David Penberthy: Bill Leak, Wayne Morrison – and a lesson in left-wing hypocrisy and hysteria
THE ranting, hysterical behaviour of one woman is so typical of the Left’s myopic view of the world, says David Penberthy.
- Cartoonist Bill Leak obituary: A witty, fearless satirical artist
- David Penberthy: Freedom of speech should be celebrated
- Wayne Morrison dead: Prisoner killed in Yatala jail fight
THIS is the story of two men, both deceased, one of whom has been deified in death, the other demonised.
The man who has been deified was an accused rapist who died after a prison brawl that left five guards injured and in hospital. The man who has been demonised was an artist and cartoonist.
The accused rapist is being billed as a wonderful man whose life was cruelly cut short by the system, whereas death couldn’t have come soon enough or been more deserved for the damned cartoonist, guilty as he was of the sin of offending people.
We will never know if the indigenous man, Wayne Morrison, was guilty of rape, given that he died last year before he could face trial. We will never know if he was innocent, either.
Despite the now-eternal doubt over his character, Mr Morrison’s family and the activists who support him are propping him as one of the greatest people who ever lived, murdered by a hateful white society.
In a star turn on ABC’s Q&A last Monday, Mr Morrison’s sister, Latoya Rule, shot to national prominence when she shut down the conversation by dancing on Bill Leak’s grave. Just three days after Leak’s death, Ms Rule was on the telly shouting her lungs out and denying others their right to speak or disagree.
“Bill Leak is a racist!” she screamed. “We won’t stand for it!” Over and over she shouted until they finally chucked her out.
When it comes to denying others the right to speak, Ms Rule has form. I interviewed her two months ago after she and a handful of anti-Australia Day protesters shut down a multicultural parade in Adelaide on January 26, where speakers from different refugee communities intended to celebrate the gift of Australian citizenship.
When Ms Rule confronted these multicultural marchers, they explained that their speeches were all prefaced with acknowledgments of Adelaide’s indigenous Kaurna people and recognition of the suffering wrought on black Australians and that they only wanted to show their gratitude at being welcomed into our nation.
No dice. Ms Rule and her chums told the refugees to leave or else. The march ended and the speeches were never made.
When I was interviewing Ms Rule, I cautiously challenged her on what struck me as her heavily airbrushed account of her apparently virtuous brother. The conversation became heated as, in her mind, he was not only innocent, but you should never speak ill of the dead.
Unless, of course, the dead happen to be guilty not of rape but of drawing a cartoon which provocatively but fairly tackled the question of derelict fathering in some sections of the Aboriginal community.
I won’t rehash any of it here, as it makes me sick and angry, but social media is full of the most venomous bile directed towards Leak, much of it written within minutes of his death nine days ago.
The consensus was that Leak – who was tormented by the star chamber that is the Human Rights Commission in the months leading up to his premature death – was a bigoted, hate-filled “right-wing” cartoonist. The view was that not only did Leak deserve prosecution for drawing an offensive cartoon, he actually deserved to die.
It is only a short stroll from the Charlie Hebdo office to the violent censoriousness some of these so-called humanists displayed this past week.
These people fancy themselves as progressives; the truth is they are fascists. They epitomise the spirit of the age, where differing opinions can never be tolerated or ignored, only resisted or even prosecuted.
They also know nothing about Leak as a bloke or as an artist. Politically, Leak was the ultimate no-winger. He hated hypocrisy and officiousness, he hated toffs and wankers but, most of all, he loved a joke.
Those Lefties cheering his demise would be unaware that one of Leak’s most notorious cartoons was an unpublished (and unpublishable) drawing in 1996 of the great conservative John Howard kneeling before the then American President Bill Clinton and performing a sex act.
Poking fun at Howard’s bromance with Clinton, and his perceived obsequiousness to Washington, Leak depicted a reporter putting a question to Mr Howard who, for obvious reasons, was in no position to reply.
Instead, Clinton, drawn with a sated grin on his face, answered on Mr Howard’s behalf: “He said Australia is an independent nation that can stand on its own two feet.”
Leak had submitted that cartoon as one of his ideas to the editor of The Australian who, not surprisingly, deemed it unfit for publication.
But, in that pre-digital age in 1996, photocopies were made of the offending cartoon and within minutes it had been faxed around the country and throughout the Canberra press gallery, where it was boxed along with press releases and pinned up on journalists’ notice boards.
The excruciating job fell to one of Mr Howard’s media advisers to obtain a copy of the Leak cartoon and show it to him. The PM was none-too-impressed but, to mix a metaphor, took the whole thing in his stride.
Howard showed similar sangfroid when The Age cartoonist depicted him as a genocidal early settler murdering Aborigines with a blunderbuss to make a spectacularly overblown point about his government’s extinguishing of native title rights in the Wik debate.
It is hard to imagine a more defamatory analogy but the PM, while disgusted, sought no legal redress or sanction.
Fast-forward 30 years and we now have what Leak so beautifully described as the “Hurt Feelings Unit”, on permanent standby to go after anyone who commits the mortal sin of speaking their mind in a robust and challenging fashion.
No good comes of Bill’s demise. The one upside is that even though he’s dead, he is still upsetting the hypocrites and wankers.