LAST July, during a visit to the Hunter Valley, senior federal opposition figure Malcolm Turnbull said what everybody knows but few will dare to say.
Suggesting that the federal government ought to have a bigger say in the assessment of mining proposals, Mr Turnbull said state governments had "a gigantic conflict of interest".
"The state governments have a massive vested financial interest in these projects going ahead. They don't get any revenue or very little revenue from prime agricultural land, but they get hundreds of millions of dollars from these coalmines and coal seam gas," Mr Turnbull said in a radio interview.
His words may be remembered by some in the wake of the NSW Department of Planning's recommendation to approve Coal and Allied's Warkworth Extension project. Recommended is the total closure of an Upper Hunter road and the complete removal of an important local landform near the village of Bulga.
Approval will also mean the loss of 764.7 hectares of woodland, impacts on 114 Aboriginal sites, significant noise and dust for 16 private residences and a significant impact on remnant populations of the nationally endangered swift parrot and regent honeyeater.
Coal and Allied, the formerly locally based coal giant now owned by Rio Tinto and Mitsubishi, wants to discard undertakings in a 2003 formal deed of agreement that it would not mine Saddleback Ridge. Its reason is simply that coal is more valuable now and it can make more money than it previously considered possible by removing the ridge.
The company expects to mine about 200 million tonnes of extra coal over the 11 years following approval. At present prices that amounts to about $24 billion in resource value.
In return for approving the project, the state government's take - at the present open-cut royalty rate of 8.2 per cent - would be just under $2 billion, or about $170 million a year.
With coal prices and royalty and approval systems as they stand, Hunter people might find themselves agreeing with Mr Turnbull about the government's "gigantic conflict of interest".
Steve Jobs's vision
BEFORE Steve Jobs and Apple gave the world the Macintosh, personal computing was an arduous undertaking for most.
Jobs's genius was to recognise the value and potential of a new type of operating system with a graphical interface - a system at first unique in the general marketplace to Apple computers but ultimately aped by imitators including the now ubiquitous Microsoft Windows.
For many innovators that might have been enough, but Jobs was always ahead of the curve in consumer technology. His second triumph, the iPod, was hardly less influential than Macintosh and the extraordinary leaps in technology since then - iPhones and tablet computers - are still nowhere near exhausting their potential.
The death of Steve Jobs marks the end of an astonishing career of innovation and imagination.
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