The increasingly shrill defenders of Victorian premier Daniel Andrews are often particularly outraged by references to “Dictator Dan”. If you can criticise the premier on Facebook, they shriek, you’re not in a dictatorship!
Except that, as we see, Victorians criticise the premier on Facebook at their peril. Zoe Bruhler, a pregnant mum in a regional town, was raided and arrested by the goon squad for suggesting that Victorians protest to criticise the premier. Ex-soldier James Bartolo had his door kicked down and was wrestled to the floor for stating on Facebook that he was going to protest the premier. Hundreds of Victorians have been arrested, thrown to the ground, cuffed and fined for taking to the parks and beaches to criticise the premier.
Now, one of Melbourne’s great institutions has been spiked for trying to criticise the premier in print.
First it was Chris Uhlmann’s evisceration of Dan Andrews’ extreme Melbourne lockdown.
Now Diary has learnt of a second instance in which a critical snapshot of life under Dan has been chucked out by jumpy senior editors at Nine’s The Age newspaper. And as with Uhlmann, the item was pulled because it was deemed too sensitive in Melbourne’s current mindset.
In this case, it was a cartoon by The Age’s marquee cartoonist, Michael Leunig.
Leunig is fittingly labelled a “national treasure” and his cartoons often defy easy pigeon-holing. In most respects, Leunig oftens seems a typical ageing, soft-left Boomer. Although an open Christian, Leunig most often seems in line with the rainbow-theology of the likes of lefty virtue-signaller Fr. Rod “Tilty McJesus” Bower. And yet…Leunig occasionally drops a cartoon like a hand grenade in the leftist echo-chamber. His “Thoughts Of A Baby Lying In A Child Care Centre” cartoon outraged the nascent mummy-bloggers of the bourgeois left in 1995. The mummy-bloggers and Twitter feminists gunned for Leunig again last year, when he dared suggest some modern mums are more interested in their phones than their children.
But at least those cartoons were published.
Leunig has been spiked before – such as his infamous cartoon likening Israel to Nazi Germany – but, as he says, always in consultation with editors. It is, he says, the first time in his 50-year career that a cartoon has been dumped without warning “because it could make readers ‘unhappy’”.
Leunig has since publicly revealed the cartoon was primarily about what he saw as “disturbing” force used by Victorian police against anti-lockdown protesters. But The Age dumped it at the last minute, without explanation. With no time for a re-draw, it was hurriedly replaced in The Age’s September 7 edition with a “vintage” Leunig cartoon.
Why was it pulled? Because, we’re reliably informed, senior editorial staff at The Age deemed it to convey views about mask-wearing that could upset readers. The cartoon by Leunig, named in 1997 as one of 100 Australian National Living Treasures, features six drawings at different stages of a pandemic, in an apparent questioning of Victoria’s strict enforcement of lockdowns[…]
It was drawn just days after Ballarat woman Zoe Buhler was arrested and charged with “incitement” after posting a Facebook event that called on people to meet in Ballarat to peacefully protest lockdown restrictions[…]
Leunig revealed in the article [on his personal website] he had copped a “deluge of shaming, insult and righteous lecturing; the accusation that I am selfish, anti-mask, that I don’t know or care about people dying, that I’m a privileged ‘booma’ (I’m actually too old to be a baby boomer), a conspiracy theorist (and) an irresponsible idiot in a tinfoil hat”[…]
“I dare say I am a fairly co-operative law abiding citizen, I wear a mask … I keep the curfew, I do all the ‘right things’.”
But he quickly added that the grand traditions of cartooning meant not blindly accepting what leaders like Andrews said: “(I) have my duty as a cartoonist who cares about my society and believes that unquestioning blind faith in leaders and experts can be tragic folly.”
But, as Zoe Bruhler and hundreds of others have found out in the rudest possible fashion, it is increasingly verboten to criticise Victoria’s Dear Leader in a public forum.
Tell me again how Victoria is not descending into a dictatorship?
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