(Image: AAP/Dean Lewins/Private Media)

Sharma chameleon Dave Sharma has an interesting pitch to the voters of Wentworth: vote for me or you’ll have to deal with my awful, awful colleagues. Speaking to The Daily Telegraph about the Climate 200 independents targeting the more socially progressive and climate change action responsive end of the Liberal vote, Sharma seems surprised to find they’ve targeted government seats with “moderate Liberals”:

If this movement succeeds in a broad sense, and it may, you’ll end up I think with a Liberal Party that’s less progressive and less moderate because those people will all be gone and it looks more like the Republican Party in the United States.

Do people really want that? Or do they want progressive, thoughtful, economically conservative, socially liberal members of the Liberal Party in Parliament? That’s what people really have to grapple with here.

Rolling in the deepfake I suspect I’m not the only one who has been waiting for this. With deepfake videos becoming more common and more accurate, it seemed only a matter of time before they stopped being used to make Tom Cruise (except it’s not really Tom Cruise) play golf or, let’s be honest, pornography, and become about deeply consequential matters of state.

So it is, via Vice, that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy came to surrender to Russia in a video that went viral:

Dear Ukrainians! Dear defenders! Being president was not so easy. I have to make difficult decisions. At first I decided to return Donbass. It’s time to look in the eye. It didn’t work out. It only got worse. Much worse. There is no more tomorrow. At least in me. And now I decide to say goodbye to you. I advise you to lay down your arms and return to your families. You should not die in this war. I advise you to live, and I’m going to do the same…

Except, of course, he didn’t — it’s a deepfake, and not a fantastically convincing one at that. Zelenskyy’s neck doesn’t really fit his body and stays eerily still throughout. At the same time, Ukraine’s Channel 24 TV and website have been taken off the air by what they say is a hack. It’s worth noting that Russia has been targeting Ukraine’s infrastructure with cyber attacks for years, as sketched in the opening chapters of The New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth’s This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends.

The standard we walk past The sudden death of 52-year-old ALP senator Kimberley Kitching has been taken up enthusiastically as material for factional point-scoring by various groups as Crikey covered yesterday — and the result of this approach is clear: The Australian uses it as a way to paint Labor as weak on China, and today we get Pauline Hanson telling the Oz (just between the two of them, we assume): “Kimberley opened up to me [regarding her alleged bullying within Labor]. She knew it wouldn’t go any further than me.”

Still, it does catch the breath to hear Prime Minister Scott Morrison jumping in to take these talking points up: “These are distressing claims and I don’t think they can just be dismissed,” he said to reporters in Perth yesterday.

Liberal women Julia Banks, Lucy Gichuhi, Linda Reynolds, Kelly O’Dwyer and Julie Bishop all spoke about bullying within the party after the leadership spill that delivered Morrison to the office. He has a fantastic talent for implying women who cross him are going through some kind of mental health issue. It was just last year that the toxic workplace that is Parliament House and Morrison’s catastrophic handling of it dominated the news for months.