasn’t overly important. “Once you can look after your own needs, it becomes superfluous,” he said.
But Forrest has gone to great lengths to look after those needs. In fact, he has spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring some of the trappings of wealth favoured by billionaires the world over. The beaten-up Mercedes he used to boast about is long gone from Forrest’s seven-car garage in Cottesloe. In its place is a luxury Lexus hybrid, parked alongside Nicola’s Lexus SUV. The Forrest home, perched at the peak of John Street near picture-perfect Cottesloe Beach, is suitably magnificent, even if slightly modest when compared with the narcissistic monuments favoured by many of Perth’s other mega-wealthy residents.
Forrest has spent millions of dollars restoring the interior of the house, a sprawling dwelling built in 1895 by retail magnate Frank Zimpel. From a grand turret at the front flies the Australian flag – the only clue beyond the Norfolk Island pines lining the street that this is the domain of a patriotic mining tycoon. Those who have been inside are impressed by Forrest’s underground humidified cellar and its hundreds of bottles of fine wine. There are few outward shows of pretension, however. On a normal evening, Nicola will be cooking dinner while the kids and their friends will be hanging around the kitchen or watching television – unless they’re taking a dip in the heated swimming pool or playing on the floodlit tennis court.
Forrest also owns a penthouse apartment on Sydney’s Circular Quay that features floor-to-ceiling windows with sweeping views of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge on one side and the Botanic Gardens on the other. The apartment, which doubles as his Sydney office, was bought for $6 million in 2006. And he appears to enjoy the frills of owning one of Sydney’s glitziest residences. When Sydney journalist Elizabeth Knight interviewed Forrest about his philanthropic work over lunch in the penthouse, they dined on quail, foie gras, grilled figs and rosella gastrique, washed down with a fine oaked chardonnay.
According to property records, Forrest also paid $1.4 million in 2007 for a property in the historic NSW village of Berrima. The splurge continued in 2010 and 2011, when Forrest bought three apartments in his own beachside suburb of Cottesloe for a total of $2.5 million. The family also has a forty-hectare retreat near Byford, in the Perth foothills, for weekend horseriding expeditions.
As his wealth rose with Fortescue’s early success, Forrest began talking about upgrading his fifteen-metre boat, Geordie Girl, for a flash 26-metre launch that cost $10 million. He took his father, Don, to a boat show to look at the shiny new craft he coveted. Don recalled: “I said to him, ‘I don’t like it, you have a perfectly good boat and you don’t need a bigger one.’” Forrest took the parental advice and decided to stick with his old boat.
But in late 2008, his wish for a more luxurious boat was granted when he bailed out a friend, Perth stockbroker Andrew Frazer, who had run up big losses during the global financial crisis. Forrest took a mortgage over Frazer’s century-old mansion in the riverfront suburb of Peppermint Grove. He also helped out by buying his mate’s 21-metre boat and beachfront property in Gracetown, which is close to the vineyards of Margaret River. At last, he had a motor launch he could proudly show off and the obligatory holiday house in the wine region of the south-west, the playground of Perth’s rich and powerful.
Forrest still lacked the ultimate symbol of corporate success: a private jet. There was a time when he regarded business people who criss-crossed the continent on their own planes as self-indulgent and removed from everyday life. “He always said, ‘Shoot me if I ever get a private jet,’” says one old friend. Something must have changed in Forrest’s attitude. In early 2011 he arranged for Fortescue to take delivery of a $53-million Bombardier Global Express to whiz him across the nation and, increasingly, around the world. Even after he stepped down as chief executive later that year to become chairman, he continued to be a regular user of the sixteen-seat plane.
Forrest now had the Cottesloe beachside family home, the Sydney penthouse apartment, the Gracetown coastal holiday house, the Byford rural retreat, the investment properties, the luxury boat and the Fortescue corporate jet. All this for a man who claimed to eschew the accoutrements of wealth.
