I love this:
China’s breathtaking appetite for all things Australian – iron ore, real estate and baby formula – has gone sky high.
Now Chinese people could soon be getting a taste for Australian air, if two Sydney entrepreneurs have their way.
John Dickinson and Theo Ruygrok have devised a way to bottle the air we breathe freely and are selling cans of pure Blue Mountains atmosphere for $18.80 each.
“We want to give people internationally a chance to taste what our beautiful air is like,” Mr Dickinson said.
They already sell bottled air from the Blue Mountains, Bondi Beach, the Yarra Valley, New Zealand and Tasmania, and are looking to harvest the atmospheric blend from additional locations around the country.
Anyone that has read or seen the stage play of Ben Elton’s Gasping will get a great kick out of this. In it, entrepreneurs patent the “suck and blow”, a revolutionary device that bottles and commodifies clean air for sale worldwide resulting in a rent-seeking oxygen monopoly that asphyxiates the world.
This is not quite so extravagant but is a neat symbol of the amount of hot air surrounding Australia’s non-resource Chinese export “boom”. Or, pining boom, as I call it:
