The mining company that owns your news

Kerry Stokes AC is Australia’s tenth richest person, with a net worth of approximately A$12.69 billion as of May 2025. He was born John Patrick Alford in Melbourne, adopted as an infant, dropped out of school at 14, and built a fortune through property development, media acquisitions, and industrial diversification.

He controls his empire through a network of private companies. The key vehicle is Australian Capital Equity (ACE), which holds a controlling stake in the ASX-listed Seven Group Holdings (SGH). SGH in turn was the controlling shareholder of Seven West Media, now merged with Southern Cross Media Group as of January 2026.

Understanding Stokes requires understanding what SGH actually is. Because most Australians, if they think of Stokes at all, think of Channel Seven. SGH is not primarily a television company.

In the financial year 2025, Seven Group Holdings generated total revenue of A$10.74 billion. Of that, WesTrac, the Caterpillar equipment division, contributed A$639 million in EBIT alone. Management has guided FY2026 underlying profit above A$1.2 billion. Media is a minority of this business by revenue and earnings.

WesTrac. The sole authorised Caterpillar equipment dealer in Western Australia, New South Wales, and the ACT. It supplies Caterpillar mining trucks, excavators, draglines, and underground longwall equipment to BHP, Rio Tinto, Fortescue Metals, Roy Hill, and CIMIC. WesTrac holds approximately 90 per cent of the Caterpillar market in the Pilbara, the iron ore heartland of Australia. Its order book swelled 20 per cent in 2025.

Beach Energy. SGH holds a 30 per cent stake in this oil and gas producer operating in the Cooper Basin, the Otway Basin, and the Perth Basin. Beach Energy NPAT rose 32 per cent in FY2025.

Coates Hire. Australia’s largest equipment hire company, wholly owned by SGH.

Boral. SGH acquired majority control of this major building materials company (concrete, asphalt) for A$4.4 billion, reaching majority control by 2024–2025. EBIT increased 26 per cent in FY2025.

Cattle. Stokes privately owns more than one million hectares of pastoral land in Western Australia, including Napier Downs station in the Kimberley stocked with 20,000 head of cattle.

A company that sells equipment to iron ore mines, holds a 30% stake in an oil and gas producer, and owns the country’s largest equipment hire business also controls the only major daily newspaper in a city of two million people and a television network that reaches 98% of Australians.

The following is not a list of alleged conspiracies. It is a list of disclosed corporate relationships that create editorial conflicts of interest, conflicts that readers of The West Australian and viewers of Channel Seven have never been clearly informed about.

WesTrac versus anyone threatening the mining industry. WesTrac is the sole Caterpillar dealer in WA’s Pilbara, the region that produces the iron ore underpinning Australia’s trade surplus. Its order book and revenue depend on the continued expansion of mining operations, weak environmental regulation of the sector, and opposition to policies that would reduce mining activity or impose windfall profit taxes. The West Australian covers all of these policy areas. It is the only major daily newspaper in a state where these are the dominant political and economic issues.

Beach Energy versus climate and gas policy. SGH holds a 30 per cent stake in Beach Energy, an oil and gas producer. Beach Energy’s profitability depends on favourable gas prices, continued gas exploration and production approvals, and opposition to policies that would accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. When Seven Network’s news coverage or The West Australian covers gas policy, LNG export restrictions, the extension of gas field licences, or climate targets, it is covering territory with a direct line to Beach Energy’s bottom line.

In February 2023, the conflict between Stokes’ media and energy interests and the businesses they cover became a matter of formal public record.

Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest’s Fortescue Future Industries (the green energy arm of his Fortescue Metals Group) had ended a long-standing equipment supply arrangement with WesTrac. Fortescue was shifting toward green hydrogen and electrification of its mining fleet. WesTrac sells fossil-fuel-powered Caterpillar equipment.

What followed, Fortescue alleged, was coordinated negative coverage in The West Australian targeting Fortescue’s green energy operations.

Fortescue’s CEO, Mark Hutchinson, formally complained to federal Communications Minister Michelle Rowland. In a letter to the Minister, Hutchinson described what he called ‘the misuse of the West Australian newspaper to pursue commercial interests’.