His good friend Rodney Adler says Forrest was once driven by the desire to become super-rich, but believes he has now moved beyond that. “When I first met him at Jacksons, all the way up to the founding of Fortescue, he was motivated by wealth,” Adler says. “There’s no question about that. But after you go past a certain point – and for Andrew I don’t know which billion it was – the motivation is no longer wealth. Because you have so much, you can’t spend it in your lifetime.”
The real jewel in Forrest’s empire is Minderoo, the 280,000-hectare cattle station in the Pilbara that served as the family seat for four generations until Don was forced to sell in 1998. Forrest was shattered by his father’s forced sale of their ancestral land, vowing to buy it back one day if he ever had the money. Ten years later, when his bank balance was much healthier, he began calling Minderoo’s owners – Kalgoorlie mining identities Peter Bartlett, Gary Connell, Graeme Smith and Ron Harken – to ask them to sell. The owners demanded $30 million for the station, which Twiggy refused to pay. But when the property was put up for auction in 2009, Forrest sent in two private bidders and bought Minderoo for $12 million. After eleven agonising years, the family name was back on the mailbox.
Forrest has since spent millions of dollars restoring the main homestead to its former glory and refurbishing more than a dozen other buildings on the property. In 2012, he invited several journalists – including the author – to fly to the Pilbara and stay at Minderoo. During a tour of the station, Forrest showed the old two-way radio he used for School of the Air lessons and, while strolling through the shearing quarters, recalled the boyhood thrill when his father and the head shearer would give him a sip from their beer bottles at the end of the day. For the cameras, he also put on a display of his jackerooing skills, helping to push a herd of Red Angus cattle through the stockyards.
That night, at the end of a sticky day in the red dust, Forrest pulled on his board shorts, walked across the homestead’s superbly manicured lawns and jumped into the soothing water of the man-made lake. Later, he produced bottles of red wine from his cellar and chatted for hours. It was proof that Forrest, when he turns on the charm, is good company. Next morning, he was up early cooking fillet steak for his guests’ breakfast.
When Forrest bought Minderoo, he believed he was righting a historical wrong. For his parents and siblings, it had been distressing to have the station out of the family’s hands for so long. “To see the look on my brother’s face, to hear the voice of my sister and to look into my father’s eyes and my mother’s eyes and see their joy is something I will never forget,” he said of buying back the property. “The place we had put so much heart into and so much blood, sweat and tears, was now back in the family and in the hands of the people who loved it. If you work hard, Australia affords you the opportunity to literally buy back the farm.”
To spend time with Forrest at Minderoo is to glimpse a man who views himself as much a pastoralist as a mining magnate or a philanthropist. He sees the station as a money-making venture, even if cattle breeding these days is a thin-margin business. After taking possession of Minderoo, Forrest employed one of Australia’s best cattlemen, Phil Clark from Alice Springs, and slashed the herd from 11,000 to 3500 to ease pressure on the land.
Forrest’s intense familial attachment to Minderoo may explain his bizarre attempts to keep other mining companies off the land. Like other pastoral stations in Western Australia, Minderoo is rich with minerals buried beneath it. But pastoral leases are all on Crown land, leaving pastoralists with little room to object to mining and exploration permits. In this region of wide open spaces, pastoralists and miners usually coexist quite happily.
As a miner, Forrest has taken full advantage of his rights. Fortescue’s Cloudbreak and Christmas Creek mines in the Pilbara were built across three active pastoral leases, including Gina Rinehart’s Mulga Downs station. Despite some objections from pastoralists in the early days about the huge scale of the project, Fortescue was able to carve its mines, railways, roads and an accommodation village that it once described as “the size of a small town” out of the pastoral land. The company went on to lock up a total of 85,000 square kilometres of prime land across the Pilbara.
But in 2010, the shoe was on the other foot for Forrest when a small private company called Yarri Mining lodged an application to conduct sand mining at Minderoo. The Minderoo lease is more than twice the size of New York City and is so vast that fully grown cattle are often brought in during a muster that have never been in the yards. Yarri applied for two mining leases covering only 141 hectares – or about 0.05 per cent of the total area. In response, Forrest’s private company, Forrest & Forrest, lodged multiple objections to the grant of the mining leases, arguing in the Warden’s Court that the noise from any mining operation would frighten the cattle and threaten the survival of a rare mammal called the mulgara.
