Support alternative media – become a member of Australian Options – and get to download copies of the journal. The Winter issue features articles on taxation, climate change and more – including an interview with Frank Stillwell, political economist.
If you thought that Governments reducing taxes, but spending on health, education and the things governments should invest in (not to forget saving the planet), doesn’t add up … you were right.
Here are a few cartoons from the issue:
The plight of asylum seekers being trafficked in boats from coastal villages in Indonesia to Australian shores, mainly Christmas Island, is a major political issue – and certainly a major humanitarian one. How to handle it, and just how to think about it , are complex. A bottom line however, is provided in an article posted on the Pro Bono news website: Salvos Staff Condemn Nauru’s ‘Cruel & Degrading Conditions’. To quote the opening lines,
‘A Public Statement by past and present Salvation Army Staff Members about asylum seeker conditions on Nauru claims that recent rioting there is an inevitable outcome from a cruel and degrading policy.
‘The strongly worded statement comes from a collection of former and current Salvation Army staff who have spent the last ten months working with asylum seekers at the Regional Processing Centres in Nauru and Manus Island’.
Here is today’s Pro Bono News cartoon:
Important reforms languish as the sitting days of parliament peter out, as some sort of compensation the political soap opera has taken an exciting (and distracting) twist.
Pro Bono is the online hub for people involved in Australia’s Not-for-Profit organisations. Here is today’s Pro Bono website NFP Kneebone cartoon.
This cartoon for today’s Pro Bono website update may well be out of date by this afternoon as more Australian politicians feel uneasy about the cosy deal to fund the major parties a dollar for every vote they get …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’.
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.”
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’….
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.
While you are on the New Internationalist’s Australian blog have a read of The city can save the planet – much more encouraging!
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.
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.
Simon Kneebone - cartoonist and illustrator 