At the speaker’s table, I seat the Prime Minister next to that fine journalist and bon vivant, Trevor Sykes. This was a serendipitous choice because I didn’t know at the time that when Trevor was editor of the Bulletin in 1984, he gave Tony Abbott his first job as a journalist. Trevor tells me afterwards that he thought young Abbott would make a fine journalist but six months later the trainee left for Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. In his address to our dinner guests, the Prime Minister says he feels humbled to stand before so many of his mentors and betters.
Read the full article, Quadrant here
Keith Windschuttle is editor of Quadrant
• news.com.au: Abbott’s popularity grows: Newspoll
• Bernard Lagan October 2, 2013, The Global Mail: What Happens With Rio Tinto, Stays With Rio Tinto
After Rio Tinto had its approval to expand a mine in the Hunter Valley overturned by a court, it entered into a flurry of correspondence with the NSW Government. The government joined with Rio to appeal the decision and now wants to change planning laws to favour mining companies. The Global Mail applied under FoI to have the correspondence released — we got a big no.
The global mining giant Rio Tinto has strenuously – and successfully – objected to The Global Mail’s attempts to use freedom of information laws to discover what role it had in persuading the New South Wales government to change mining laws so they are weighted in favour of big coal miners.
After a six-week push to obtain Rio Tinto’s submissions to the government and details of a meeting between the mining conglomerate’s global head of energy and the NSW Premier, Barry O’Farrell, The Global Mail has been advised that Rio Tinto lobbied against the release of all of that information, claiming that if it were made public, it would set back its mining operations in NSW.
The NSW Department of Planning and Infrastructure has decided that emails, letters, documents and legal advice – preceding the government’s announcement at the end of July that it would make the economic benefits of coal mining paramount when deciding if more new coal mines could go ahead – should not be released. The government accepted Rio Tinto’s argument that making them public would harm Rio Tinto’s business, commercial or financial interests.
The government, in a letter to The Global Mail setting out its reasons for refusing to make Rio Tinto’s emails and letters to it public, said Rio Tinto had objected because they contained sensitive information about potential redundancies and job losses at its large Mount Thorley Warkworth coal mine near the tiny township of Bulga in the Hunter Valley.
“The third party [Rio Tinto] has also stated that the information is highly confidential and its disclosure would prejudice the third party’s business interests and it would impede the third party’s opportunity to seek development approval for mines in other areas of NSW in the future. The release of this information could significantly disadvantage the third party’s ability to carry out mining operations in NSW,” the government letter said.
