Victorian opposition leader Michael O'Brien (Image: AAP/James Ross)

Unintended Consequences The pandemic has delivered all manner of workplace hardships. The gendered impacts, the loss of work for casuals and international students who can’t access support, the hemorrhaging of academic jobs, the performing arts laid to waste, and countless others. Possibly worst of all, it appears to be keeping Michael O’Brien in a job.

The Victorian opposition leader and guy you just had to Google to jog your memory survived a spill back in March, one that had been openly planned since the previous August. Since then O’Brien has overseen the scattergun and incoherent day-to-day sniping, peaking with spreading surreal unedifying conspiracy theories regarding how Premier Dan Andrews sustained his serious back injury earlier this year. It has clearly not won him any admirers, with a group of Victorian Libs telling Annika Smethurst in The Age they would love to roll him, but health restrictions banning large gatherings at Parliament House have stymied them:

“With the four-square-metre [density limit] rule in place there is no room at Parliament House big enough for us to meet in person next week,” one said. “It makes it impossible for there to be a spill.”

Of course this is a happy result for the Andrews government who put the restrictions in place. O’Brien’s Libs have a strong claim to the title to least effective opposition in the country — and that includes the WA Libs, whose parliamentary arm scarcely qualifies for the carpool lane, and NSW Labor, traditionally the automatic answer to any question including the phrase “worst political party”.

BeSnitched Australians have proven themselves to be a nation of cop-loving snitches during the pandemic, so the people of South Australia ought to be proud of Premier Steven Marshall’s strong anti-snitch stance. We would only quibble slightly with the example he choose to illustrate his point.

“Don’t be a Gladys Kravitz,” he told the South Australians, a reference to the nosy neighbor character from Bewitched, a show that has delighted viewers between 1964 and 1972. As far as Crikey can gather, it hasn’t even been rerun on Australian TV for years. Nothing makes for a vivid reference like one that requires a paragraph of explanation and a YouTube link to make sense.

Misheard it through the grapevine The Politiwoops website assiduously collect every deleted tweet from Australian MPs. Usually it just lets us know when an MP has worded something inelegantly or made a commonplace typo in one of their tweets. But occasionally it gives us a little inspiration on our morning playlist.

Shadow minister for defence Brendan O’Connor has been tweeting out his skepticism at the amount of community transmission Gladys Berejiklian has been reporting: “Fighting the pandemic starts with recognising facts. @GladysB just said only 46/177 out in the community yesterday. But COVID official website shows 46 fully non-iso, 22 partially and a whopping 62 unknown which means there is up to 130/177 in the community,” he said yesterday.

Well, that’s what he tweeted eventually. His initial tweet, hastily deleted, accused a different Gladys of not being entirely transparent with the people of NSW — soul legend Gladys Knight.

You leave Gladys Knight out of this, Brendan. The only gold standard that she need concern herself with is her performance of “If I Were Your Woman“.

Answer the question, prime minister Crikey has expended a great deal of energy on the prime minister’s near compulsive lies, not to mention he and his office’s comfort with simply ignoring valid questions, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here — we’re pretty sure his befuddlement at the question “prime minister, like our Olympians, will Australia beat COVID?” was entirely candid and sincere.