I read it as a statement that the problems faced by remote aboriginal communities are structural and obey institutional inertia; that they are hard problems.

We have a history of well-intentioned reformers coming in and making everything much worse: the stolen generation, the NTER, laws against alcohol consumption that cause even more destructive patterns of behaviour, etc. I've known men and women who trained as police, and went off to the NT rosy-cheeked idealists. All came back either depressed or outright racist. It's a hard problem.

Abusive parents create abused children, who grow up to be abusive parents themselves; the same is true of poverty. Abuse and poverty are grinding cycles that are very hard to disrupt. How do you teach a boy who's never met his father about the importance of being there for his own sons and daughters? How do you talk about the cycle without blaming or objectivising the human beings trapped within?

But then, maybe Bill Leak was just plain old racist, and I read a pattern in the noise.

Thanks, what an intriguing level of detail to draw from the cartoon, I have to admit I never read even the slightest amount of that from it.

To me the cartoon is staggeringly racist. Clearly, deliberately, outrageously racist. And I am deliberate in my use of the words "deliberate" and "outrageous" because personally I believe in Australia that the proprietor of this particular newspaper makes his money by manufacturing outrage.

To me the cartoon is as racist as the day is long, it's as racist as it is blunt. There's no finesse. There's no guile. There's no dog-whistle or wink to the unspoken. It's a full frontal racist scaling of the ramparts. Which is why I find your comment so intriguing, because you clearly hold a detailed opinion, well communicated, of many different facets you have drawn from the content and how they relate back to social issues in the Northern Territory and yet none of what confronts me occurs to you.

So can I ask you. If I were the proprietor of a newspaper that liked this cartoon but needed it to actually be racist. What would you change? Could you change anything to make this cartoon racist? Or is it not possible. Perhaps we just disagree on what racism is.

Personally, I can't think of a single thing that I could change to increase the amount of racism it expresses. I'm interested to hear your opinion.

The reality of life in Australia is that, if you are Aboriginal, you are vastly more likely to be abused as a child, you will die on average a decade earlier than the rest of the country, and as far as anyone can tell, much the same will be true for your children - life could be a little better for them, because the gaps seem to be narrowing, but they aren't narrowing fast enough to reach parity before those children reach adulthood. This is an uncomfortable truth for most Australians to hear, but at least it's talked about. What isn't widely talked about, and what is even more uncomfortable to a lot of people, is that poverty/abuse/anti-social behaviour can be passed down to kids by parents, and that this is why they are cycles.

It's hard to draw a line between pointing out uncomfortable truths in an effort to help, which I consider the role of a political cartoonist, and just slandering the Aboriginal people, which I consider racism. I give Bill Leak the benefit of the doubt because the policeman is Aboriginal. If the policeman was white, I would see the cartoon as blatantly racist, but I believe Leak deliberately made the policeman Aboriginal to contrast the two men: the successful policeman futilely trying to pull a kid out of a downwards spiral, the alcoholic absentee father unable to help, and the son who's already begun to inherit the problems of his father and might one day be in his father's position.

Even if I've read the cartoon correctly, I don't think it was very good, since it clearly failed to communicate its message. What I think of when I see it, though, is one of the Koori kids I went to primary school with, who we'll call Eli. Eli's father was jailed for drug trafficking when we were young, and didn't come back to Eli's mother when he got out. Eli himself grew up to be jailed when he was in his early twenties, after an assault related to drug trafficking, and Eli has a kid on the outside just like his dad did. Racist or not, effective or not, the cartoon accurately shows the process by which Eli ended up in jail.

I find it interesting that you choose to go into fine detail, again, about the facts of life and social problems in the Northern Territory as you understand them and to share your own personal anecdotes, as if these have some impact on the cartoon been grotesquely racist (or not).

Please understand that even as a johnny-foreigner I'm perfectly well aware of the state of affairs in the NT. You'll note that your not the only Australian that reacts to this cartoon by earnestly explaining their understanding of the social problems of indigenous communities (though the other responding to me is also perfectly comfortable stating the cartoon is racist, but strangely chooses to respond to me, rather than any of the comments claiming the cartoon is not racist, go figure).

I'll posit that everything you mention, to some degree, is common knowledge in Australia. I don't accept that Bill Leak was genuinely trying to play an informative role here. We are also plainly ignoring the fact that this cartoon came in response to reports of aboriginal children being tear-gassed in Don Dale, so it's obviously an attempt to re-apportion blame, no?

If you'll humour me one more time. Imagine that the police-officer is out of frame, just a hand. Can you suggest anything that would make the cartoon of the two remaining aboriginal men racist? Let me help you, perhaps you could exaggerate some physical features, or include some negative stereotype? Has the author missed anything? What would you add to change their representation to be a racist one? It's fascinating that your only suggestion to turn the original cartoon from "not racist" to "blatantly racist" is the ethnicity of one character. Is it true (and it's hard I guess not to deliver this without the tone of an insult, so apologies) that you're perfectly aware that the caricature of the two remaining characters is deeply, deeply racist, it's just that you're comfortable with all the stereotypes they contain? It is racist, but it's ok, in short.

In case you're considering explaining further fine details about aboriginal life, let's say the cartoon was of three greedy hook-nosed sinister jew bankers. I've put literally every trope in I can, exaggerated every physical characteristic, every negative stereotype. Would that cartoon become not-racist because there's some element of truth the idea that Jewish people are a merchant class? And would your time be spent well explaining that to me in fine detail?

