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Tag Archives: political

A dollar a vote deal

This cartoon for today’s Pro Bono website update may well be out of date by this afternoon as more Australian politicians feel uneasy about the cosy deal to fund the major parties a dollar for every vote they get …

Pro Bono is the on-line hub for Not-For-Profit organisations; an ongoing issue has been the slow pace of the Statutory Definition of Charity Bill, which ‘would help support charities by providing a succinct and clear definition of charity which is easier for charities and the community to understand’.

Vote for NFP 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

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

Just buy it, okay?

For the inspiration for the cartoon in this month’s issue of New Internationalist see Brian Loffler’s post Hypocrisy, Terrorism and Algeria on the New Internationalist’s Australian blog. Follow his link to Jeremy Keenan’s article How the US has been sponsoring terrorism in the Sahara.

war on terror LR pic

While you are on the New Internationalist’s Australian blog have a read of The city can save the planet  – much more encouraging!

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

What does this mean?

This is the Scratchy Lines cartoon in this month’s issue of the New Internationalist.

Visit the New Internationalist website for highlights from the magazine and the latest postings on their blog – including this post reporting the detaining of Palestinian cartoonist Mohammad Saba’aneh by Israeli Defence Forces. Mohamad’s cartoon ‘Dreaming of Freedom’ appeared in the May 2011 issue of the magazine. Fellow Palestinian Fadi Abou’s cartoon response, also shown in the post, makes clear the power of the pencil.

There are more cartoons on the detaining of Mohamad Saba’aneh, and many other world issues at Cartoon Movement.

local control

Where are we going? ….to an election

Australia is heading for an election … in seven months time.

Mission Australia’s chief executive says the ‘welfare system is broken and is limping along in a dire state’, on the Pro Bono website.

Don’t hold your breath….

welfare system pic

 

Discover Frank Fisher!

 

Frank Fisher, who died earlier this year, was an inspiration to many people, an environmental educator committed to ‘social transformation to a more sensitive self-aware world’.  Among other things he was professor in the National Centre for Sustainability, Swinburn University of Technology, Melbourne.

 

Frank established The Understandascope in 2005, the name coming from cartoonist Michael Leunig’s cartoon. It was relaunched this year as a website www.understandascope.org – to continue Frank Fisher’s vision of ‘a more circumspect, humble and considerate society, increasingly sensitive and responsive to the consequences of our actions upon each other and the rest of nature’.

 

The Understandascope has launched an ebook Everyday Transcendence: the influence of Frank Fisher. Discover Frank Fisher and a link to download the ebook here.

 

Frank Fisher was a committed cyclist. Here is one cartoon from the ebook.

Fisher cyclist pic

 

 

 

 

Election – make a difference!

November’s New Internationalist is out. This issue tackles Medicine and ‘inequality’s toxic effect on health and healthcare’.  However, with the US election only days away my Scratchy Lines cartoon took a look at how electing our representatives works …

Affordable housing … oxymoron!

 

Affordable housing doesn’t seem like a big ask ….

 

 

A recent cartoon from the Pro Bono news page.