Tough customer

CLIVE Palmer started the week saying that the Chinese were communists who shot their own people.

CLIVE Palmer started the week saying that the Chinese were communists who shot their own people, then the rest of the week saying he didn’t mean all the Chinese, just his business partners. Yet he’s still doing business with other Chinese. The good folk of Fairfax, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, regularly receive a CD from their local member with a sort of Parliamentary Greatest Hits, the most recent one being the big fella’s budget reply. But on the back of the CD in fine print is “Printed by Rose Duke Trade (Beijing) Co Ltd, 902 Tower B, 39 East Fourth Rong, Chaoyang District, Beijing”. In another business deal with China, Palmer paid a shade under $700,000 for the 160 replica dinosaurs that adorn his resort at Coolum, or about $4400 a dinosaur. The Australian’s China correspondent, Scott Murdoch, reports that the Chinese business people say they got their money, but they were always a bit confused about the Palmer operation, and Clive’s people weren’t easy to deal with. Golly, who’d have thought? Maybe the fake dinosaur retailers could compare notes with Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey.

Goat mete

STREWTH is not familiar with section 197 of the Local Government Act 1993 in Tasmania, but it was under this section that the Derwent Valley Council placed a public notice in Hobart newspaper The Mercury headed “For Sale by tender, 1 Angora Goat”. The council sought tenders for “the purchase of 1 brown male Angora goat impounded from the Molesworth area on the 9 July 2014”. Potential tenderers were told to place their offers in a sealed envelope marked “Angora Goat” in the tender box at the council chambers. Mayor Martyn Evans tells Strewth the successful tenderer paid $80 for Gary the Goat. “We could give it away, but in a small community people would be saying it was favouritism or something like that,” says Evans, who shaped up to Jeff Fenech for charity earlier this year (we are not making this up). There were some rumours that Gary was not a real angora. “Look, I’m not a goatologist so I can’t give a definite answer on that,” Evans says. The advertising people estimate that the public notice would have cost just shy of $500. A small price to pay for democracy.

Top End gun

SOME traditions continue — we understand that Country Liberal Party senator Nigel Scullion was the crack shot at the annual pollie clay target shoot at Lilydale near Melbourne yesterday. Someone from the Northern Territory who can wield a gun — who’d have thought?

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