from the australian, a very good piece from political cartoonist bill leak who really comes to the conclusion i think most sensible and reasonable australians should arrive at given the last few years of government. he's brave as it goes against all trends and fashions but none the less one can appreciate and respect his convictions. note: he mentions patrick cook who i have to acknowledge as being the best australian political satirist, unfortunately unrecognised by 
most mainstream  especially the abc and the smh.

MY FALL FROM GRACE BUT I'M FREE TO OFFEND BY BILL LEAK


WHILE trawling through a number of popular left-wing blogs recently, I realised I had to accept a painful reality: I have become a rabid right-winger and a Murdoch toady.

It seems widely accepted that this terrible turn of events is attributable to the fact that I recently had an accident, after which I had to undergo brain surgery.

Apparently this has also been the fate of Patrick Cook who also, after surviving brain surgery, suddenly took to poking fun at "greenies living in yurts". One contributor helpfully explained by saying, "It's sad, but if you lose a quarter of your brain you'll emerge a conservative." Another went so far as to call for "an inquiry into the quality of the nation's cartoonists".

Naturally, I was very worried. Were they right?

Remember we're talking nice, compassionate left-wingers here, not insensitive types who'd make politically incorrect remarks about a poor old brain-damaged man with special needs, like me. So, was it really my brain injury that had turned me into a Hitlerian monster, or was there a more sinister explanation? Perhaps the diabolical Rupert Murdoch, on hearing I was in an operating theatre with the top of my head lying next to me like a fruit bowl, had summoned one of his operatives at Holt Street and dispatched him to the hospital. There he'd bribed the surgeon to allow him to slip a microchip into my brain that would enable Murdoch to control my thoughts, thereby making me just another one of his servile minions working towards the realisation of his ultimate aim of world domination which, of course, would culminate in the eradication of left-wing activism.

I started by looking back through my cartoons for the first signs of the dead hand of conservatism, expecting to see it manifesting itself soon after I'd lost "a quarter of my brain".

It seemed as plausible a conspiracy theory as any of the others I'd read about the inner workings of Murdoch's Evil Empire, so I did a bit of detective work myself.

No, it hadn't happened then. My fall from that balcony had not been responsible for my fall from left-wing grace.

After searching through another year's worth of cartoons I was finally able to pin it down to the exact moment: it was in the last week of November 2007.

Now, what on earth had caused this momentous change? I checked with my doctor who assured me that, no, I hadn't suffered an earlier serious brain injury that I'd forgotten about.

So what was it that had turned me into a right-wing shill?

Thanks to the miracle that is Google, I was eventually able to find the answer: Kevin Bloody Rudd had won the election by defeating John Howard and becoming our first Labor prime minister for 11 years.

And me? I'd turned into a fascist overnight.

There I was, a darling of the Left, a man who'd fought the good fight against Howard's oppressive regime for all those years, suddenly having the gall to draw cartoons critical of the hero who'd deposed him. Worse still, here I am, more than four years later, still at it, banging away at Julia Gillard's government and her merry band of social engineers who, to be fair, only want to make the world a better place by telling us what to think, what to read and what to write, what to eat, what to drink, not to smoke, to respect Aboriginal culture and to ensure that by enshrining racism in our Constitution we will eliminate the scourge of racism.

No wonder the self-appointed moral guardians of our society have dropped me like third period French!

Oh well, salvation might be only an election away.

If, as is widely anticipated, we soon see the advent of an Abbott government, it won't be long before I'm accused of having switched sides again. The moment I start knocking out cartoons that display an acceptable level of hostility towards the Mad Monk, the luvvies on the Left will welcome me back into the fold like some sort of prodigal son.

But for now, such a Murdoch arse-licker have I become that I even saw fit to have a go at Robert Manne when he wrote that splendid Quarterly Essay about how The Australian is destroying public debate in the country.

In hindsight, I see now that I really should have just dropped to my knees in awe of the comic genius Australia's Leading Public Intellectual had shown when he'd flicked the switch to parody, writing an impassioned plea for the suppression of free speech mocked up to look like a defence of it.

The Weekend Australian's editor Nick Cater asked him at the Byron Bay Writers Festival why he'd never accepted any of Cater's requests to have his views published in The Australian, and Manne responded by saying he didn't want to give that squalid rag "legitimacy" by writing for it.

I witnessed that little exchange and, fascist that am, misinterpreted his answer as pompous and sanctimonious, when I really should have considered myself lucky to be there, able to gaze on admiringly while the great Manne put that Murdoch lickspittle in his place.

Only a couple of weeks after my nasty cartoon about Manne appeared I was at it again, this time apparently taking sides with that enemy of all virtuous, decent people everywhere, Andrew Bolt.

Now, I don't always agree with Andrew, but I do agree with Voltaire, who said back in the 18th century, "I don't agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." And I, for one, would defend to the death Andrew's right to say whatever he likes, even if it does occasionally constitute what Justice Bromberg decried as "irresponsible journalism". When I read Bromberg's decision, I naively expected to hear howls of outrage emanating from the anti-censorship brigade on the Left. You'd think they'd be the first to jump up and down and scream, "Irresponsible? And just who's going to decide what's irresponsible and what's not?"

But no, barely a voice was raised in anger. Presumably, given this was a judgment that went against that loathsome right-winger Bolt, it must also have been, by definition, a bloody good thing.

Freedom of speech is the freedom to offend, and that means the freedom to offend anyone.

Neither cartoonists nor journalists should be required to exempt certain groups within society from this general rule when expressing their views. I don't want to be protected from anybody's views, especially not from those I find personally repugnant, because it's often when finding yourself in violent disagreement with certain ideas that you're best able to clarify your own.

It seems ironic that those who are the first to rail against perceived social injustice are, these days, the ones most vehemently determined to silence those with whom they disagree.

Their dictum appears to be a slightly modified version of Voltaire's: I do not agree with what you say, and I'll fight to the death to stop you from saying it.

Then again, perhaps this shouldn't strike me as ironic at all. When, in 1994, I left my job at Fairfax to take up a position at News Limited, a lot of my colleagues were offended and dismayed.

It was as though I'd made a conscious decision to reject the company of angels and go over to the Dark Side, a seething cesspit of amorality ruled over by the devil incarnate himself, Rupert Murdoch.

"How could you possibly go and work for an organisation controlled by him?" one indignant friend howled in the pub after my last day of work at The Sydney Morning Herald.

"It's no wonder you feel morally superior," I conceded, "working as you do for an organisation run by Conrad Black."

Now, how long has that bastard been in jail? Seems like an awfully long time. Don't tell me he did something unethical!