Australia on verge of combusting: Leunig
Michael Leunig is more worried than usual at the moment.
He
believes his role as an artist and a satirical cartoonist is to reflect
what he sees in the community, and he believes something in the
Australian social fabric is about to combust.
"The
nature of my work is to get to the heart and the soul and the psyche of
us all," he said, speaking to AAP at the Sydney Writers' Festival on
Friday.
"So I'm simply doing
what the poets, the bards and the artists have always done. You speak,
you express what is repressed. I'm trying to get to the understory.
"There's
a perception there's been a growth of corruption, on both sides of
politics, and there's a sense that democracy is not effective, that
people are not represented."
He said it's not just an Australian problem, but Australia was particularly vulnerable to it right now.
"The
culture is always changing, but at the moment something is being
degraded or lost and there's a great sense of exclusion because of
artificially constructed cultural wars," Leunig said.
It shows in politicians' attitude to the environment, to asylum seekers and even the way we build our cities, he said.
"Australia
had a sense of its own decency or at least tried to speak of it and
that friendliness, keenness to embrace those less fortunate, the Good
Samaritan has gone and people are really disturbed when they see this
value just being flagrantly abused and neglected; the ethical, moral and
emotional idea that we look after each other.
"We
have become more racist than ever. We got rid of the old racism and now
we've adopted a new one. And when we push the other out we're pushing
part of ourselves away."
Leunig believes the Abbott government's budget delivered last week will be the catalyst for unprecedented social change.
"A
lot of people looked upon the coming of the Abbott government with
dread and doom and gloom. And I said, 'Yes, but let us be brave and
accept what is inevitable'. But it's going to be a catalyst for
something of which we know not what at the moment.
"I
think this budget is a flashpoint for something that has been building
for a long time in the spiritual and philosophical sense of the nation;
there's a sense it's the last straw.
"Whether
it's the last straw or not, it feels as if some sort of critical point
has been crossed and people have put up with a lot for a long time. They
have a sense of losing their participation in the political process.
"There seems to be a coldness in politics now."
"I'm
starting to observe in a younger generation and in the very old a
common resistance to and a revulsion about the heartless quality of
politics, the pugilistic quality that Tony Abbott would seem to
represent, this desire to take people on, to punch the wall behind their
head and to intimidate.
"There's
a sense of punishment and this is how people are feeling it. And we
have to watch out for breaking the spirit of a people.
"It's too narrow, too hard, too heartless."
"When
we push our neighbours away, we're pushing all of our fellow community
and the community dies a bit when you start hurting the world community.
I think it rebounds on us, so the temperature of our nation is
dropping.
"But the
redemption lies in the people, ultimately, and how that's going to play
out I really do not know. Something is either forming or something is
dying and I'm not sure which it is.
"Something is taking shape or something is going under. It's forming as we speak."
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