Andrew Hastie sitting in parliament
Andrew Hastie (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

Hastie continues his push. Is Andrew Hastie making a play to the new “right-wing thought leader” of the Liberal Party? Previously we’ve reported that he inherited — and has enthusiastically used — Tony Abbott’s old email contact book, and caused a potential headache for Scott Morrison with his outspoken stance on China.

Now we see that he’s paying for promoted Facebook views:

It will be worth keeping a close eye on this continued to push to raise his profile.

Greens watch. Contrary to circulating rumours, we have been reliably informed that Lidia Thorpe is a still a candidate for the Greens’ Senate spot vacated by Richard Di Natale. After our piece yesterday we heard she may have dropped out, but Victorian Greens state director Martin Shield told us Thorpe remains a candidate in the Senate preselection. This is a blow to Julian Burnside, Thorpe’s most realistic rival for the spot.

Alternative histories. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is getting a schooling in the racism of Winston Churchill after he said Churchill wasn’t racist compared with you-know-who in World War II. Of course, finding examples of Churchill’s anti-brown and anti-black racism isn’t hard.

But “fun” fact: he was also anti-Semitic. In a 1920 article, “Zionism vs Bolshevism”, he identified “international Jews” as the cause of the world’s problems going back to the French Revolution, and saw their alleged nihilistic tendencies as issuing directly from their religion. Not such a funny old word …

Trending. Yesterday’s Google trends data gives us a little good news: the groundswell of interest in the Black Lives Matter movement has not just been posturing, something we’ve been keen to have a kick at here in Tips and Murmurs. A lot of people are clearly taking the moment to look at what they can do practically.

Sure the potentially useless “Blackout Tuesday” — with “black square” and “How to do Blackout Tuesday” — spiked sharply in the last week, but search interest for the far more practical “How to financially help BLM” also spiked more than 5000% over the past seven days.