The 10 Worst Australian of the Year Awards

With the announcement tonight that David Morrison is the 2016 Australian of the Year, there have now been 61 Australian of the Year award recipients over 57 years*.

* There are four years where there were dual committees and dual winners, because nothing reflects Australia better than arguably her highest civic honour becoming the disorganised plaything of petty provincial rivalries.

Greatest country in the galaxy.

I thought about ranking all the winners in some colossal countdown, then after doing proper serious journalist research - that is, briefly consulting Wikipedia and Twitter - I realised how silly it was trying to decide whether, for example, Dick Smith is better than Robert de Castella. And who was Sir John Crawford anyway?

Yet while ranking everyone is pointless, it is clear that some award decisions are much, much better than others.

The following is a list of those others, counting down to the worst award decision:

BBL05 Best XI

I've watched a lot of the Big Bash League. Here is the team of the tournament.

There are only two rules:

1. Selection is based on performances during the tournament only. Past performance and reputation counts for nothing.
2. Selections are limited two imports, just like the teams, sorry, franchises.

The official unofficial BBL05 Best XI is presented in batting order:

Messed Up Nursery Rhymes

We have a book of nursery rhymes.

The boys sometimes ask me to read it before bed. This usually works by them pointing to a page and saying, "I wanna read this one!". This routine is actually redundant, because they point to every single page in the book. Some rhymes have illustrations over two pages. I have to read them twice.

A lot of these rhymes are a bit wrong. In order of appearance in the book:

Unconscious Sexism

It's not that surprising that cricketer Chris Gayle would demean Mel McLaughlin - he's done it to other female interviewers before, both in Australia and in the Caribbean. On his Twitter account he basically plays the role of Jamaican Hugh Hefner, but with much less literacy.

I can't relate to doing your job and having your work completely ignored so you can be propositioned, then when clearly uncomfortable at the advance, being called "baby" and having the initial comment repeated. Then to have work colleagues sniggering in the background and your employer initially play it for laughs before going into damage control much later. Then to have the person punished by his employer, who then excuses the behaviour as a cultural misunderstanding "said in jest".

I can't relate to that, because I'm a man.

Toddlers

My twin boys are toddlers, and they do and say funny stuff. Like...

Big Bash League Ladder Prediction

I really didn't care about BBL1 and BBL2, but then BBL3 was on free-to-air television every night for six weeks, and suddenly I found it very interesting. There is probably a lesson there for sport leagues on the margins of mainstream public consiousness – I'm looking at you A-League and Super Rugby.

By BBL4 I'd even decided which of the artificial Sydney-based franchises with ugly uniforms I'd support – go Sixers!

Now I'm so comfortably on the bandwagon I'm going to try and predict the final ladder positions of each team in BBL5, which seems absurd given the unpredictability of Twenty20 cricket and the short length of the regular season. But it can't go worse than my NRL predictions.

Top Five Things I Wrote Before This Blog Existed

I launched this blog in January 2015, instantly capturing the hearts, minds and clicks of dozens of friends with my captivating prose they could readily skim through in seconds, yet claim to have read in full, so they seemed politely interested in my new hobby.

It's now hard to remember a time when I wasn't a successful and influential voice in the blogosphere, shaping modern opinion and events on a myriad of important subjects, but if I cast my mind back eleven or twelve months, that time does in fact exist as a hazy memory.

And it turns out, I still wrote things!

They are on Facebook, and from probably hundreds of status updates, I've managed to identify five that are okay, I guess.

Here they are in reverse chronological order: