Talking of which , how is Titanic II getting on over there ?.
That seems to have faded away, like a lot of Clive Palmer's ridiculous ideas. Nothing has been said in the press for a long time, and I doubt we'll ever hear of it again.
For those who don't know who Clive Palmer is, he's a multi-millionaire who made his money from the mining industry. He started a football (soccer) team based on the Gold Coast, but then closed off most of the stadium seating as the ground's owners charged according to the amount of seating used in each match. He decided he didn't want to pay the money asked, so he took the above action. Needless to say, that didn't go down too well with the fans. He eventually walked away from the club, saying that Rugby League was a better game anyway
and the club eventually folded.
His next big venture was to form a new political party called the Palmer United Party, or PUP. This party won a couple of seats in the Upper House (Senate) at the last election, one member is a somewhat radical woman from Tasmania, and the other a former Rugby League player. The woman has just been expelled from the PUP because she dared to argue with Palmer, and she now sits as an independent. Another PUP member was elected to the Senate in a special election in April, following a case in the Court of Disputed Returns. Palmer himself was elected to the Lower House, but he's been accused of hardly ever showing up for parliamentary sittings.
The Titanic project is typical of the man, all talk and very little substance, and I don't think that many Australians actually believed that it would come to anything.
Peter.