The Sunday Telegraph 8 May 2011

I still think the whole buried at sea thing was Hollywood leaving the door open for a sequel. Anyway here’s today’s from The Sunday Tele and below is another rough that didn’t find a home because there are only so many cartoons you can get published in a week, but hey, it’s passed its expiry date and I thought it was kind of funny…

unpublished rough

There didn’t seem to be a place for this cartoon all week and it’s probably passed its use-by date, which is a pity because I do think that The Sculpture Garden Of Things Which In Retrospect People In Public Life Probably Wish They Hadn’t Said would be a salutory experience for us all. It would certainly make twitter a more exciting place, though the world would probably run out of marble in a hurry.

Anyway, the little fella’s contribution to the 2008 US election campaign deserves another airing in light of the circumstances of last week, so here it is.

unpublished rough

As we all know, the Chaser’s Royal Wedding commentary has been abolished by royal decree, thus surely removing the one connection most non-lobotomised Australians still actually have with the monarchy, which is of course taking the piss out of it.

Vive la Republique.

unpublished rough, 25 April 2011

I’m pretty sure that our soldiers didn’t fight in all those wars just so that the head of the Australian Christian Lobby could crucify himself on twitter, but it’s a free internet, and at least now we know what sort of lobbying he’s doing when he’s lobbying our politicians.

And now they know we know, which is probably a good thing too.

unpublished rough

Since the dikileaks saga seems to have reared its ugly head again, so to speak, here’s one that got away last December. The story’s moved on a bit sleaze-wise, but back in those innocent days it was all about the willies on the internet.

Here’s a rough idea from last week that got buried because of the cyclone. It was referring to the “Million Person March” in Egypt, but seems even more appropriate now. Good to see people power can win the day. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Just quietly, I think Joe was pulling his lever a bit hard today.While I agree that telling the banks you’ll be very cross if they raise interest rates probably won’t do the trick, having the government deciding what banks can charge is guaranteed to end badly. I don’t want to tell the Party of Free Enterprise how to do their job, but I reckon encouraging a bit of healthy competition might trim the fat a bit. There’s a rumour that markets can be quite good at that sort of thing.

Couldn’t quite make this cartoon work for tomorrow’s paper, but I liked the exploding cigars, so here it is just for you, gentle blog reader.

The People have Spoken and in the next excruciating episode of So You Think You Can Be Prime Minister, contestants Julia and Tony will be frantically scurrying around trying to tell us what we just said.

Having suffered through the whole hung parliament thing in Tasmania earlier this year, I should probably warn you that if you think the bullshit flowed thick and fast during the election campaign, you ain’t seen nothing yet. However, once all the shouting about the popular vote, who got the most number of seats and non-existent mandates is over, it will of course boil down to the only vote that really matters, which is who can muster a majority of votes on the floor of the House of Reps and convince the GG that it wasn’t a fluke.

While I am sure that the suddenly remarkably popular independents will mention the national interest more than once in the ensuing bargaining period, it’s Christmas for their respective electorates, and as a resident of  The Electorate Formerly Known As We’re-Taking-You-For-Granted (aka Denison), I for one can’t wait for my pressies.

Of course, if neither side manages to bully, bribe, blackmail or buy their way to 76 votes, it’s back to the polls we go, and if either Julia or Tony is in any doubt as to what the People Spake last night, I think it’s something along the lines of “stop treating us like idiots”, which is not to say that politicians don’t always treat us like idiots, it’s just that this time around it was so clumsily done that we finally noticed.

It’s possible you’ve been wondering why our pollies have been banging on about the catastrophic effects of voting for the other guy (or gal) for what feels like years, and yet the official “launches” only occurred just recently. Perhaps the delayed launches are meant to deliver some sort of subliminal message about stopping the boats, but the cynic in me suspects that it’s got more to do with the subject of the admittedly incredibly expository cartoon above.

Yep, until the election campaign is officially “launched”, the travelling circus designed to deliver power to our politicians and spit to the cheeks of babies in marginal electorates is on our dime. Tony’s launch was a week earlier than Julia’s, so maybe that’s what he means by “ending the waste”.

Anyway, next time a politician picks up one of your kids for a snog, I recommend buggering off to the pub to get a couple of hours’ childcare out of it.