The roll call of the departed and the appointed represents a remarkable changing of the guard, with the non-Australians leaving after a particularly messy period of bad investment decisions and heavy losses for investors.

The switch-overs are:

Mark Cutifani (Australian) replacing Cynthia Carroll (American) at Anglo American

Sam Walsh (Australian) replacing Tom Albanese (American) at Rio Tinto

Ivan Glasenberg (Australian citizen, South African born) replacing Mick Davis (South African) at Xstrata, which is merging with Glencore

Andrew Mackenzie (Scot – British passport) replacing Marius Kloppers (South African) at BHP Billiton.

There are different reasons for the wholesale shuffle, but the underlying cause in most cases is a combination of the chief executives reaching their “use-by” dates, or by being in charge when some unfortunate investment decisions were made.

Falling commodity prices did not help any of the departing, though all making an exit will head off into comfortable retirement. One of the retiring chief executives, BHP Billiton’s Marius Kloppers, is said to be sailing into the sunset (or his next career) with a pot of cash and BHP Billiton shares valued at $94 million.

Now is not the time or place to discuss the question of why the hired help gets paid so much while shareholders have to beg and plead for higher dividends, but if that $94 million pile is what one man gets for six years work, then there is scope for a future comment on the imbalance between executives and owners.

What’s more interesting than one man’s big win in the lottery of life is to question whether the Australians (and a ring-in, Melbourne-domiciled Scot) now running the world’s mega-miners will favour Australia as an investment destination, or avoid the country because they know it too well.

To understand that point, and before we name more names, consider what happens when a teacher or parent doubles as an umpire in a game of cricket or football, and the pressure he (or she) is under when making a decision – to favour his side, or go the other way to be seen as being fair, to a fault.

Cutifani, for example, would seem to be the ideal Australian to run Anglo American with its big coal-mining interests in Australia, though that’s until some of his comments in earlier years when running AngloGold Ashanti are dredged up, including a classic in 2010 about Australia exhibiting “greater sovereign risk than South Africa”

On that comment alone, it is possible to argue that Cutifani, given a choice, would prefer to invest more of Anglo American’s capital in South Africa, where it has plenty of assets, rather than his home country of Australia – though there is now the problem of wildcat industrial action at the platinum mines of Anglo American Platinum, and the odd massacre of strikers.

Glasenberg – who is more than an honorary Australian having acquired an Aussie passport (if not the accent) in the late 1990s when based in Sydney as a coal trader for Glencore – has no love of his adopted homeland and regards it as too expensive and too difficult for the sort of business he prefers for Glencore/Xstrata, which is higher risk, higher reward mines in countries such as Colombia and Congo.

Walsh, the London-based Australian, is probably the man with no choice but to stick with Australia as his preferred investment destination because Rio Tinto has so many problems elsewhere, including a rising tide of resource nationalism in Mongolia, corruption in Guinea and low profits from Canadian aluminium.

Mackenzie, the Scot soon to acquire an Australian residential address, has the widest choices of all, and probably no fixed ideas on what he wants to achieve. But over the course of the year he will reveal his true colours and they might not be mining focused at all. This is given his training in oil and gas, and a prevailing view inside BHP Billiton that petroleum could be the major growth option for the future – both in the US, where it is big in shale oil and gas, and Australia where a bid for Woodside Petroleum is always somewhere on the agenda.

The key point from the perspective of the wider mining industry is that four new leaders at four mega-miners, at a time when cost-cutting seems to be the preferred option over asset growth, signals an interesting time for everyone.

And interesting does not necessarily mean positive.