Too many folk on a planet too hot for comfortJune 1, 2006, Why I like political cartoons

Some letters to "The Age" ... just spot on.

Too many folk on a planet too hot for comfortJune 1, 2006

While focusing attention on greenhouse emissions and climate change, Tim Flannery ("Let's talk about nuclear power", Opinion, 30/5) ignores or overlooks a range of other problems we face or from which we already suffer. These include, as well as greenhouse emissions and climate change: holes in the ozone layer, reactive nitrogen, restricted water supplies, electricity shortages, urban sprawl, traffic congestion, increasing pollution, overstretched health and education systems, overfishing, river and dry land salinity, soil degradation and diminishing oil and gas reserves.

All of these have a single underlying cause: people, or to be exact, too many people. They are, in fact, symptoms of a fundamental problem: overpopulation. There seems to be a strange reluctance, especially on the part of governments, to face up to this and do something about it. A common response is that science and technological developments will provide answers. This is wishful thinking. There can be no guarantee that such developments will occur.

In any case, those in the past have depended on cheap and plentiful oil and natural gas supplies. There is a growing expert consensus that these supplies, coming as they do from finite resources, are reaching a global peak and will begin to reduce with increasing rapidity and run out in the not too distant future.

Unless we do something to reduce population, worrying about greenhouse emissions and nuclear power is a waste of time and only diverting attention from the real problem.

Bruce M. Dinham, Hawthorn, SA

It's not surprising that states fail under the loadAny understanding of failing states, social chaos, refugees, depleted resources, unemployment and international tensions must include what is happening to population growth as the world zooms from 6 billion today towards 8 billion in 2050:

¦Food aid and police cannot keep pace with the growth rates in East Timor: 1950 population, 436,000; 847,000 in 2000; heading for 1,943,000 in 2050 — estimated from its burgeoning proportion of youth.
¦Solomon Islands population has grown in 50 years from 106,000 to 466,000 and is heading for 1,110,000.
¦PNG: 1.4 million to 4.9 million, heading for 10.6 million.
¦Half the population at Wadeye is reported to to be under 15 years old. What economic sustainability is possible?
¦Formerly Iraq was self-supporting in food. Now it imports, with population growth from 5 million (1950) to 22 million (2000) heading to 56 million (2050).
¦Afghanistan: 8 million to 23 million to 81 million.
¦Nepal: 8 million to 24 million to 53 million.
¦Ethiopia: 20 million to 64 million to 144 million.
¦Sudan: 8 million to 35 million to 84 million.
¦Rwanda: 2 million to 7 million to 19 million — despite the millions massacred.
¦The Gaza Strip: population 245,000 in 1950, by 2000 it was over 1 million, and heading for over 4 million by 2050.
And so on. If humane stabilisation plus economic security is not attempted now, the solutions will be inhumane.

Valerie Yule, Mount Waverley

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Why I like political cartoons

Cartoonists: a last redoubt against spin
Robert PhiddianJune 2, 2006


It has been a big year for cartoon controversies. There was the fear that political cartoonists would be muzzled under the new sedition laws delivered for Christmas last year by the Federal Government. Then there was the international uproar over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. Before that entirely settled, relations between Australia and Indonesia were sorely tested by Bill Leak's trademark tastefulness in depicting the Indonesian President sodomising a Papuan. And very recently The Sydney Morning Herald has shown high sensitivity to taste by refusing to run a Leunig cartoon about John Howard that, to my jaded eye, was only averagely scatological.

There is, I think, a growing sensitivity to cartoons' potential impact in public debate. Maybe that is because they are becoming one of the last redoubts for undisciplined, unspun commentary. You might argue that the powers that be could reasonably expect loyalty in time of a war against terror. I don't agree, however, that we are made safer by limiting the organs of dissent.

When I started formally studying political cartoons back in 1996, it looked like a beautifully designed research project. Now it's becoming clear that there's much more to it than that. Cartoons are the hub of the surviving anti-spin and shaming devices in the mainstream media at a time when spin and shamelessness are a ballooning element in public life. Think everything from Big Brother to the AWB inquiry, from Shane Warne to weapons of mass destruction. Cartoons have increasingly been at the heart of storms over free speech and the pressure from governments, corporations, and opinion-makers to control the message.

The clearest recent example has been the response to the Tampa crisis of 2001 and the subsequent incarceration of asylum seekers. Every one of the hundreds of cartoons I have seen on the topic (in tabloid and broadsheet, metropolitan and regional papers) has advocated more humane treatment for refugees, and none has shown any tolerance of the subtle legalisms spread by ministers and their bureaucrats. Their unanimity clearly had little impact on public opinion, which remained broadly opposed to "illegal immigrants". Still, cartoonists were quite the most ungovernable part of the media on this topic, and remain so. At the very least, they provided support and consolation to those opposed to the policy and its media-managed execution.

Governments have learnt the lessons of Vietnam and Watergate, and corporations the lesson of big tobacco; even churches are beginning to learn the lesson of the Hollingworth saga. We are reaching a stage where the old light-bulb joke could be reworked as: "How many investigative journalists does it take to write a story? One, plus 24 public relations officers and four beautifully presented, if mendacious, information packages." Cartoons are one of the last frontiers for product placement and controlling the message.

Any competent editor knows that a cartoonist's only real responsibility is to be funny and interesting without breaking any laws. The great New Zealand-born cartoonist David Low even managed to get himself onto the Gestapo's hit-list for after the invasion of England by dint of his cartoons attacking Hitler in the 1930s. No amount of Foreign Office pressure on the Evening Standard could get him to tone them down.

The last Australian media proprietor to direct a cartoonist to a topic was Frank Packer back in the 1940s, and the cartoonist, Will Mahoney, preferred to be sacked rather than follow orders. Such fearlessness is now the stuff of legend, and the independence of the cartoonist is widely established in Western nations.

This doesn't mean that newspapers must accept whatever cartoon their artist offers. That would amount to the same level of unqualified privilege enjoyed by members of parliament. Editors can nag cartoonists, refuse particular cartoons, and sack recalcitrants. This is all perfectly sensible and legitimate, but it's also a slippery slope of pressure that must be constantly negotiated.

A cartoon can be a very emotive thing. So far as one can tell from electoral commission surveys, individual cartoons by Leunig or Tandberg have been about as insignificant in directly shifting votes as individual opinion pieces by Robert Manne or Andrew Bolt. But over time, they mark the ethos of the papers they appear in just as strongly, and colour the views of those who choose to be regular readers.

That is why we need to be careful that cartoonists are free to be antsy and difficult, that the pressures out there to make us all disciplined team players in corporate solidarity for the safest return on investors' capital are kept at bay. At present in The Australian, Bill Leak is cartooning strongly in tune with that paper's crusade against the maintenance of remote Aboriginal communities.

This is just a coincidence of view, and Leak is often at odds with his paper's editorial line, but the coincidence is remarkably powerful. It becomes very hard for a consistent reader of that paper to resist the overall argument that remote communities are beastly. The emotive effect is well in excess of the real evidence led.

The spin doctors out there will be noticing how much cartoonists can add to an argument, and will be thinking of ways to cultivate them, ways of helping them over the fear that dogs them all: that the paper will have to run with a blank space where their cartoon should be. Let them and their editors be warned, and long may they remain uncultivatable.

Robert Phiddian is head of English and director of the Flinders Humanities Research Centre at Flinders University.