Some Ernie Awards offerings from the past

Australia Post, for:

1. telling female staff at the Bondi Junction Post office that if they wanted to be at the opening of the new Post Office they should lose weight; and

2. cutting the maternity leave of a worker from 12 to six weeks when her baby was born 13 weeks premature on the basis that this was 12 weeks earlier than the date she had nominated.

Tom Cruise once won for a past comment about his then-pregnant fiance: "I've got Katie tucked away so no one will get to us until my child is born ... [Katie's] life from now on was going to be about being a mother. I'm not giving her the chance to turn into another Nicole."

In the judicial category, lawyer Chrisovalantis Papadopoulos won the Ernie for saying a rape was only brief and "at the very bottom of the scale of seriousness," while the political prize went to Australia's Bill Heffernan who criticized his opponent, Labor MP Julia Gillard, for remaining unmarried and childless. "Anyone who chooses to deliberately remain barren ... they've got no idea what life's about," he said.