Buoyed by thoughts that Labor might actually be getting its act together, one of Sydney’s Inner West councils has come up with another of those ‘sounds good, feels good, doesn’t work’ notions. This time it’s the distribution of free cloth nappies and free tampons.

As a solo mum in the Seventies, I remember cloth nappies with a shudder – white terry towelling cloth squares that you fastened with a large safety pin (‘safety’ meaning that if flesh came into contact with the point of the pin, it was your fingers, rather than the baby’s buttocks that felt the pain).