Culture

The Australian Published A Cartoon Depicting Indian People As Backwards Morons For Some Awful Reason

What the hell is this?

by Alex McKinnon  14 December 2015

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Bill Leak is one of Australia’s most well-known and accomplished cartoonists and painters. He’s won nine Walkley Awards, been a finalist in the Archibald Prize an astonishing 11 times, and won the Archibald’s Packing Room prize twice. It’s a formidable record.

Unfortunately, when he’s not doing those impressive things he’s the resident cartoonist over at The Australian, where his undeniable talents are put to use cranking out incoherent and risible artworks about whatever the Oz‘s editorial team is furious at on the day. His cartoon of a Palestinian man sending his child out to play in airstrikes to “win the PR war for Daddy” was a particularly low point of last year’s Mike Carlton/Fairfax controversy, and the overtly racist nature of many of his cartoons have been noted pretty exhaustively by Bill Leak Explained, a Twitter account that endeavours to translate their often-confusing messages.

Today’s Leak cartoon takes the recently-concluded Paris climate accord as its cue, criticising the accord’s emphasis on promoting renewable energy in developing countries. A lot of debate at the conference focused on how much poorer nations can develop their economies using existing fossil fuel technology, and how much assistance developed nations should provide to help poorer neighbours transition to clean energy sources.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has been particularly evangelical on the transformative power of coal to alleviate poverty developing nations; a strange position to take, given she’s overseen the greatest cuts to the foreign aid budget in Australian history. But those mental gymnastics look positively brilliant next to what Leak’s come up with. Going on his cartoon published in today’s Australian, Leak seems to think that Indian people are too stupid to tell the difference between glass and food, and left to their own devices will smear mango chutney on solar panels and try to eat them.

Besides being the kind of racism you’d expect to find on the porch of an Empire club at the height of the British Raj, Leak’s understanding of India’s position on renewables is way off too. India is streets ahead of Australia when it comes to investing in renewable energy; its Green Energy Corridors project will see 25 immense solar panel farms installed across the country, and it hopes to stop coal imports entirely by 2017.

Back in March, India was rated as a more attractive investment environment for renewable energy than Australia was — not hugely surprising, given we only just reversed a ban on our own government investing in wind power.

Given one of those famous past cartoons depicted the President of Indonesia as a dog forcibly having sex with a Papuan with a bone through their nose, the finer nuances of India’s economic situation are probably not going to make it into the Oz‘s follow-up coverage.