An extract from Chris Mitchell’s column in today’s Australian, October 11, 2021 about the new biography on cartoonist Bill Leak. I specifically like the Barry Humphries line in the introduction about comedians these days as, “unfunny comedians who merely ‘identify’ as funny”
How true, how funny, is that? Skewered!!!
But thinking back on that Bill Leak, aboriginal father and son cartoon, the events at the time and the reaction to it by the Human Rights Commission, along with the usual suspects at the ABC, is again a reminder of the comment by a spokesman for the SDS, part of the 1960’s Marxist and countercultural anarchist outfit in the U.S, the Weather Underground, that exposes the modus operandi of the left universally:
“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution”
That is, the cause is never the real cause, but simply a vehicle, a pretext, to perpetuate their rolling revolution.
They couldn’t care less about the issue du jour because their intention, whether on indigenous issues or climate change to name two, is never to solve the problem but the exact opposite — To perpetuate the problem. To keep it alive as a political cudgel to further the cause and accumulate power.
Nuclear energy is a case in point.
Nuclear would go along way to solving the problem of emissions. That’s the last thing they want.
READ ON —
“…Once cartoonists were expected to take the mickey out of politicians and their ideas, no matter which side was in office. Now some ideas — about climate, racism, ethnicity, diversity, minority group religion, feminism, homosexuality and transgender rights — can never be satirised. Doing so was Leak’s crime.
Says (Barry) Humphries in the introduction to Die Laughing: “The New Puritanism in Australia, which endorses unfunny comedians who merely ‘identify’ as funny, also condemns every form of creative art it does not understand.”
People who sought to punish Leak under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act for publishing a poignant cartoon about Aboriginal dads are on the side of the wowser, who according to Humphries “is a traditional Australian figure — humourless, ignorant, vindictive. He is still with us, disguised as a liberal-minded upholder of the politically correct”.
That cartoon — which showed an Aboriginal father not knowing the name of his son — followed issues of violence against young Aboriginals at the Don Dale Detention Centre in Darwin, exposed by Four Corners in 2016.
Leak was moved by the Don Dale story and many of his Aboriginal friends supported his cartoon. They know Aboriginal people have agency and are not victim caricatures. But in the modern media world, only whites can damage Aboriginal people.
If you don’t like your political commentary delivered by an overwrought, pursed-lipped, tut-tutting reporter with little real world experience, this book is for you. If you like journalists and cartoonists with a healthy disrespect for authority, prepared to challenge accepted pieties, even better. Because that’s who Leak was, and Fred Pawle nails it…”