Bill Leak was good trouble. And Australia owes him

The racial-hatred stirrers are so lacking in empathy they didn’t have room in their hearts for the flash of understanding that came with Bill Leak’s cartoons, writes Miranda Devine.

“Laugh till it hurts… someone else” is how Bill Leak signed his book of “Deplorable Cartoons”, titled “Trigger Warning” last week, less than 36 hours before he died of a suspected heart attack at Gosford Hospital, aged 61.

He looked so well that night and his friends told him how handsome he looked in a suit, tanned and with a fresh haircut, slightly nervous among the crowd of admirers.

His beloved wife Goong had been busy all week making “food with love” for the book launch at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney’s CBD.

“I’m sure the CIS has caterers” he told her. “Not like me,” she said.

She was radiant, with a flower in her hair, as she handed around plates laden with delicious Thai treats, and every now and then he would stop to admire her from across the room. He loved to watch her when she’d cook at parties for friends. He would shake his head and say how incredible she was. He was so proud of her and she of him, and friends would think how clever they were to have found each other.

He didn’t get to finish his speech on Wednesday night before being interrupted by Sir Les Patterson. It was a pity because it was so thoughtful:

“Political correctness is a poison that attacks the sense of humour,” he said. “As the senses of humour of people suffering from PC atrophy, their sensitivity to criticism becomes more and more acute until they get to the stage where everything offends them and they lose the ability to laugh, entirely”.

Cartoonist Bill Leak and Sir Les Patterson at the launch of Leak's book Trigger Warning in Sydney. (Pic: The Australian)

He’d been under enormous pressure, ever since the Charlie Hebdo massacre had placed cartoonists on the frontline of the war against Islamist fascism. Five cartoonists at the satirical magazine in Paris had offended their Islamist murderers by drawing cartoons of Mohammed.

He thought the natural reaction from cartoonists worth their salt was to draw Mohammed. And so he did.

Three days later the counter terrorism squad was on his doorstep telling him to move house because Islamic State had issued a fatwa to “fellow Mujaheddin” in Australia to slaughter him.

He and Goong had to sell up at a vastly reduced price and move to a safe house with alarms in every room, but his cartoons never flinched.

In one, titled “All in the head”, a psychiatrist talks to a decapitated head on a couch: “I’m sensing a certain level of Islamophobia. Do you want to talk about it?”

A friend who spotted him having coffee near his new coastal hideaway was about to ambush him from behind and mock strangle him with an “Allah Akbar”, but changed his mind at the last minute. Just as well, because the beefy guy sitting with Bill was a professional bodyguard who could have snapped his neck in a trice.

The Australian's cartoonist Bill Leak with wife Goong.

The jihadi threat was real and it changed the way Bill lived, though he used to make light of it.

But worse was to come as the totalitarian impulse of political correctness to silence “offensive” thoughts aligned with the totalitarian impulse of Islamo-fascism.

He found himself having to explain his cartoons to mirthless offence-takers, while in hiding from mirthless terrorists, two sides of the same coin.

One day, irritated by having to take time out of his daily highwire chore of finding inspiration for his next cartoon, to answer a long list of questions put to him by what he called “Tedium Watch”, he made a rare complaint: “How a man’s supposed to deal with the reaction to cartoons he’s already had published and keep up with the demand for new ones is something I can’t quite work out.”

Last year he was persecuted under our oppressive racial hatred laws for a cartoon which was the opposite of racist, but only told the truth about family dysfunction in indigenous communities. In the context of horrific footage of young indigenous inmates ill-treated by guards in the Northern Territory he drew a cartoon of an Aboriginal child being handed back by an Aboriginal police officer to an apparently drunk father who cannot remember his son’s name.

Bill Leak’s powerful and insightful cartoon depicting Aboriginal family dysfunction. (Pic: The Australian)

Any thoughtful person who hasn’t been preconditioned to see the cartoon as racist would understand he was communicating sympathy for a boy who doesn’t stand a chance.

Instead he was assailed with an open letter from “173 media and communications professionals” slamming his “racist cartoon”.

Tim Soutphommasane, Race Discrimination Commissioner of the Australian Human Rights Commission actively touted for complaints under section 18C.

White lawyers went bush, armed with a copy of the cartoon, in search of Aborigines to sign a statement seeking compensation, censorship and apologies.

And so began months of ­bureaucratic harassment from the AHRC, which he described as Australia’s real life equivalent of the “Ministry of Truth”.

“So now there’s a mob that won’t only punish you if your cartoon offends them, they’ll punish you if it’s offended someone else,” he said on Wednesday night.

“They’re also driven by the same authoritarian impulse to silence, using whatever means they have at their disposal, anyone who transgresses against the unwritten laws of political correctness.

“I’m talking, of course, about the thought police at that rogue totalitarian outfit, the Australian Human Rights Commission.

“Well, bugger them, too.”

The racial-hatred stirrers are so obtuse and lacking in empathy they didn’t have room in their hearts for the flash of understanding that comes with Bill’s cartoons.

It is frightening that such people are rewarded with power in bureaucracies of control which flourish outside the normal checks of democratic accountability. Institutions such as the AHRC, ICAC and other illiberal, unaccountable star chambers which are springing up like topsy, are how the Left subverts democracy and imposes its preferred social policies.

Bill Leak was singled out for destruction quite deliberately to warn off others.

At Christmas he apologised to Goong: “Ever since we’ve been together, I’ve just caused you trouble.”

She smiled at him and said “Good trouble.”

Yes, Bill Leak was good trouble, and Australia owes him.