A remarkable thing happened on the way to the mining tax …

Recently, according to an ABC website, “Xstrata Coal chief executive Peter Freyberg told a business audience in Sydney that multinational companies could send their investments offshore if they did not like Australia's tax policies”. He stated: "Government needs to understand how decisions are made by industry and what impact policy decisions can have on investor confidence and perceptions of sovereign risk."

Interestingly on that same ABC website it states: “He [Freyberg] later told the ABC it was not a threat to the incoming government over the mining tax.”

"It's not a threat. It's a statement of fact," he said.

Yes, well … But let’s not get too caught up with whether Freyberg’s “statement of fact” is a threat. (The probability of that is only about 90 per cent, I’d guess.) The threat more generally from the resources industries to our democracy is a full blown 100 per cent!