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Paul Burton, an emeritus professor of planning at Griffith University, who lives on nearby Tamborine Mountain which overlooks the Gold Coast, had previously cautioned that the coastal strip had a history of ambitious tower and resort projects that never came to fruition. Most collapsed, he said, because they either failed to get approval or, “much more likely” to raise the funds to finance construction.

“One of the problems now is that you can just feed something into Claude or Copilot or ChatGPT and say: ‘produce me an image of a fantastic gold plated tower sitting in the middle of Surfers Paradise’ and it’ll do it in five seconds,” he said.

“But unless you are Harry Triguboff, most developers will still have to go to a bank or an institution and borrow money – and those institutions are pretty sensible and cautious”.

Burton said he was “absolutely not” surprised at the collapse of the Trump Tower plan. “It was very predictable and the most likely outcome was that it would all fall over and end in tears,” he said. “The only question was: would it be sooner or later?”