In a judgment handed down in January 2013, Magistrate Stephen Wilson took only a few sentences to sum up what he thought of Forrest’s central arguments. It was difficult to fathom, he said, how two mining leases covering such a small area could cause any financial or environmental impact to Minderoo. But Wilson saved his real disdain for Forrest & Forrest’s “dictatorial” application to the court to impose a condition that Yarri must pay Forrest an annual performance guarantee of at least $200,000 if mining went ahead. “In my opinion this proposed condition by Forrest is outrageous,” he said. “The proposed condition appears to be an attempt to create some form of dictatorial power that allows it to act as the investigator, prosecutor, judge and enforcer of the provisions of the Mining Act when it has no power or right to do so.”
Later, Andrew Forrest also opposed an application by Perth mining identity Tony Sage to explore for uranium on Minderoo. Sage, who had spent years working closely with Pilbara station owners, was shocked that a man who had championed the junior end of the mining sector could object to the use of pastoral land by an explorer. “We are disappointed that someone so prominent in the Australian mining industry, and who … has purportedly ‘fought’ for junior exploration companies, has taken such a bewildering stance,” Sage said.
This wasn’t the first time his fellow miners had accused Forrest of hypocrisy. When he created Fortescue, Forrest promised repeatedly that his railways would be open to other Pilbara miners and this would help unlock the huge potential of the region for anyone with a stranded deposit. This open-access regime was also a critical part of the mining agreement he signed with the WA government in 2004. Forrest’s mantra was that BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto had failed the nation by refusing access to their infrastructure, but he would be its saviour. When he opened Fortescue’s Pilbara operations in 2008, Forrest declared with typical hyperbole: “These ports and lines will have lives way beyond ours. These are the arteries which will see hundreds of other projects grow.”
Years later, however, Fortescue’s rail lines remained as closed to other companies as those of BHP and Rio. By 2013, it was painfully clear to the up-and-coming miners in the Pilbara that Fortescue would not allow them rail access without attempting to extract a heavy price. Fortescue did reach an agreement in 2011 to transport ore for one company, BC Iron, but only after driving a hard bargain that involved it securing a 50 per cent equity stake in BC Iron’s mine.
Another junior miner, Brockman Mining, became so frustrated with Fortescue’s attitude that it applied to the WA government, using an unused part of the railways access code to try to force the company to give it access to part of its 280-kilometre line. Fortescue demanded up to $576 million a year – a massive price – from Brockman to use the railway. It later said it would not have any spare capacity on its line for twenty years, and that the Chinese-owned Brockman would need to pay for an expansion of the railway if it wanted to use it. Fortescue argued in submissions to the WA Economic Regulation Authority that allowing Brockman’s trains on its railway would create “material inefficiencies” in its train scheduling and maintenance. The claim echoed those made by BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto in the 2000s, when they successfully fought Fortescue’s ownefforts for third-party access.
And therein lie the contradictions at the heart of Forrest and the mining empire he has built in the Pilbara dirt. This is a man for whom life is a sequence of ambiguities and paradoxes. He wants to be seen as an everyman who took on powerful mining giants and triumphed for the benefit of all Australians, yet he regularly conflates the national interest with his own commercial interests. He is an elitist who craves the respect of the establishment but wants to be loved by ordinary people. An honest bloke found by several courts sometimes to have trouble with the truth. A devout Christian who does business with morally dubious characters. A philanthropist who will do anything for a dollar. A supporter of Aboriginal people except those who stand in the way of his mines.
What is next for Andrew Forrest? Still only in his early fifties, and with energy to burn, he will likely be a prominent figure in Australian public life for decades to come. Forrest has stepped down from day-to-day duties at Fortescue and handed the job to a management team that no longer needs a master promoter at the helm. He has thrown some of his money at a few promising nickel and gold mining plays, though none will ever be as spectacularly successful as Fortescue. And he has embarked on a series of philanthropic ventures that are bigger and bolder than anything else undertaken in this country.
