Today’s Pro Bono news cartoon. Yesterday Treasurer Scott Morrison spoke to the National Press club warning that it will be a slow path back to a budget surplus, and calls for spending cuts (read here). In contrast, ACOSS, Australia’s peak welfare body, says the next budget must support essential community services and ‘realign its spending priorities and strengthen the tax base’ (read the Pro Bono post here).
And now you can explore the new look Pro Bono website!
Todays Pro Bono News cartoon. After months of negative attention Shane Warne has closed his charitable foundation (see the Pro Bono post here).
Today’s Pro Bono News cartoon. Oxfam has released a report, An Economy for the 1%, showing that the gap between the world’s richest and poorest has widened in the last year. For an overview see Xavier Smerdon’s Pro Bono post ’62 People Make as Much Money as Half The World’. Oxfam Australia’s CEO Helen Szoke says ‘As a first priority, there must be an end to the dodgy tax practices and use of tax havens that allow corporations and individuals to accrue phenomenal wealth while others’ suffer’.
This week’s Pro Bono News cartoon. The ideas came from Karen Mahlab’s (founder of Pro Bono Australia) blog post ‘The social economy – working towards the common good’. As the intro to the post says: There is a noticeable shift from purely profit-driven capitalism towards integrated social citizenship, which is happening in Australia and around the world, writes Karen Mahlab in her latest blog.
A recent post on the Pro Bono news website reports that the Abbott Government is accused of trying to silence Not for Profit organisations. “I’d like to know why the Abbott Government has, across the board, been cutting funding to advocacy work of the Not for Profit sector,” Founder and CEO of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC), Kon Karapangiotidis said.
Butterfly in the Cocoon is a collection of six stories of domestic violence, a project of the Vietnamese Community in Australia (South Australian chapter). ‘The stories identify issues around gender stereotyping and the misuse of power and control in these families… Each of these women is like a butterfly in a cocoon, they are unique, beautiful and precious’.
Today’s Pro Bono News cartoon. As the post ‘Disability Funding Backflip Fuels Calls for Certainty from NFP Sector’ reports- a number of recently defunded disability advocacy groups, representing 200,000 people with disabilities, have been given ‘transition funding’ until the end of June. This short-term backflip is small change compared to the overall $1 billion cuts to community services.
Today’s Pro Bono News cartoon. Illustrating that ‘Peak welfare Not for Profits ACOSS and State and Territory Councils of Social Service have issued a collective New Years Resolution for the Federal Government to stop devastating funding cuts to community organisations across Australia’. Read more of the post here.
This is an illustration for one of the new Forest and Wildlife Discovery Trail signs, at the Free The Bears Tat Kuang Si Bear Rescue centre, near Luang Prabang, Laos. This sign will explain the role of umbrella species:
‘Just as umbrellas protect people underneath them from rain, umbrella species keep their Lao forest wildlife friends safe from extinction. Poach or kill umbrella species and the balance of the whole forest is upset, but keep them safe and everyone’s a winner!’
Here is a link to an earlier sign drawn up for the Free The Bears trail.
For perhaps the first time, young people could be worse off than their parents. Read the post on the Pro Bono website here. This is my fortnightly NFP Kneebone cartoon for the website.
Simon Kneebone - cartoonist and illustrator 