Gina Rinehart's descent upon Fairfax will be welcomed by all right-thinking Australians. As everyone knows, great wealth automatically confers great wisdom, a clarity of vision light years beyond the feeble witterings of the rest of us. With a fortune of $20 billion or so, there is no one wealthier than La Rinehart.

Frankly, things have never been the same here since 1987, when our last proprietor in the grand manner, Sir Warwick Fairfax, ascended into heaven to sit, if not at the right hand of God, at least near enough to pass the port.

The place had style then. It was always an inspiration to the staff when Sir Warwick's custom-built Rolls-Royce purred into the grim old Fairfax fortress on Broadway.

Legendary were the garden parties at the family seat, Fairwater, in Double Bay.

Those who were there have never forgotten the glittering ball given in 1973 to celebrate the opening of the Opera House. The guests included Rudolf Nureyev, Liberace, and best of all, Imelda Marcos, first lady of the Philippines, whose stately arrival was impishly welcomed by the band playing that cheerful Scottish air, Ho Ro My Nut Brown Maiden.

Now the glory days beckon again, although we don't know what sort of media proprietor Gina might be. Should she get the gig, that is. She is said to be very much in the mould of her father, Lang Hancock, the famous mining magnate.

To the day he died in 1992, Lang waged a ferocious war against socialism, or Canberra-ism, as he called it. The ''many-sided taxation monster'' was ruining the nation, he warned unceasingly. In his book Wake Up Australia, published in 1979, he urged that everything north of South Australia, should be declared ''a 100 per cent tax-free zone'', where the resources barons could let it rip for the benefit of us all.

Mind you, his loathing of socialism was selective. In the 1980s he formed a bizarre business partnership with the Stalinist tyrant of Romania, the blood-soaked Nicolae Ceausescu. With thousands reported murdered in the 1989 revolution that toppled the Butcher of Bucharest, Hancock snapped that he would be surprised if anything more than 10 students had been killed ''because they protested about something or other which is none of our business''.

And he loathed journalists. In a letter to the Herald in 1978, railing against ''the so-called freedom of the press'', he demanded that the media lay off his mate, Queensland's Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who was ''one of the main bulwarks of protecting [sic] … the decent citizens of Australia from anarchy, violence and the total bureaucratic control of every facet of Australian life''.

That same letter also pronounced that ''the genuine Aboriginal is not interested in high-sounding phrases such as 'self management' etc. He is happiest when left alone.''

Gina keeps her cards closer than her dad did, but it's safe to say she's in the same ideological groove. With a few modern flourishes, such as her fervent boosting of that climate change nincompoop Lord Christopher Monckton.

But with Rupert Murdoch now ga-ga, if his recent foray into tweeting is anything to go by, it would be wonderful to see a new Australian media titan arise to lead us to those broad sunlit uplands.

Mike Carlton