Skip navigation

Category Archives: Political cartoons

Coal Reef…

Reef pic

This week’s Pro Bono News cartoon: the Queensland Government’s approval of the Adani coal mine increases the risk of further damage to The Great Barrier Reef. See “‘Trifecta’ needed to save Great Barrier Reef” on the Pro Bono website.

Smart enough…

Smart bomb pic

This month’s New Internationalist magazine Scratchy Lines cartoon.

Um…

political correctness pic

The March New Internationalist Scratchy Lines cartoon. Visit the Australian New Internationalist site for the blogs, shop and more here.

Er…nothing left to add…up

Do-the-maths-pic

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!

They ARE taking it with them…

Tax Haven pic

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’.

It is still there….

Elephant in room LR pic

 

This month’s New Internationalist ‘Scratchy lines’ cartoon. For the New Internationalist Australia, including its Fair trade shop click here.

Love your work…not

advocacy_work_pic_0

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.

The Mars option…

Ticket to Mars LR

This month’s New Internationalist Scratchy Lines cartoon. See seven good reasons to subscribe at the Australian New Internationalist site here.

For the future – or June 31st…

for_the_future_pic

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.

Bruce Petty!

Bruce Petty 5-2-15 LR photo

When I started cartooning last century I didn’t know any cartoonists but I did have two books of cartoons – they were my guides. One was a collection of Michael Leunig’s cartoons, the other was of Bruce Petty’s.

Last night Bruce Petty presented the keynote address to the  21st Australasian Humour Studies Network Annual Conference here in Adelaide. It was a real treat. He described – and drew – the last 50 years of cartooning, thought, life, and everything, and how our brains have tried to keep up … and our imagination has been battered in the process. The photo shows Bruce Petty with the drawing he produced showing how the cartoonist fits into it all.

Bruce was a panelist in the earlier session, which discussed humour in relation to the Charlie Hebdo murders. It was a valuable discussion about the role of cartoons and refreshed many questions. Cartoons work because they cross lines, but (for me) do you cross lines because they are there, or because there is something to be said from crossing certain lines? (That is simplifying it a bit too much perhaps). Can you claim selective context in a multicultural and globalised world? And why would you?

The conference information quoted Shakespeare (Love’s labour’s Lost):

A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear /Of him that hears it, never in the tongue /Of him that makes it                                                                                                 

Ah, this strikes a chord. When I have given cartooning classes I have asked kids to think about what they want to happen in their reader’s heads – and then work back. I think it is a good guide.