173 Acres For $1

One of those feel good stories. If you're a coal company:

In the dying days of the New South Wales Labor Government a profitable mining company was virtually given 70 hectares of crown land - land that’s supposed to be owned by the taxpayers, and the asking price was just one dollar.

Phil Stuart is the loser in the deal. He's the general manager of the Hunter Plant Operator Training School, a small not for profit heavy machinery training organisation that used the land for two decades, investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in infrastructure and buildings. Now it’s facing an uncertain future.

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Instead the area was given to another tenant on the land - White Energy, a publically listed coal technology company worth $675 million.