PM is taking a clear-eyed view of Bill Leak
Not a naughty boy, Bill’s just ‘a very colourful, passionate Australian of enormous artistic ability’.
“He’s … a controversialist.” Malcolm Turnbull on 3AW yesterday:
Neil Mitchell: I think the cartoonist Bill Leak once painted your portrait. What sort of bloke is he?
Turnbull: Bill is a very engaging guy, he writes as colourfully and powerfully as he paints. He told me a fantastic story about painting the portraits, simultaneously, of Bob Hawke and Bill Hayden, their official portraits. When each of them came in for their sitting, they would comment not very generously on the developing portrait of the other. So you should get Bill on — I won’t spoil his story — you should get him on the radio and get him to tell you. It’s hilarious.
Mitchell: Is he a racist?
Turnbull: Of course not. No, look, he’s an Australian; he’s a cartoonist; he’s, you know, a controversialist. That’s what he does but he’s a very colourful, passionate Australian of enormous artistic ability.
Mitchell: I just point out his cartoon was about parental responsibility in the Aboriginal community. A report to the Victorian parliament this week showed that 20 per cent of children in out-of-home care are Aboriginal, 1 per cent of the (Victorian) population are Aboriginal. I think Bill Leak might have nailed it.
Osman Faruqi in Junkee yesterday, pondering Leak’s latest:
Leak has depicted Gillian Triggs, the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, and Tim Soutphommasane, the Race Discrimination Commissioner, as goosestepping Nazi “Kommandos”. For some reason the cartoon features Speedy Gonzales and a bunch of Vikings (who I think are supposed to be Asterix and Obelix?). It’s probably attempting to make some sort of point about racial stereotyping but I can’t figure it out ... Comparing the Human Rights Commission to Nazis because they’re following up their statutory duty to investigate racial discrimination complaints seems deeply odd. And Malcolm Turnbull decided that today, of all days, was the best one to go out and defend Leak. Good timing.
“Creepy 1984 vibe.” The Guardian on Wednesday:
Ian Martin, originally hired as a “swearing consultant” by (Armando) Iannucci for The Thick of It, went on to become one of the main writers. “I still remember one from a few years back,” he says. “One of the characters had demanded of another character that they behave ‘like a Hutu’, in graphic and unpleasant detail. It was massively ‘inappropriate’ and precisely the sort of awful thing that character would say. Nevertheless, I was challenged to explain why I thought genocide was funny. And that’s the tone now, isn’t it? Creepy 1984 vibe. Bumptious, puffed-up little dickheads demanding so-and-so is ‘sacked by the BBC’. Everyone patrols the boundaries of their own jokes and opinions now. But if they do go over the line, there’s a great mass of outrage starlings ready to swoop down and Hitchcock them.”
The Guardian continues:
Iannucci agrees that something has changed. “I’ve found this very worrying, the idea that if anyone says anything that might offend anyone, they mustn’t be given a platform. It’s like when a complaint is made about a satire show, the reply goes out immediately: ‘The intention was never to offend.’ The intention was to offend. If it hadn’t offended, it wouldn’t be funny. If we have beliefs, religious or political, and they’re not strong enough to stand up to a joke, then they can’t be that good.”
Taking a joke. Junkee yesterday on Honi Soit’s spoof of The Australian:
“If people at The Oz can’t take a joke or legitimate criticism, then perhaps they should reassess their dogmatic approach to ‘free speech’,” a Honi editor told us. It seems like they may be safe for the moment. The CEO of The Australian (Nicholas Gray) has expressed begrudging support for the spoof on Twitter and it’s even copped a shout-out from columnist James Jeffrey in the paper today.