Skip navigation

Tag Archives: social issues

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

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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

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

 

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

 

Evaluation Tool

 

Here is a cartoon originally drawn during the ‘Show me the change’ conference for community organisations. It has been revived for use with  RMIT University’s Better Evaluation project.

evaluation tool pic

 

Pig-toons?!

 

Hans T from Germany is a cartoon fan and is writing to cartoonists around the world hoping to get back a signed ‘pig-ture’, he and his wife being collectors of pig cartoons.

 

Here’s my attempt….

flying piggy pic