Context: A very strange news week last week. The Jake Kovco saga began when we heard word on Sunday of the first Australian soldier to be killed serving in Iraq. Even from the first report people started gossiping about how suspicious the circumstances were and whether he had purposefully committed suicide and not accidentally shot himself in the right temple as suggested by the Department of defence. If this wasn't enough, on Thursday it was reported that Kovco's coffin had been delivered to the wrong country and we had recieved the body of a Bosnian security contractor. (An interesting thing happened after this where the greiving widow called up Prime Minister John Howard in the middle of the night and gave him an earful.) It was later revealed that a private transport contractor was used to send the coffin home where bungle occured on a stop off on the way to Australia.

So what's this cartoon about? Well, also this and last week there has been a local story floating around the news cycles of a David and Goliath battle between small-time mining company "Cazaly Resources" and giant corporation "Rio Tinto". The conflict began when Resources Minister John Bowler returned ownership of a lease (for the Shovelanna iron ore deposit near Mt Newman) back to Rio Tinto, even after Cazaly resources had put their application in for the lease after Rio Tinto failed to send its renewal in to the Marble Bar office within the designated deadline to do so.
The excuse that both Rio Tinto and John Bowler used was that Rio Tinto had indeed sent the lease renewal in time, but had sent it via TNT courier. The couriers do not have an authorised delivery agent in Marble Bar, so the courier just gave the lease renewal to the local general store owner, Lenny Lever, who later had it hand-delivered to the leases office.