Thanks again for the conversation, this has been a fine example in my experience of discussing racial issues with Australians.

In the case of Jewish stereotypes, consider two fictional cartoonists in 1938. One is in Nazi Germany, and uses the most stereotypical Jewish caricature possible sitting on a train next to a pile of gold bars, to justify confiscating the possessions of Jewish emigrants. The other is in Britain, and uses the exact same stereotypes and the exact same caricature of a Jewish man, this time standing in front of a locked door and menaced by a dog with Hitler's face, to shame the British government over its pitiful intake of refugees. The first is an attack on the Jewish people. The second is an attempt to help them, and I believe a cartoonist would be justified in having drawn it.

Which role did Bill Leak try to play? I believe he bungled an attempt to get the rest of Australia to talk about and fix a problem, but I'm open to the idea that he may have been throwing bigotry around blindly, or trying to shift blame with no intention of doing any good.

I appreciate the contrast you are drawing with that comparison, it's a clever one.

It seems that we agree that, in isolation, the caricature of two bare-footed, slack-jawed, slovenly, drunk, ignorant, impoverished indigenous Australians is racist. At least neither of us can think of anything we would add to exacerbate it.

In my example of the hook-nosed Jew, the Jew is the hate-figure. In your counter-example Hitler is the hate figure.

Who is the hate figure in this cartoon? The racist generalisation of the indigenous man. Surely that's problematic?

You're aware that the cartoon was posted in a paper that has history of writing articles titled "Blacks find ways to get high", the cartoonist has a library of similar content where the hate-figure is indigenous, and that this particular cartoon was aimed (and succeeded comfortably) to shift attention from the case of indigenous children being tear gassed.

I'm comfortable that it is racist dross, I'm hoping that I've managed to at least raise that thought with you in a compelling way.

Thank you for so eloquently making that point. That is also how I interpreted the cartoon.

I have no idea how we can help Aboriginal Australians break out of this spiral. I truly hope we can find a way.

Satire would suggest humour? Like you I've read all sorts of discussion of the cartoon, not once have I heard it described as funny. Perhaps I'm reading the wrong articles. What is satire that is not funny, crap satire?

I was familiar with the affairs of the week, I just didn't read the precision of the OP because I don't think the cartoon was clever. As noted, I thought it was deliberately provocative, outrageous, and deeply, deeply racist.

I find the Australian commentariat interesting:

> So I guess the cartoon was a failure; it used racist, racial stereotypes and no positive outcome came from it.

We agree, the cartoon is racist. So why all the circumlocution around the central point? Is it because it raises uncomfortable questions about Australian culture? Is it really appropriate for your Prime Minister to, of his own volition, choose to exalt a cartoon that includes racist, racial stereotypes?

I expect the OP is a reasonable person, and I suspect I won't ever receive a response to "How would you make that cartoon racist?", because literally every ham-fisted racist trope has already been applied. There's nothing subtle about it.

I'll posit this. That cartoon would never have been printed in The Times of London, The New York Times, or The New Zealand Herald. If it had been we wouldn't collectively expend one iota of the discussion required in Australia to ascertain that, yes, it is racist. It's not really a question that requires much inspection, but here we are.

I'll accept our British, Kiwi, and American friends if they choose to contradict me on that.

And yes, the NBN is a disaster. We're in agreement again.

You realize that you are implying that any negative cartoon with a black person in it is automatically racism.

That's why flukus said "it's your own bias that makes you think it is". If you weren't biased you would just see people being criticized.

> You realize that you are implying that any negative cartoon with a black person in it is automatically racism.

No. If this was a comic strip telling a story about a deadbeat father who happened to be black, that would be one thing. But it's a political cartoon. The entire point of the medium is to make broad points using clearly-understood imagery. If a political cartoonist draws a caricature of a black man (big red lips and all), it's either representing a specific public figure, or black people in general (aboriginals, in this case).

So unless you're arguing that the father is a caricature of a specific person who was in the news at the time, there is no way it's not supposed to represent all aboriginals.

It's about remote aboriginal communities that have problems like this, not aborigines as a whole. Note that the cop is also an aborignal he's probably the type that is fed up with dealing with this shit.

I'd say the people that think it's racist are the racist ones, all they see is the skin color. They'd think it was a funny joke (or at least be indifferent) about rednecks of the characters were white, but lost their shit when the person is black.

For context, the two biggest issues are alcoholism and especially remoteness. Imagine a poor black community in the US just after segregation ended and then imagine that they were 300Km from the nearest corner store (or maybe this is a problem in the US?). Our welfare system could probably eliminate a lot of the problems in a generation or two in cities but it doesn't make much difference in remote communities.

Thanks for sharing your opinion.

The earnest responses you've received are fairly representative of commonly expressed opinions in Australia. I don't believe it's the majority view, but certainly at large minority at least - including the Prime Minister it appears.

The further context is that cartoon was printed in The Australian, which is basically a Murdoch tabloid but masquerades as the paper of note in Australia. The cartoon in particular was drawn in response to a "Four Corners" (TV) report on the treatment/abuse of children at the Northern Territory's Don Dale detention centre, many of whom were Indigenous.