Dennis Shanahan (Image: Supplied)

The Shanahan curve  The “secret Victorian government modelling” on the Oz‘s front page back on August 6 suggested the state would experience nearly two weeks of 1000 or more new infections per day from mid August. 

Now that fortnight has been and gone, regular Crikey readers will know, that one single day aside, they were comically wrong.

We asked The Australian whether it planned to revisit the figures, offer more clarity on where they came from and why they were so far off, or, at the very least, to update the original piece.

We also asked whether it regretted publishing such explosive and ultimately inaccurate figures at such a sensitive time. We didn’t hear back before deadline.

We also called the author of the piece, Dennis Shanahan, to ask the same questions, and he told us that his policy was not only that he wouldn’t talk to Crikey but wouldn’t talk in the presence of Crikey correspondents.

Which, at the very least, is as informative and a lot clearer than his statement to Media Watch.

Crossing the ALPs YouTube satirist and staunch Labor fan FriendlyJordies (aka Jordan Shanks) has regularly hosted ALP figures trying to court to the youth vote in recent years.

Following his petty feud with various too-online-for-their-own-good members of the Unemployed Workers Union, the immutable rules of Twitter meant someone went back and found something legitimately fucked up he’d said.

So a clip surfaced of Shanks defending former New South Wales Labor leader Luke Foley after allegations of sexual assault against an ABC journalist forced him to resign:

If you’d rather not listen — and fair warning, Shanks’ tone, as ever, suggests a uni tavern conversation became sentient and fell in love with its own reflection — here’s a summary: Shanks notes Foley’s denial and concludes that, regardless, “fired as opposition leader for grabbing someone’s arse while you’re drunk? I don’t know about that…”.

We wonder if Senator Kristina Keneally, Tanya Plibersek or current NSW Labor leader Jodi McKay (or former PM Kevin Rudd for that matter) will perhaps give it a second thought next time they get invited on for a chummy interview?

Government puts pressure on … itself? Today’s research, released by the federal government, predicting a loss of $55 billion to the tourism industry on account of border closures, has buttressed the “federal government pressures the states” narrative.

So it seems worth noting the research actually backs the point Crikey made yesterday — according to the research, the international border closure has cost tourism more ($31 billion) than the interstate ones ($23 billion).

Freedom cafe If you’ve been following media coverage of Melbourne’s hospitality sector, you might be forgiven for thinking there’s only one cafe owner in the city that calls itself the coffee capital of the world.

Matt Lanigan, owner of the Lucky Penny cafe in South Yarra, has been getting an awful lot of airtime in the mainstream media: on ABC News, The Age, The Australian, The Herald Sun, and Sydney’s 2GB (and full disclosure, Smart Company, owned by the same company as Crikey). And, raising some eyebrows, a video with his friend of over a decade and one of the shrillest anti-lockdown voices, state Liberal MP Tim Smith.

Lanigan told The Australian, always quick to sniff out a culture war yarn, that he’d been harassed and received negative reviews from groups like Sleeping Giants since his video with Smith.

He then went on the Institute of Public Affairs’ The Young IPA Podcast, to talk about being cancelled by the left. If cancel culture really has limited Lanigan’s ability to contribute to the discourse, we wonder how much media attention he’d get without it.