His most obvious career move would be politics. He is close to Tony Abbott and the two men have chatted informally about Forrest’s interest in joining the Liberal Party and possibly entering federal parliament. Forrest has sounded out those close to him about whether he should go into politics. If he does put his hand up, few of his old friends and acquaintances would be surprised.
Mark Caruso, the man who sold Forrest the tenements that made him a multibillionaire, believes Forrest’s overwhelming motivation in life is restoring his family name to greatness in public life, and being prime minister would be the ultimate way of achieving this. “He has both the influence and resources to become a significant politician,” says Caruso. “I honestly think he can be prime minister.”
Albert Wong, Forrest’s buddy from his Sydney deal-making days, is another who reckons he will aim for the prime ministership. “One day, I said to him, ‘You’ve done it all now, you might as well be prime minister.’ He didn’t admit it to me, but I’m sure that has crossed his mind. Ultimately, Andrew is the type of guy that really wants to make his mark and leave a legacy.”
Warwick Grigor believes his old business partner is more likely to follow in the footsteps of Sir John Forrest and seek to become the premier of Western Australia. “He has a need to do what his forefathers have done,” Grigor says. “I told him one day he would be premier of Western Australia and that was his overriding desire, and he looked at me and said, ‘How do you know that?’”
Others who know Forrest say he is fixated by how he will be remembered in fifty years’ time. “Twiggy won’t be happy with a bronze statue in Kings Park [like Sir John Forrest]. He’ll want a gold one,” a colleague told the Australian.
One close friend reveals that Forrest is still trying to work out how to make a contribution to Australian public life, and this may include a career in politics. “But I think it would kill him – he would have to toe the party line,” the friend says. “He would want the red carpet treatment, but he could never go straight in as prime minister, and I think he would only ever have aspirations to be prime minister.”
Whatever his aspirations, Forrest will seek to differentiate himself from the fumbled efforts of his fellow mining billionaires, Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer, in seeking to exert influence in Australian life. Only a handful of people were aware that Forrest, in 2011, rejected the major stake in publisher Fairfax Media that Rinehart eventually bought, a move that signalled he had no desire to become a media mogul. And while Palmer created his own political party to contest the 2013 federal election, it’s unlikely even Forrest would see any advantage in such an ego-driven stunt.
Even if he decides against a shot at politics, Forrest is deftly positioning himself as a 21st-century statesman. At the high-level Boao Forum for Asia conference in 2013, Forrest led the Australian delegation and hosted cocktail parties in his hotel suite for government and corporate leaders from Australia and China. Of all the delegates, he was the most passionate in arguing that Australia must work harder to boost its trade and investment links with a country that he insists will remain an economic powerhouse for decades. Those present witnessed a businessman with the ability to schmooze the Chinese leadership better than anyone.
Yet there are still those who believe Forrest’s enduring belief in his own infallibility will ultimately prove to be his downfall. “In the final analysis he will fall victim to his own personality, which is to keep pushing and pushing and pushing,” warns Brian Burke, the former WesternAustralian premier who worked closely with Forrest. “One day there will be something that will be impossible and Twiggy won’t recognise it.” Burke pauses and searches for an example. “I will never run 100 metres in ten seconds,” he says. “But if you told Twiggy, he’d say, ‘Let me have a few months’ training and I will do it.’ In the final analysis, that inability to accept that something is impossible will cause him to fail.”
The great unanswered question of Forrest’s life is whether he is motivated more by money, power or the need for respect. The answer will, to a large extent, determine how he is remembered. Whatever happens, though, Forrest’s fortunes will continue to be governed by chance. If the Chinese economy suffers a serious jolt, his wealth and influence could shrivel up almost overnight. Under this scenario, he would be left without much of a fortune to give away to charity. And if he does decide on a political career, he will have to rely on the vagaries of the party system, and the will of the people, to get to the top.
Forrest has never chosen the safe path. Driven by the legend of his pioneering ancestors, he continues to dream of conquests on a grand scale, and he is desperate to prove his remaining doubters wrong. Of this we can be sure: the high-stakes life of Andrew Forrest has plenty more adventures ahead.