Two months ago, mining billionaire Gina Rinehart stood before the News Corp National Bush Summit in Townsville and proposed a radical reshaping of northern Queensland’s landscape. Her plan was to establish an Israeli-backed arms manufacturing hub near Prairie, west of Townsville, by offering free land and transport incentives to Israeli defence specialists. The ultimate goal was to build an advanced research and manufacturing base for war drones and missile defence systems like Israel’s Iron Dome.

To justify this foreign military-industrial enclave, Rinehart anchored her rhetoric in local history. She invoked Townsville’s World War II heritage as a critical naval and aircraft base, arguing that welcoming foreign defence specialists would allow a historic, patriotic military culture to flourish once again.

The backlash was immediate and ideologically fractured. Critics noted that Townsville is already a highly active garrison city whose defence culture needs no external resuscitation. Local advocates and veterans — many of whom otherwise lauded Rinehart for her recent $200 million private initiative to house homeless veterans — pointed out the glaring irony of gifting free Australian land to foreign interests while locals endure severe housing and cost-of-living crises. Meanwhile, peace and environmental groups condemned the literal weaponisation of pristine regional land.

Most revealingly, the proposal ignited intense friction within conservative, nationalist political circles. While right-wing groups like the Australian Jewish Association praised the idea, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation came under immense pressure from its “Australians First” voter base, forcing senators to hastily clarify that they had no intention of backing a foreign land giveaway.

Rinehart’s assumption that Australia’s patriotic military heritage would naturally resonate with Israel’s defence apparatus exposes a profound cultural misunderstanding. To evaluate whether her parallel holds any water, it’s worth exploring the foundational myths, iconography, and concepts of sovereignty that shaped both nations.

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Both Australia and Israel were established as settler-colonial states — meaning their foundational structures relied on replacing an Indigenous population with a new sovereign society. However, the internal mechanics of the respective state-building projects were driven by fundamentally opposing dynamics.

Australia began as a penal colony — a project of forced exile driven by a “push” dynamic. The British Crown established the settlement for its own administrative convenience, treating the Australian continent as a remote prison to alleviate domestic social and economic pressures. Israel, conversely, was built on a “pull” dynamic. Early Zionist migration was a voluntary, ideological journey driven by the desire to construct a sovereign refuge.

This difference dictated each nation’s relationship with the British Empire. For early Australia, the British functioned as an overarching master overseeing a frontier. Australian sovereignty evolved continuously and relatively peacefully from the imperial centre, maintaining deep cultural and legal fidelity to British institutions, culminating in a modern constitutional monarchy. Israel’s sovereignty, by contrast, was achieved through a violent break with the British Mandate. The Israeli state did not extend an empire: it intentionally replaced one, building itself from the ground up through autonomous, pre-state paramilitary and labour institutions.

These divergent origins forged distinct national self-images. Because early Australian sovereignty was top-down, imperial, and disciplinary, it produced a highly centralised, bureaucratic state. Historically, Australians have looked to the state to administer order and infrastructure, a relationship that eventually evolved into the secular myth of the “fair go” — a belief in universal support, merit, and equality of opportunity. At the heart of Australia’s self-image is the “battler”: a hardworking, modest figure trying to survive the system.

Meanwhile, Israel’s early sovereignty was collectivist, ideological, and existential, with power rapidly consolidating around the military. This created a cultural legacy defined by constant mobilisation, where citizens view themselves as active participants in the state’s survival rather than subjects of its administration. Consequently, Israel’s self-image centres not on the bureaucratic battler, but on the proactive, military hero.

