Give a man a coalmine, make him rich, and what does he do? He goes and tells everybody he’s not your mate. The costs of corruption will weigh on NSW for years to come. A decade of deals can hardly be unwound now
May 13, 2013 Leave a comment
Mateship, it is obvious, can come at a high price
May 11, 2013, Michael West
‘If he was me mate, he would have showed up.” Former union boss John Maitland tells the Independent Commission Against Corruption this week former New South Wales mining minister Ian Macdonald was not his mate because he didn’t show up at his farewell dinner. Crikey, that’s hurtful. Give a man a coalmine, make him rich, and what does he do? He goes and tells everybody he’s not your mate. It’s fair dinkum un-Australian! Granted, the union boss did concede in testimony before ICAC this week, that he and the minister may have had a ”close working friendship”. Yes, struck the deal over a magnum of pinot noir at Catalina Restaurant. Yes, there had been no tender – come on, it was only a ”training mine”. Yes, the training mine somehow become a real mine and found its way into a stockmarket company NuCoal. And yes, John’s $165,000 investment happened to turn into $14 million. After all that goodwill from Macca, one can only surmise that John attaches exceedingly rigorous performance hurdles to his mateships. In the same year that Macca approved the Hunter Valley licence for John, he also opened up tracts of land in the Bylong Valley. That’s the spot where, by sheer providence, Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid had bought a property whose value was soon to rise fourfold. Eddie Obeid had stewardship of the mines portfolio in NSW from April 1999 to April 2003. Macca came later. A pall has been cast over any mining deal struck by the NSW government in the past 14 years, including those with mining leviathan Newcrest, which operates Cadia, the country’s largest gold mine, near Orange. Gold and Copper Resources – an explorer led by Brian Locke and backed by former Rio Tinto boss Leigh Clifford, founder of Barlow Jonker Jeremy Barlow, former Glencore and Xstrata chairman Willy Strothotte, and venture capitalist Mark Carnegie – is contesting the validity of Newcrest’s licences. They await judgment on the first of five court actions over the Cadia licences. It’s a mess, though there is the odd winner from ICAC: the Coalition, we in the media and, of course, Ian Macdonald’s dentist to name three (love that smile). But the costs of corruption will weigh on NSW for years to come. A decade of deals can hardly be unwound now.
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