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.
Today’s Pro Bono news cartoon following this week’s Four Corners (ABC TV) investigation into the payday loans industry. Read more on the Pro Bono website here.
This month’s New Internationalist Scratchy Lines cartoon. See seven good reasons to subscribe at the Australian New Internationalist site here.
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.
Craig Greer writes in the latest South Australian Teachers Journal about the lack of special needs funding. ‘It’s an issue that is becoming more critical by the day and, if not addressed with the rollout of needs based funding as recommended by the Gonski Review, has the capacity to severely impact on outcomes in public schools for years to come.’
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.
The Summer edition of Australian Options is out now. ‘Discussions for Social Justice and political change’ with articles on the ACOSS Report on poverty in Australia, growth issues and alternatives, the Middle East and more.
The father of killed ISIS hostage Haruna Yukawa said ‘If I am ever reunited with him, I just want to give him a big hug’ (read here).
Life is all that holds us on this small planet.
Simon Kneebone - cartoonist and illustrator 