Doing a Bondy: Qld privatised Dalrymple Coal, now buys back when it’s too late

“You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I’ve had mine,” Kerry Packer once famously proclaimed, after selling his Nine Network to Bondy for $1 billion and buying it back three years later for $250 million.

Now the cagey Canadian asset shufflers from Brookfield Asset Management have found their Alan Bond; the Government of Queensland. Invoking the bizarre investment theory “sell low, buy high”, rather than the more traditional approach of attempting to make a profit, Queensland has sallied forth to spray the wealth of the people of Queensland into a coal port whose days are numbered.

Queensland privatised the Dalrymple Bay coal terminal near Hay in Queensland in the 1990s. Brookfield ripped out billions of dollars in…