It was this time last year that Centrelink’s error-riddled “RoboDebt” automated compliance and debt recovery system was in the news.
For the monster, a bride.
(The Canberra Times, 13 January 2017 | Gallery of most recent cartoons)
Summer’s hottest reads
The Bureau of Meteorology says 2017 was Australia’s third hottest year on record. Seven of Australia’s 10 warmest years have now occurred since 2005.
(The Canberra Times, 11 January 2017 | Gallery of most recent cartoons)
The politics of panic
Peter Dutton has joined sections of the media in kicking off the new year with a new “racialised moral panic”, doing burnouts in the new modified Home Affairs Department to prevent any clear-eyed analysis of crime in Victoria.
On the theme of making stuff up, we also began the new year learning the government ignored advice from Treasury in order to whip up fear around proposals to trim negative gearing.
What better metaphor to use than the stuff made up by satirist Ben Ward about the US President’s obsession with a Gorilla Channel?
(The Canberra Times, 5, 6 and 10 January 2017 | Gallery of most recent cartoons)
The economic environment
Federal environment funding in Australia has been cut by a third since the Coalition took office.
(The Canberra Times, 14 December 2017 | Gallery of most recent cartoons)
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse
A short summary of the key recommendations; the final report in full.
(The Canberra Times, 15 and 16 December 2017 | Gallery of most recent cartoons)
Australia says YES to marriage equality
61.6% of Australians voted ‘yes’ in a drawn-out national postal survey, floated by conservatives as their last great hope for delay, but ultimately exposing their minority position. Three weeks later, Parliament finally reversed the Howard-era ban on same-sex marriage.
I had the Sydney 78ers in mind when I drew this cartoon. Their protest for gay rights, the first Mardi Gras, when homosexuality was still a crime in NSW, “ended in violence, mass arrests and public shaming at the hands of the police, government and media”.
But the shirt says ’75, as that year marked the beginning of decriminalisation in Australia (thank-you Don Dunstan and gay rights campaigners in South Australia).
After years of wrecking ball politics, the ‘yes’ vote was, as Rebecca Huntley observed, “a welcome sign of life in our demoralised political climate”.
(The Canberra Times, 8 and 9 December 2017 | Gallery of most recent cartoons)
The Paradise Papers
A new mass data leak sheds more light on the opaque financial network used by the global elite to hide their wealth offshore and minimise tax.
The release of the Paradise Papers by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists coincided with protests by asylum seekers on Manus Island.
(The Canberra Times, 7 November 2017 | Gallery of most recent cartoons)
Free Ramón Esono Ebalé
Artists around the world are campaigning for cartoonist Ramón Esono Ebalé, imprisoned without charge in Equatorial Guinea since September 16.
Share your artwork in support of Ramón on social media using the hashtag #FreeNseRamon
You can check out Ramón’s excellent work here. Some of it features Equatorial Guinea’s President “Obi”, who seized power in a coup way back in 1979.
Imagine drawing the one Prime Minister, say Tony Abbott, for 38 years straight. Good grief.
Climbing Uluru
“Righting a historic wrong”: the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Board of Management votes to close the rock to climbers.
(The Canberra Times, 3 November 2017 | Gallery of most recent cartoons)