Kevin Rudd
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd

Kevin Rudd has some thoughts on moving on, great hackings of our time, and Dave Sharma weighs in on the culture war (with predictably dispiriting results). Plus other tips and murmurs from the Crikey bunker.

Power deficiency deficit It’s a week until the 10th anniversary of the ascension of Julia Gillard, a complicated event that both delivered us our first female prime minister and set in motion the slasher-film approach to party leaders that has dominated ever since.

The date is being marked by Labor frontbencher Tanya Plibersek and national party president Wayne Swan with a webinar this Sunday.

You’ll never guess who has some thoughts on that.

“It’s absolutely bizarre that the president of the ALP, given what’s just erupted with the faceless men in Victoria, should decide to participate now in a celebration of the work of the faceless men a decade ago in executing a coup against Australia’s democratically elected prime minister,” quoth Kevin Rudd in The Australian Financial Review — a paper which we assume just happened to call while Rudd was already saying it to the nearest reflective surface.

And sure, the optics could be, at best, misconstrued. But then he goes on to say, quite remarkably, “Surely it’s time Mr Swan moved on from his role in the coup”.

Sure, of all the people involved, it’s Swan who needs to move on.

ABC watch Given the recent discussion of diversity and representation in Australian public life, we wonder if the ABC’s Annabel Crabb checked ahead on the make up of the “Gender Equity in business” panel she’s hosting for Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency on Friday, which is so white it’s practically see-through.

Trump watch Today in “Donald Trump cannot be parodied” news — his official website has a new poll, which attempts to gauge what kind of candidate the American public are after in the lead up to his re-election bid:

Him, or a lying, MS-13 loving, radical-socialist democrat?

Its primary purpose is the same as any online survey conducted by a political party: data harvesting. You can’t submit your response without giving Trump your email address and zip code.

Which is worth remembering if you’re thinking how funny it would be if he came off second best in his own pathetic ego-stroking exercise.

#CancelCulture Yesterday added another note to the blaring, dissonant chord that is being on the internet in 2020, with comedian Meshel Laurie claiming a “hacker” was responsible for a tone-deaf post on her Facebook declaring “blackface has no cultural relevance in Australia”.

By early evening, Laurie told The Australian, she had “found [the] culprit”, spoken to them and satisfied herself there was no malice at play. Sorted. But it put us in mind of other great “implausibly-specific hacks” of history.

Then-defence minister Christopher Pyne’s was a classic, as was US Senator Ted Cruz’s slightly odd 9/11 commemoration. Former New York mayor and bewildered crypt keeper Rudy Giuliani was “hacked” when his account retweeted the link to anti-Trump website.

And while an investigation was unable to find out who was behind the account of then-commissioner of Border Force Roman Quaedvlieg liking a pornographic tweet, we’re sure it wasn’t Quaedvlieg, who would be far more likely to fill the timeline with breathless “Dad took a creative writing course” style prose.

Ratio of the week Wentworth MP Dave Sharma sells himself as a “modern Liberal”. Which, we hope, is the reason he’s particularly clunky when he tries to weigh in on cheap culture-wars bullshit like the following, ironically wondering when we are going to get around to cancelling Pharaoh Khufu :

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