This divergence extends directly into how each nation constructed its ideas of belonging:

• The exclusionary push vs the inclusionary pull: Early Australian citizenship was organised around the White Australia policy, defining identity through racial exclusion to preserve an Anglo-Celtic monoculture on the geographic periphery of Asia. Israel defined its identity through ethno-religious inclusion via the Law of Return, using a demographic “pull” to gather a globally dispersed diaspora into a unified majority.
• Conformity vs the melting pot: Australia implemented a conformist assimilation model, expecting migrants to seamlessly absorb British values and social norms. This eventually blended with “mateship” — an egalitarian ethos born from frontier survival and the trauma of World War I. Israel, conversely, enforced an aggressive policy of Shlilat Ha’galut (the Negation of the Diaspora), stripping away the European or Middle Eastern cultural markers of Jewish migrants to forge the “Sabra” — a rugged, Hebrew-speaking, self-reliant agricultural pioneer and soldier.

Both the Australian “mate” and the Israeli “Sabra” are rooted in military myths used to sanitise the foundational violence of Indigenous dispossession. In Australia, the ANZAC myth is framed as the moment the nation ideologically cut the umbilical cord of the British Empire. Yet, because this myth is tied to the concept of the slighted “battler” sent to fight an empire’s war, it carries an undercurrent of victimhood and institutional self-esteem issues that made it uniquely vulnerable to political hijacking.

For decades, ANZAC remembrance was defined by a quiet, local, and deeply reverent community ritual. It lived in the pre-dawn cold of regional cenotaphs — silent crowds in heavy winter coats, the solitary, haunting notes of the Last Post, and the smell of rosemary pinned to a lapel. It was an intimate space of collective grief and raw, egalitarian mateship, sealed afterwards over a quiet beer and a game of two-up in the smoky corner of a local RSL.

However, under the Howard government and a rising tide of defensive nationalism, this sacred cultural space was aggressively gentrified. The local, quiet ritual was replaced by extroverted, performative spectacles. Suddenly, the myth was commercialised: the humble dawn service expanded into the “Gallipoli Pilgrimage”, turning a tragic, blood-soaked Turkish beach into a crowded, backpacker rite-of-passage. The quiet dignity of remembrance morphed into flag-draping and boisterous public drunkenness.

The dark underbelly of this manufactured, aggressive nationalism became horrifyingly visible during the 2005 Cronulla Riots, during which the Australian flag was literally draped over the shoulders of drunken mobs reclaiming “their” beaches through racial violence. The ANZAC identity was no longer about shared sacrifice — it had been twisted into a defensive settler shield designed to exclude the outsider and dismiss Indigenous history, identity, and land rights.

By contrast, the Israeli military narrative skips the victimised “battler” phase entirely. It leans directly into a David vs Goliath archetype, positioning a traumatised population of refugees against a coalition of hostile regional forces. Military mobilisation is thus framed not as a sentimental coming-of-age ritual, but as a perpetual, high-tech requirement for physical survival.

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This cross-cultural analysis reveals why Rinehart’s Townsville inference fundamentally fails, and why the ADF would deeply resist seeing its reflection in the Israeli archetype.

The ADF is a highly professional, bureaucratic, all-volunteer force operating within strict international legal frameworks and a Westminster tradition. It is currently navigating the cultural and legal fallout of the Brereton Report into war crimes in Afghanistan, making institutional leadership hyper-sensitive to any overt cultural alignment with foreign military doctrines characterised by prolonged counterinsurgency and aggressive border fortification. The ADF does not possess, nor does it want, the collectivist “nation-at-arms” siege mentality of the Israeli defence model.

Ultimately, Rinehart’s proposal exposes the raw ideological hypocrisy of modern Australian right-wing populism. Outfits like One Nation build their platforms on strict monoculturalism, English language dominance, anti-globalism, and a refusal to recognise Indigenous sovereignty. Yet, when a billionaire oligarch proposes to slice up pristine Australian territory and give it away to a foreign military corporate interest to build war drones, the populist right hesitates to condemn.

Rinehart’s “Billionaire Frontier” proves that for the corporate right, the nationalist monoculture is a secondary concern. The true priority is a transnational, militarised alignment dedicated to resource extraction — even if it means trading away the very Australian soil it claims to protect.