(Image: AAP/Private Media)
(Image: AAP/Private Media)

A total Elliott It is once again time to check in with New South Wales Minister for Transport and friend of Crikey David Elliott. In the chaotic lead-up to this week’s shutdown of Sydney’s train services, Elliott had other concerns. He was so incensed by the sight of a police officer dressed as a nun at Mardi Gras (a fairly ’90s culture war combo that Elliott viewed as “vilification”) that he had to have a bit of a lie down and was thus uncontactable while the big decisions were made.

The next day, awake but maybe too groggy to check the email that said the trains weren’t running because the government had locked out its workforce (not because of strike action), Elliott accused the Australian Rail, Tram and Bus Industry Union (RTBU) of engaging in “some sort of terrorist-like activity”. Then followed the obvious response to terrorists: utter capitulation.

It’s only the latest in a litany of moments — many hilarious, some less so — in Elliott’s career that demand the question “seriously how the fuck does this guy still have his job?”:

  • In 2019, he got into a road-rage scrap with a 17-year-old boy, telling the kid he worked for the cops and when he was asked to produce a badge said, “I pay for the badges, I don’t get one”.
  • Around the same time, when reports revealed over 120 girls had been strip-searched by NSW police, Elliott responded by arguing most parents would be happy about the practice, saying he would want police to strip-search his own children.
  • In 2018, he used parliamentary privilege to accuse then-Labor leader Luke Foley of sexually harassing an ABC journalist, something he put on the public record without the consent of the alleged victim. Foley, denying the allegations, resigned shortly after.

Those are just the biggies — you could fill a small book with Elliott’s career as a perpetual scandal machine. In fact, the only reason we plausibly put forward for why he should continue in this or any ministerial role is the hole his absence would create in the nation’s news content.

On the frontlines Misha Zelinsky is a impressively busy guy. Earlier this year, the Australian Workers’ Union assistant national secretary briefly popped up as a potential preselection candidate for Labor’s campaign in Cunningham, before retreating. He has now popped up in Kyiv as a reporter for the Australian Financial Review, producing a tense, genuinely moving account of a city not knowing just how close it is to the precipice. The piece informs us Zelinsky’s reporting in Ukraine will be ongoing.

On your Markson We can’t imagine a single journalist group chat this week that hasn’t been dominated by talk of the incredible saga of the Geoff Bainbridge exclusive that wasn’t. Investigations editor Sharri Markson — with various collaborators — has delivered a series of revelations regarding the former Grill’d CEO that have taken on a distinct “stop, he’s already dead” vibe, not to mention humiliating the Nine papers who credulously reported Bainbridge’s claim that footage of him smoking ice was six years old and came to the Oz via extortionists. Nine have since retracted its story, and Age editor Gay Alcorn has said that it appears the paper had been “misled”.

We can only offer Markson our congratulations on a series of Ws this week, not to mention the message this sends to anyone who messes her about (like Bainbridge running to Nine in attempt to gazzump her story when she went to him for comment). Congratulations Sharri, and I hope we weren’t out of line when we talked about how Trump responded to being shown your book that time.