From ScoMo to Albo: how a new cast of characters poses a challenge for cartoonists

There are three, not entirely compatible, things to say about how cartoonists are coping with the recent change of government in Canberra.

First, there is the usual mild distress at having lost a pet set of ministers who seem to get uglier and more recognisable with age. Cartoonists can be like chooks returning to an empty feeder: the cartoonists’ Robert Menzies “stayed on” long after his retirement in 1966; so too did Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser well into the 1980s, and Bob Hawke and Paul Keating into the later ’90s.

Bill Leak’s classic whinge in The Australian in late 2007 sums up the problem. Every cartoonist, he said, had the right to feel

extremely disappointed, depressed or even downright angry at what Rudd and his cohorts have given us to work with […]...