She's travelled the world and seen some things. She knows Brett Ratner, for Pete's sake. But when our wandering Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, looks back on career highlights, you'd have to imagine becoming a godmother to a large offshore mining platform will be right up there.
Our mining superstructure spies report JBish was bestowed the ultimate honour on her recent trip to South Korea, visiting the almost-completed offshore gas production platform, the Ichthys Explorer at the Daewoo shipbuilding yards on Goeje Island. Apparently there was a naming ceremony in which an axe was involved. Sounds painful.
The platform is part of the Ichthys LNG project, which is budgeted at $US37 billion and is supposed to be starting production in September this year.
And as if to hedge their bets, politically-speaking, the clever folk at parent company Japan's Inpex Corporation invited former NT chief minister Clare Martin to Korea to be godmother of the similarly hulking production ship, the Ichthys Venturer, which will sit offshore next to the platform in the Browse Basin off WA.
Its very existence will be a thorn in the side of aspirant third-time WA premier Colin Barnett. Martin was accorded godmother duties after she scooted to Japan back in 2007 and convinced Inpex to base the onshore processing plant for the project in Darwin instead of WA's remote Maret Islands, pulling off the LNG coup of the year. Which is a thing.
