Here's an uncomfortable truth about modern political journalism: most of it can be gamed. Press releases can be timed. Quotes can be curated. Spin doctors are very well paid for very good reasons. But nobody has yet figured out how to spin a cartoon.
The Sydney Morning Herald's daily cartoon roundup, a modest fixture in one of Australia's oldest broadsheets, is easy to scroll past. A quick laugh, maybe a wince if it catches your preferred politician in an unflattering pose, and then on to the next story. Yet the form itself deserves more credit than we typically give it.
Political cartooning is arguably the oldest form of political commentary still practised in recognisably the same way it was centuries ago. Where the op-ed has morphed into the tweet thread, and the long investigative piece has fought for survival against shrinking newsroom budgets, the cartoon has held its shape. One image. One argument. No hedging.
That economy of means is also its democratic virtue. You don't need a university degree or thirty minutes of spare reading time to grasp what a cartoonist is saying about a politician's credibility or a government's broken promise. The form is radically accessible in a media environment that too often rewards those who already know the inside game. When Parliament descends into procedural theatre, the cartoon cuts through in seconds.
Australia has produced cartoonists of genuine world standing. The tradition runs deep, from the biting colonial-era sketches that needled the establishment to the contemporary artists who have made careers dissecting the contradictions of modern Australian politics. Their work sits in major cultural collections and has won international recognition. This is not a minor cultural footnote.
The case against
The strongest argument against the form is also worth taking seriously. Critics from the left and right alike have pointed out that cartoons, by their nature, flatten complexity. A prime minister is reduced to a nose or an eyebrow. A policy dispute becomes a slapstick metaphor. Real people and real issues get caricatured in ways that could, in the wrong hands, shade into something less than fair commentary.
That critique has merit. But it mistakes the cartoon's function. Nobody reads the morning cartoon instead of the news. They read it alongside it, as a kind of emotional punctuation. The cartoon doesn't replace analysis; it confirms that someone has looked at the day's events and found the absurdity or the hypocrisy worth marking. That's not distortion. That's editorial courage in concentrated form.
A question of economics
There is also the inconvenient matter of economics. As newspaper circulations decline and digital advertising revenue fails to replace print revenue, arts and illustration budgets are among the first casualties. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has documented the sustained contraction of Australia's media workforce over recent years. Cartooning, which requires skilled artists who understand both politics and visual storytelling, is not cheap to sustain. The health of democratic discourse depends, in part, on whether institutions still invest in holding power to account through creative means.
Strip away the rhetoric and ask the simple question: what kind of public discourse do we want? One where every uncomfortable observation is smoothed into a press release, or one where the day's events are still held up to a mirror and sketched with an honest hand?
The cartoon roundup isn't high literature. It doesn't pretend to be. But in a media culture increasingly shaped by what algorithms reward, there's something quietly radical about an art form that answers only to whether it's true.
We deserve a better debate than this moment usually delivers. The cartoonists, at least, are still trying to give us one.
Originally reported by the Sydney Morning Herald.