(Image: AAP/Bianca De Marchi, Private Media)

A Cunningham plan Yesterday Australian Workers’ Union assistant national secretary Misha Zelinsky announced a last-minute intention to run for preselection as a Labor candidate for the seat of Cunningham.

A few things stand out. Do people generally make campaign flyers when they run for preselection? And do they generally use the colour scheme more generally associated with their political opposites?

Zelinsky has taken a run at Cunningham before. Sort of. In 2015 he announced his intention to run against then sitting member Sharon Bird, a minister in the Gillard government. More or less immediately, a book chock-a-block with jocular sexism which Zelinsky co-wrote in 2012 surfaced and Zelinsky was eased towards the exit. Bird is retiring at the next election, but Zelinsky is up against her long-time staffer Alison Byrnes Scully, so presumably the same people who said his book made Mark Latham’s interactions with women “look sane” won’t be giving him a clearer run this time.

Giving a RATs The Australian Council of Trade Unions’ push for free rapid antigen tests (RATs) and N95 masks in the workplace, accompanied with the threat that “for those employers who will not work with us to make workplaces safe, the union movement will do what is necessary up to and including ceasing work in order to keep workplaces safe”, elicited a fairly predictable response. Employer groups said the union movement was “unnecessarily inflaming the situation” and imposing “unworkable” costs on employers. Hell, Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox went so far as to say people should be tested less: “Until we get many millions more tests into circulation, we need to look at reducing the testing requirements.”

I suppose it deserves some credit that the word “militant” didn’t feature in the responses. But lest we forget, business has hardly been abandoned during the pandemic. The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates that $38 billion of the $88 billion paid to businesses through JobKeeper went to businesses that plain didn’t qualify. It’s probably more. All this while private sector wages growth is well below inflation and employment becomes increasingly precarious.

Even at the extremely gougy price of, say, $30 a test, that’s enough to buy 1,266,666,666 RATs (we didn’t deliberately choose a price that would give us that demonic vibe, we promise). Separate but related: Australia’s billionaires have doubled their wealth during the pandemic.

RATs to you We’d probably also suggest to Willox that it may be a good idea to tell employers to stop using the RATs they do have for promotional purposes — Cafe St Ali in Melbourne is the latest to have to apologise after texting customers they could get a free RAT double-pack with any purchase over $160 — or just selling them at more than a 100% mark-up.

Transport this In a new take on the whole “personal responsibility” mantra it was so keen to adopt, the New South Wales government has a novel approach to public transport: do it your fucking self.

But despite getting more attention in the past few days and feeling extremely on brand with the whole “governments who don’t want to govern” vibe of the past few months, this isn’t actually all that new: NSW public transport started saying, literally, to commuters, “Transport Yourself” back in 2020.