Spending the night with Sean Leahy (and the ARM)

There was a function for the Republican Movement at the Fox Hotel in South Brisbane featuring Sean Leahy, the cartoonist for the Courier Mail. The Republic Upstairs events are usually a bit low-key, and this one was even more so because the guest speaker was unavoidably detained until 2 hours after it was due to begin.

Which was fine with me, as it turned out.

There was an announcement just after the start at 5.30 that Sean was going to be about an hour late, so we just sat and talked amongst ourselves for a while. It was the kind of quiet, friendly social night you don’t get too many of during an election campaign. I was just getting ready to head off at 7.25pm when there was a second announcement that Sean was just parking his car and would be there shortly.

He soon rushed in, set up his computer for his slideshow and launched into a very engaging 20 minute or so spiel on some highlights of his work and some commentary on the events surrounding them, and then everyone had to go.

The next two hours or so, the two of us spent talking about all kinds of things (but mainly politics) until we got turfed out. As a lifelong teetotaller, this was the first time I’d been shooed out of a bar so they could shut, and I imagine the last. And we kept talking for another ten minutes or so on their doorstep until we finally split up and headed off.

Let me tell you – keep your self-opinionated columnists and world-weary foreign correspondents – cartoonists are where it’s at for interesting conversation. And getting the perspective from someone on the media side of the fence (even someone they’d probably, and unfairly, sit on the kid’s table) on political issues was quite enlightening. Sean’s lent his time and his images to a lot of progressive causes over the years – including the Australia at the Crossroads forum in 2004 and we’d crossed paths a few times before – and I forgive him for not recognising me, both because we probably exchanged no more than a couple of sentences each time, and because I was a lot hairier back then.

Sean, if you’re reading this, and didn’t just take my campaign flyer out of politeness – I used this piece from that amateur cartoonist I was telling you about for a forum on the ABC Board) – but he wouldn’t let me credit him with it, because he only considered it a rough draft.

I’ve always admired cartoonists’ ability to take extremely complex issues and condense them down into often a single panel, and then add a joke. And recently I’ve been wishing for a bit more of that kind of ability, as I’ve been struggling to do the same for some policy ads soon to be launched on YouTube. Abstracts like rights and freedoms are proving pretty tough to describe in a thumbnail sketch, and ways of protecting them, even harder.

I went along tonight because I want an Australian head of state. But I want that state to be a democracy, not a monarchy by other means.

The Government has changed the electoral law so today was the cut-off date for new enrolments, and the date for updating your details is next Monday. The Coalition has created a demographic gerrymander that Sir Joh would be proud of – deliberately disenfranchising those most likely to have changed address since the last election – overwhelmingly young people, poor people and Indigenous people – all less likely to vote for the Government.

The same people who claim that our citizenship is so valuable that only folks who can pick Don Bradman out of a line-up are allowed to have it, argued that the Australian Government is under no obligation to act on behalf of any of our citizens abroad (UnAustralian Citizens And The Law).

The Immigration Minister personally has the power to make life or death decisions for refugees – decisions that can’t be reviewed, that somehow don’t form a precedent, and that the Minister cannot be compelled to exert.

This Government rushed us into a war in Iraq, without UN support, against the will of the people and without even a vote of the parliament. In fact there was a vote – after the troops had left – just to really rub it in.

After countless reports, some from NGOs, some commissioned by the Government themselves about family violence and social problems in Indigenous communities, the Coalition discovered an emergency that people had been begging them to address for a decade. Then claiming after a decade of inaction that there was no time to lose and that anyone trying to take a breath and examine their policy was supporting child abuse, they trumpeted the fact that they weren’t going to accept any amendments to the laws they rammed through in a week. And at the shamefully brief one day Inquiry, they refused the authors of the Little Children Are Sacred report – supposedly the alarm bell that woke them to the crisis – the chance to give evidence.

The greatest, most dangerously radical changes to our industrial relations system ever were forced through parliament in a similarly rushed fashion – despite having never been mentioned at the election. And the first $55 million ad campaign on these “reforms” were on air before the laws had even been written – let alone passed through the parliament.

We need an Australian head of state, but we need a bill of rights and an independent Senate even more to save us from the Divine Right of the Howard Government and their attacks on our democracy.

In a small irony, I received a letter from Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy on Monday, asking my views as a candidate for Brisbane on their issues.

And I should mention that the ARM offered a full refund for anyone who had to go before Sean showed up

www.leahy.com.au