Blaugust 6/31: Dr. Dolittle's Circus

Thursday's are the day that I've left open and free-form for Blaugust, in the hopes of inspiring something new and exciting instead. In the absence of that, though, let me show you a political cartoons I made this week.

(Warning: This post contains Australian politics and racy language. The two often go hand-in-hand for some reason.)

If you don't follow Australian politics, you're missing out, as the last few weeks have been completely focused on the important business of finding out which of our national politicans has most profitably misused their parliamentary travel allowance. There have been many interesting cartoons, and a seemingly infinite number of helicopter memes, made out of the ensuing scandal, and as the dust settles our government again has egg on its face and the Speaker of the House has resigned having collected enough of them to make a record-breaking omelette. If you're a Usonian or otherwise unfamiliar with Australian politics, you might think that the Speaker is a powerful person: the head of their party, or third in line for the Prime Ministership or some nonsense like that, but that's not how our system works. In Australia the speaker is a largely ceremonial role whose job is to manage the house in session, which appears to the public to involve mostly throwing out people that you don't like, so it could easily, and perhaps more happily, filled by a bit player or even a non-entity, and given the current climate, that might be exactly what the government goes looking for.

This means that we need a new speaker, and the man tipped for the job is none only than the local member for us here at Parliament House, Dr. Andrew Southcott, who is known far and wide (mostly amongst his political opponents, for some reason) as Dr. Dolittle, as the man has an incredibly low profile for someone who's been in the for almost 20 years now. Since it's an obvious joke that I'm sure all the real cartoonists with actual skill will be making some better variant of soon enough if and when he is announced as the man to fill Bronwyn Bishop's comfortable chair, I thought I'd better get this little number up now, just in case.

We have a great tradition of political cartoons in Australia, and the working cartoonists of the country go a long way to building a language that even those of us with no artistic skill at all can use to make their idea (relatively) clear to a pre-prepared audience. By this point, I hope that most Australians that have been anywhere near the zeitgeist could tell that Hercules the strongman here is dressed as Prime Minister Tony Abbot, I mean, he's a man in a blue tie, with a surf-life saving cap on. The low-profile Andrew Southcott (as played by Dr. Dolittle himself) is more obscure, of course (I've never seen another cartoon with him in it), but I suspect that will no longer be the case if he gets the nod early next week.

I know it doesn't count as a real cartoon, but in a field where the below image is still considered a work of high art, maybe I have a shot. All in all, I'm rather proud of it!

Fare well until tomorrow, gentle readers.