There's nothing like a sprinkling of Hollywood stardust helped by a low Australian dollar to make a politician loosen the purse strings, and their inhibitions about giving subsidies to business. 
Swoon. Thor - aka as Australian actor Chris Hemsworth - and those saliva-dripping aliens from Sir Ridley Scott's Aliens series are coming to Australia next year, providing a $300 million blood injection and the promise of 3000 jobs with film studios, local business and the creative industry.
Only 24 hours earlier, former treasurer Joe Hockey congratulated himself for refusing to write billion-dollar taxpayer cheques to the likes of Toyota, Holden, Qantas or Coca-Cola Amatil "because we could not justify taking money off the local butcher or the local plumber or the local farmer so that a profitable big business could be even more profitable".
Never mind. Australia is to become the home of the mega-sequel/prequel. Fresh from the success of the Gold Coast filming of Pirates of the Carribean 5 - not withstanding Johnny Depp's "war on terrier" quarantine scandal - the region will host the production of Thor III, Thor: Ragnarok, and Prometheus 2, the second prequel of the Aliens franchise. 
All it will cost taxpayers is a $47.5 million tax break to 20th Century Fox and Disney's Marvel Studios in the form of a 30 per cent location tax offset, up from the usual 16.5 per cent rate.
With the Australian dollar hovering around US72&cent;, the government hopes the stronger buying power for foreign film studios could trigger another foreign investment boom not enjoyed since the 2000s when the Star Wars, Matrix, and Mission Impossible movie franchises were filmed here.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who counts herself a friend of the Perth-raised Hemsworth, revealed on Thursday that her recent visits to Los Angeles and New York included wooing the Walt Disney Company, Marvel, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Village Roadshow, and NBC Universal.
Ms Bishop said Australia had also lobbied for the current box office hit The Martian to be filmed in Australia but had lost out to Hungary.
The excitement of the big budget movies had captured the imagination of everyone from Industry and Innovation Minister Christopher Pyne to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who had kept in "hourly and sometimes minute-by-minute" contact during the negotiations, Arts Minister Mitch Fifield said.
"When I was briefing cabinet on this proposition, I had to declare a conflict of interest that in the first Prometheus movie there was a character called Fifield, and Christopher Pyne said, `Yes, but he died'," Senator Fifield said.
 "For the moment I'm still standing on my feet."
Senator Fifield said every job in the film and television industry supported 3.57 jobs in other industries, every dollar of turnover created $3.52 in other industries, and the equivalent of 13 to 20 per cent of the film industry's spend came back to the federal government in taxation and a further 3 per cent went to state governments in taxation.