The West’s coverage has gone far beyond fair scrutiny and is clearly driven by fossil fuel interests with the aim of damaging Fortescue’s green energy mission.Mark Hutchinson, CEO, Fortescue Future Industries [9]

The complaint pointed to a fundamental problem: Perth has no alternative major daily newspaper. If The West Australian is systematically covering Fortescue in a way shaped by its owner’s commercial interests, there is no competing masthead to provide balance or a different account.

Ben Roberts-Smith was, for a period, one of the most celebrated figures in Australian public life: a Victoria Cross recipient, former SAS soldier, and widely described as the country’s most decorated living soldier. Kerry Stokes employed him at Seven Queensland from 2015.

Starting in 2018, journalists Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald published a series of articles alleging Roberts-Smith had committed war crimes during his deployments to Afghanistan, including the unlawful killing of unarmed civilians and prisoners.

Roberts-Smith launched defamation proceedings against the three newspapers in January 2019. Kerry Stokes chose to fund the case. Seven Network and his private company ACE entered into loan agreements with Roberts-Smith that included terms giving their lawyers ‘oversight and management’ of the defamation proceedings.

In June 2023, after a 110-day hearing, Federal Court Justice Anthony Besanko dismissed Roberts-Smith’s defamation case, finding the war crimes allegations, including murder, had been proven on the balance of probabilities. ACE alone was ordered to pay A$13,270,950 to the media respondents. Total legal costs for all parties were estimated at well above A$25 million.

The case reveals how Stokes operates: he used his private company to bankroll a defamation case against newspapers owned by a commercial rival (Nine Entertainment) with his lawyers having direct oversight of the litigation. The case involved allegations of war crimes, a matter of profound public interest.

When the Afghan Files, which first exposed potential war crimes by Australian soldiers, triggered federal police raids on the ABC in 2019, Stokes’ The West Australian ran a short story on page six. Seven West Media was the only major news organisation not at the subsequent Perth press freedom rally.

As Michael West Media has documented in detail, Stokes controls his vast business empire through what it terms ‘Dark Companies’: private holding structures that are exempt from normal ASIC financial disclosure requirements under a grandfathering provision in the First Corporate Law Simplification Act 1995.

Under this provision, large private companies incorporated before 1995 and meeting certain criteria are not required to lodge financial accounts with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. Their revenue, profits, liabilities, and financial arrangements are not publicly available.

Australian Capital Equity, the private company through which Stokes controls SGH and which funded Roberts-Smith’s legal case, is one of these Dark Companies. The full extent of its financial interests, loan arrangements, and commercial relationships is not publicly known.

In a functioning democracy, the owner of the only major newspaper in a city of two million people, and a television network reaching 98 per cent of the population, should have transparent finances. In Australia, the law created in 1995 means he doesn’t have to.

Perth’s mayor said it plainly in 2022. Western Australia is Australia’s most resource-dependent state economy. Iron ore, liquefied natural gas, lithium, gold, and nickel drive its budget and employment. The decisions made in Canberra and in Perth about mining approvals, royalties, environmental regulation, and energy transition policy are among the most consequential in the country.

In that state, there is one major daily newspaper. Its owner holds the largest single stake in a gas producer, runs the dominant Caterpillar dealership supplying the iron ore industry, and controls a satellite network through which Sky News reaches regional communities often without alternative broadcast news sources.

When WA politicians consider environmental regulation of the Pilbara, or gas royalty reform, or a windfall resources tax, they do so knowing that the only major newspaper in their city is owned by a man with direct financial interests in the outcome of those decisions.

Kerry Stokes is, by most accounts, a self-made man. His personal story (adopted from an orphanage, left school at 14, built a fortune from nothing) is genuine and remarkable. This article is not about him personally.

It is about a structural arrangement in which one of the most consequential industrial conglomerates in Australia, with direct financial interests in mining equipment, oil and gas, and construction, also controls the primary source of news for the state most dependent on those industries.

The residents of Perth are not told this clearly when they pick up The West Australian. Viewers of Channel Seven are not informed during the news bulletin.

Kerry Stokes does not just own your news. He owns the machines that dig the mines your news is afraid to scrutinise.