January 2007

Hallo? is there a conservative Australian humourist out there?

Janet Albrechtsen

There is nothing like an end of year anthology to collect all the evidence. Each morning during the last year, many of you, like me, will have tucked into your Cornflakes and chuckled at your favourite cartoonist in the morning newspaper. Taken individually, each cartoon took a well aimed potshot at a deserving target. But you, like me, probably had a nagging suspicion that something was missing. Then it dawned. All the potshots seem to come from one side of politics. And all the targets from the other. Is there no such thing as a conservative Australian humourist?

The anthology that inadvertently assembles the evidence is the “Best Australian Political Cartoons of 2006” edited by Russ Radcliffe. This collection of witty, occasionally hilarious, sometimes magnificently insightful cartoons sums up the year’s events as seen by the cartoonists from our major, and sometimes minor, newspapers.

Perhaps the pick of the bunch is by Andrew Weldon in The Big Issue, a newspaper sold on street corners around the country. Weldon depicts John Howard’s growing political stature with a handy chart which shows that the ever increasing tendency of cartoonists to draw Howard as a small man - he shrinks every year - only increases his electoral appeal. It’s a neat thesis topped off with a plea for cartoonists to start drawing the PM as a tall man, in the hope that his popularity will then shrink. Funny stuff.

But the gaping hole is that one side of politics gets off almost entirely scot free. Of the 186 cartoons, the few that mock Labor do so from the Left, attacking former Opposition leader Kim Beazley over his Australian Values-for-Visas policy (admittedly a dopey idea). We are treated to images of him in a scratching, clawing punch up with John Howard as the two leaders apparently fight for the same xenophobic moral low-ground over national identity. There’s another one with the same leaders belting out their own dog whistle politics via a trumpet. Funny, huh?

While both cop it from the cartoonists over Australian values, when it comes to other issues, the poison pen of the cartoonists in this collection is aimed only in one direction - to the Right. The top picks of the year on anti-terrorism laws, for example, has Australia literally going to the dogs with the Prime Minister and Attorney General, Phillip Ruddock suckling a fierce “terror” Rottweiler. Bill Leak’s “sedition edition” of The Australian is blank with a chuffed PM remarking that there is “nothing to worry about in the paper today.” Too bad that the average punter apparently supports these laws by a wide margin.

Similarly, the top 14 pick of industrial relations cartoons all veer in the same direction. It’s fair enough that The Age’s Matt Davidson has Howard, the sculptor, chipping away at a statue emblazoned with “Workers’ Rights.” And that the Sydney Morning Herald’s Alan Moir has Howard and a group of raping, pillaging Viking employers behind a canon blasting employees to smithereens. And so on.

But where is the lampooning of Labor’s fraudulent IR campaign, its symbiotic relationship with the unions or the irony that the so-called progressives now want to drag 21st century workers back to the 1950s nine-to-five salaryman paradigm. On Iraq, no mention of Labor’s white flag cut and run policy. Instead, we get a “Left-Wing Garage Sale” from
The Age’s John Spooner where “everything must go” - secular humanism, free speech, feminism, democracy and science. Labor’s farcical leadership problems get a passing stab but what of its retarded policy on uranium mining and its agonies over teacher standards? Where are the digs at Labor’s new found recognition that passive welfare hurts? And soon.

And the Greens demonstrate even more powerful layers of Teflon. With nutters on the Left of the calibre of Bob Brown, you might think it rich pickings for our cartoonists. But Green hyperbole and inner city populism gets a free kick every time. It seems that the further to the Left you travel, the more untouched the terrain when it comes to our cartoonists.

Now, of course, it is possible that the fault lies with the anthologist. Maybe Russ Radcliffe is simply a hopelessly irredeemable old Leftie whose funny bone only works when struck from one side. And true it is that a conservative government in Canberra will inevitably mean anti conservative japes are more topical and easier to make.
But does that alone explain why apparently only one side of politics does lampoonable things? No. Sadly the best explanation is likely to be the obvious one. There are no conservative funny men, or women, in Australia. Or at least none that our publishers and roadcasters will air. Sure, there used to be at least the token right-wing humourist. But even those guys - such as Tim Blair, former columnist at The Bulletin and now opinion editor at The Daily Telegraph and The Australian’s own Imre Saluzinsky - have moved on to bigger and better things. Indeed, with this cartoon anthology slotting snugly into those shelves of your local bookstore, groaning under the weight of the latest diatribes against the nasty conservatives, you kind of get the feeling that Australian publishers can’t find any right-wingers at all, funny or not.

But back to our best cartoons of 2006. To borrow from Julius Sumner Miller, why is this so? Can it really be the case that more than 52 per cent of voters who elected the Coalition government don’t enjoy cartoons, or that cartoonists can’t find something that might appeal to them. The editorial stance of newspapers is at most only a partial explanation - although no one seriously expects The Age to poke fun at their secular gods on the Left.

Nor is this some wacky conspiracy where, in the dead of night, scruffy cartoonists sit around planning how to join forces to shift the country on their pet issues. Cartoonists, no doubt, sincerely believe in their causes. The explanation lies, not in some cartoonists’ conspiracy, but in the cartoonist’s cast of mind. There is a natural leftist habitat for the cartooning kind.

So I’ll leave you with a larger but somewhat cheeky hypothesis. Left-wing politics is essentially an emotional, instinctive utopian kind of world peopled by romantics and dreamers. Conservatism is, on the other hand, more rational, analytic and pragmatic. That is why creative types tend to come from the Left. Right-wingers, by contrast, have real jobs.

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