Pickering his targets 25/7/2012
Larry Pickering is skilfully and hilariously exposing many rotten matters connected to the federal government. Get on his mailing list – his cartoons alone are worth the effort. It’s worth noting that Australia’s best political cartoonists – Leak, Spooner and Pickering – have shuffled out of the Left Lockstep embraced by most of MSM’s Canberra commentators. Smart sketchers, they suspect there’ll be an editorial purge of biblical proportions through the Labor luvving Canberra press gallery when Abbott et al soar to power.
Pickering has always been right winger, albeit a doltish and incompetent one. His campaign as Liberal candidate for the seat of Canberra in 1974 was so clumsy and bad that many believed – unfairly – that he was an ALP agent provocateur. He was beaten by Kep Enderby that year, a significant inverted achievement!
Pickering may be on the right side politically, but as a satirical cartoonist, he’s never been anything more than a plodder. His draftsmanship is senile, his punchlines crass and he can’t actually draw any contemporary politician. I thought we’d heard the last of him in 1983 when it turned out that he couldn’t draw Bob Hawke.
And Spooner and Leak? Not to mention Pickering’s recent unrefuted allegations about this rotten plodding government?
The difference between Pickering on the one hand and Leak and Spooner – not to mention Pete Nicholson – on the other, is that the latter are actually clever and innovative draftsmen and satirists. I have no problem with Pickering’s politics, but as a cartoonist, he hasn’t had any ideas since 1974, and even then his style was out of the thirties and his humour out of the toilet.
To claim that an artist is good, as an artist, just because you like his politics is Stalinist.