The Bill Leak cartoon on the issue of Aboriginal parental responsibility published in The Australian last week (August 4) is a crude piece of racism reminiscent of the old Bulletin School of cartoonists.
The Bulletin School cartoonists were prominent 100 years ago, their work published in the now defunct Bulletin magazine. In the early days of Federation, the magazine was strongly nationalistic and vigorously supported the White Australia policy.
Its cartoonists depicted Asian people in grotesque ways that exaggerated the populist racial stereotyping of what were in those days called “Asiatics” — Chinese people with gapped teeth, slanty eyes and coolie hats; skinny Indian men in loincloths and turbans.
His right to draw and publish it is not in dispute, but in our society when you exercise your right to speak, others may exercise their right to oppose you. That doesn’t make them “sanctimonious” or “tantrum-throwers”.
As a nation, Australia has abandoned the White Australia policy, but Bill Leak’s work is a throwback to those times.
Another of his recent cartoons has a pair of skinny Indian men in turbans and Ghandian robes smashing up solar panels that have been sent as items of foreign aid, because they have mistaken the solar panels for food.
Of course he denies that his most recent offering is racist. Well, it depicts a man who is clearly meant to be a typical Aboriginal father as a shambling barefoot drunk, beer can in hand, who doesn’t know the name of his son.
Just as the Bulletin School cartoonists did, he draws on all the ugly stereotypes of the targeted racial group, in this case dirty, dishevelled and shiftless types who only care about where their next drink is coming from.
It has provoked a strong response from a wide range of people, and spawned a social media hashtag, #IndigenousDads, where people have been putting up pictures of Aboriginal fathers playing with their kids, hugging them, going fishing with them, standing proudly alongside them.
Leak’s response to the criticism has been to resort to name-calling – “sanctimonious Tweety Birds” and “tantrum-throwers”.
He has also said that he didn’t intend the cartoon to convey a racist meaning. In that case, the cartoon fails on its own terms: it has conveyed an unintended meaning, the most hazardous of all kinds in journalism and useless as a defence in law as well as ethics.
The response of the editor-in-chief of The Australian, Paul Whittaker, is the purest humbug: “Bill Leak’s confronting and insightful cartoons force people to examine the core issues in a way that sometimes reporting and analysis can fail to do.”
Notice how he dodges referring to the specific cartoon and talks about Leak’s cartoons in general.
In any case, in the wake of the ABC Four Corners program showing boys being treated with appalling cruelty in the Northern Territory’s Don Dale detention centre – which is the background to the cartoon — the core issue is the way the Territory Government treats young people in its care.
Media Watch this week had a number of cartoonists defending Leak’s cartoon and his right to draw and publish it.
His right to draw and publish it is not in dispute, but in our society when you exercise your right to speak, others may exercise their right to oppose you. That doesn’t make them “sanctimonious” or “tantrum-throwers”.
We are living in feverish times when different minorities – Muslims and homosexuals to name but two – are the subject of sometimes ugly stereotyping in public debate.
The media has a responsibility not only to carry the debate but to do so in ways that are calculated to elevate its quality, not debase it.
That doesn’t mean the media have to be bland or humourless, but to avoid doing avoidable harm.
Harm includes reinforcing ugly racial stereotyping.
► Dr Denis Muller is a long-time journalist and leading expert on media ethics. He is a Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism.