I cannot see anywhere in my posts where I talked about connections en masse.
The market between UK and Australia/NZ is already well served by the Qantas/BA Joint Service, and by many carriers which use home cites in Dubai, Singapore, KULas hubs. If people from Glasgow want to ride to SYD.BNE.MEL/PER/CHC or AKL with one change in DXB they can do it already.
I have visited Britannia headquarters where I was told that for holidays to Australia, Thomson preferred to put people onto scheduled airlines. Britannia has operated some flights to Australia.NZ since that time, and we even had European operating a 747 to Australia for one season, but any carrier that plans flights to Australia knows there already are plenty of seats available, There are several airlines that are planning services here, like Etihad. Emirates want to double their frequencies here. I know several new carriers in Asia which want to link Australia and UK, but they have not publicly announced plans, If you look at the D & G gossip column you will see that it is not impossible that Qantas will allow Jetstar to operate a parallel service to the UK, possibly using A380s. OK, this is only gossip, but it does show that if there are lots of seats available now, there will be lots more seats on the market by 2010.
If TD can find a way of making services between UK and Australia work, that will be excellent. Certainly, 787s will be good if they can be used for departures from UK cities outside London that will be good for a lot of people.
OK, so does Mr Dalrymple only want to fly people from Glasgow to lie on Bondi Beach to go lobster colour? I just think it is a bit boring to focus on Australia's largest city as the only gateway, when you have to fly over most of Australia to get to it.
If it makes sense to have partnershiips between GSM and Canadian or US carriers at American/Canadian gateways, I was suggesting that GSM have an interchange agreement with a like minded carrier at an Asian transfer point. GSM flies two thirds of the route to Aus/NZ. The local carrier feeds the service from Perth. Adelaide, Brisbane etc. It would give GSM access to a local carrier which knows its local market ( one of the reasons for linking with Zoom on Canadian services.)
I would say that at this stage there isn't an Australian carrier of this type flying. When Australians go on holiday to Asia or the Pacific the airlines are all scheduled. But, GSM was not in existance until Channel Express started operating the ex Ansett 737-300s for them a few years ago.