The Editorial Cartoon's Fading Impact: The State of play in Australia at the Federal Election of 2016 and beyond

The editorial cartoon has been one of the great humor forms of the print age and, more particularly, the age of newspapers. Newspapers have been a dominant medium for political communication through the long 20th Century (c.1880s-present), though their position in the media landscape is now fragile. At the heart of the opinion pages, cartoons have been prominent sites of comic commentary and occasionally searing satire in the debate that characterizes liberal democracies. They have a fool's license to speak impertinently and often truthfully to the pompous and powerful who rule us. In the onslaught of digital media, this print ecology is changing, and we have witnessed that transition in a series of studies of Australian election cartoons, going back to the 1990s (i.e. Phiddian, 1998; Manning and Phiddian, 2015; 2012; 2010; 2005; 2002; 2000). This paper focusses on the significance of the editorial page cartoon capacity to lampoon leaders, political parties, and key election campaign policies and promises, with a special focus on the Australian federal election of 2016. Given our assessment that an era of political cartooning is at an end, this it may well be the last of what is now comfortably the longest such series in cartoon scholarship focused on the election campaign cartoon.