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Category Archives: social issues

Community development ….

The Scratchy Lines cartoon in this month’s New Internationalist:

Super market LR pic

Australian Federal Budget 2013

Here are my cartoon ideas for the Pro Bono news website. Pro Bono is the online hub for the Not for Profit (NFP) sector in Australia. The ideas came from a couple of articles: Budget: Gaping Hole for Poorest Remains, and the 14 May SACOSS Responds to Federal Budget media release (can’t find a link to it). To quote a couple of paragraphs:

However, the enormously disappointing part of this budget remains the failure to address the longstanding inadequacy of our support for unemployed Australians by not increasing the Newstart allowance.

SACOSS Executive Director Ross Womersley said …”Interestingly, this budget contains $3 billion to purchase 12 attack aircraft. Increasing the base rate for single allowance payments by $50 per week would cost approximately $1.8 billion per annum.”

Budget pic2

Budget pic1

Myer Brookes-ed

Yesterday Myer chief executive Bernie Brookes said that the proposed National Disability Insurance Scheme would hurt retail sales:

“Remember, a lot of our customers have equity portfolios, they’ve got superannuation and they get the bills each week, and suddenly the Medicare levy costs them another $300 from July next year and that’s $300 they might have spent with us.”

After outrage at his statement he gave a very limp apology of sorts  ‘to those who may have been offended or hurt’ by his comments.

Graeme Innes, Disability Discrimination Commissioner has started a petition challenging Myer to employ more people with disability, click here.The petition has almost 25,000 signatures already.

Brookes Myer pic

Dog eat dog?!

New internationalist May edition is out now.

The cover story is Land Grabs: big investors buying up land in Africa (and Asia, central and southern Americas), for large scale agribusiness. “Villagers were displaced after their chief gifted community farmland for a motorbike’, however there is a growing groundswell of people saying ‘we’d rather have our land’.

The Scratchy Lines cartoon for May is sort of  ‘meanwhile, back in Europe’….

Life of Europe

Vibrant Moorabool!

Moorabool Shire Council, in country Victoria, Australia held its Vibrant Communities Conference 2013, in the Ballan Mechanics Institute Hall ,on the 20th of April.

I was there to cartoon the issues and ideas that emerged in the workshops and sessions. Cartooning on the spot, among people passionate about their community and its future is a dose of reality.

It is also a good test for the cartoons. Do they help capture what people are feeling and saying? Do they have ‘yes we can’ positiveness? (Tricky, cartooning lends itself to more negative ways of looking at things). Can they help remind participants of the conference discussions weeks and months down the track?

It is that mnemonic role of cartoons, and other images, that gives them value after the fun on the day.

community group event pic

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GERM – privatisation of public education

GERM is the global education reform movement, as described in the latest Australian Education Union Journal (South Australian branch), is pushing radical proposals for the privatisation of government schooling.

These ideas are becoming mainstream in countries like Britain and Sweden, and are being promoted by independent schools lobby groups in Australia. ‘Sweden has led the way with for-profit schooling…. which media mogul Rupert Murdoch praised as an example of “IKEA schools” ‘.

Mike Willis, the author of the article, uses the example of the miner’s canary, warning that these developments are a threat to public education.

Here is the cartoon I drew to illustrate the article.

Education canary pic

Waiting for evolution… or what?

Andrew Rixon of Babelfish Group has been running free webinars working up to his Strategic Planning for Managers and Consultants program. After reading the key text for each webinar I have drawn up cartoons that can be used to illustrate some of the ideas in each webinar. Here are a few….

reinvent pic1

reinvent pic2

Vision pic

Taking the Pulse!

Metro North Brisbane Medicare Local‘s  Taking the Pulse conference: bringing it all together on April 20th did bring it all together. After eight forums across the region what local communities regarded as the important primary health care issues for the region were presented. A wide range of local initiatives tackling many of these issues were outlined in concurrent sessions, and by over 20 exhibitors.

That Health is at some sort of crossroads is indicated by the last two plenary sessions: “Whatever happened to the Health Reform?’ and ‘Keeping it all together’.

As Conference Cartoonist it was my brief to capture the messages, and the feeling, throughout the day.

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If you’re not a statistic?

What happens if the ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) doesn’t have statistics for your town? Have you ceased to exist?

Read the id Blog to find out the answer, and more.

ABS forgets your town pic

.id is ‘a company of population experts – demographers, spatial analysts, urban planners, forecasters, census data and IT experts who build demographic information products for Australia & New Zealand‘.

From a cartoonist’s point of view, using ‘tailor made’ cartoons to highlight many of their blog posts, .id recognises the value of cartoon illustrations to catch the eye and give a fun take on quite serious information.

 

Hole in the Wall

‘Hole in the wall’ is a project begun by Indian  researcher Sugata Mitra in 1999, to inspire curiosity and working together in children around the world. By putting an internet-connected PC in a hole in a wall in a slum in New Delhi the researchers saw slum kids playing with the computer, exploring websites, learning English – and teaching each other. 13 years of study on the nature of self-organised learning has earned Sugata Mitra the first ever $1,000,000 TED Prize award. Read more on the Pro Bono news website.

This news story  inspired today’s Kneebone cartoon on the Pro Bono website…

Hole in the wall pic