Refusing Walkleys boycott a chance to stand up to industrial-scale virtue signalling and laugh at it

Cartoon: Johannes Leak

Now and then in life, we are faced with a choice.

Do we meekly submit to the prevailing tide? Do we buckle under pressure and stay silent even though we know, deep down, it’s weak? Are we prepared to sit back and do nothing in the face of a threat that is truly existential?

Or do we stand up and face it, head-on, like our life depends on it? Because – and the science is settled on this – it does.

I’m talking, of course, about virtue signalling. This, readers, is the great moral challenge of our generation.

This previous week saw a further outbreak in the ongoing virtue-signalling pandemic.

The latest flare-up featured a handful of hysterical and sanctimonious cartoonists who are so convinced of and petrified by impending climate apocalypse that they were prepared to do something unimaginably heroic.

With the sort of courage and moral sinew that would shame your average Blockade Australia abseiler, these giants of cartooning lined up, as one, and threatened not to enter the Walkley Awards.

The ultimatum was clear: transition the global economy from its almost complete and utter dependence on fossil fuels to 100 per cent renewables in quick time, or a handful of cartoonists won’t show up for their annual mutual backslap-athon.

For some of us, this was the stunt that finally pushed us over the edge. I rang my colleague John Spooner and The Daily Telegraph’s Warren Brown only a matter of hours before entries closed and told them about the boycott.

Warren and I were thinking the same thing – as the ranks of participating cartoonists thinned out, there was a chance one of us could end up being the Steven Bradbury of Australian cartooning. That and the opportunity to show our solidarity and love for hydrocarbons and all things Ampol, and to do the exact opposite of what the other lot were doing – this was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up.

So with a bit of luck we might get a guernsey after all, and when we arrive, ferried in on planes and stretch Hummers, they’ll all be at home instead.

But they’ll be on the right side of history, safe in the knowledge that being a cartoonist isn’t about being funny, daring or outrageous – it’s about making the world a better place.

So I say don’t be the frog in the pot of boiling water. Don’t wait until it’s too late. Don’t be the one who says I had my chance to make a difference but I did nothing. Stand up to industrial-scale virtue signalling and laugh at it.