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Tag Archives: social issues

Asylum?!

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:

Nauru situation LR pic

… on the same planet?

Invisible stuff LRpic

Australian Politics gets Shakeup, well, maybe…

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.

Hello-NFP Reforms

Make a difference!

The role that philanthropists play, in partnership with the not-for-profit sector, is highlighted in a number of posts on the Pro Bono News website.  In particular, a call to young Aussie philanthropists from the Founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Tipping Point Community, Daniel Lurie.

As Philanthropy Australia’s New Generation of Giving Manager, Caroline Vu says: “This generation of young philanthropists isn’t content just writing cheques. They want to be engaged in the giving process, using their skills, resources and networks to maximise return on investment.”

Here’s the cartoon the article inspired:

Make a difference pic

Community development ….

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

Super market LR pic

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This cartoon for today’s Pro Bono website update may well be out of date by this afternoon as more Australian politicians feel uneasy about the cosy deal to fund the major parties a dollar for every vote they get …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

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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