by Mark Steyn
Ave atque vale
Bill Leak, the great cartoonist of The Australian, died of a heart attack in the early hours of Friday morning. He was 61.
Like Andrew Bolt, I feel not only terrible sadness at his premature death, but also anger and resentment. Bill Leak was not gunned down at his office, like the writers and artists of Charlie Hebdo, nor did a murderous Somali axman break into his home, as happened to Kurt Westergaard, one of the Danish Mohammed cartoonists, nor did he have his last public appearance shot up by a killer jihadist, as did the Swedish artist Lars Vilks. But, as much as any of those, Bill was a target of what he called (at right) “the Cartoonists Hit List” and the wider war on free expression that has rampaged across the west this last decade.
Last October, he woke up to find that, after a cartoon arising from a then current controversy on Aboriginal policy, he was to be investigated by the Australian state’s thought-police. Indeed, the government’s Race Discrimination Commissar, Tim Soutphommasane, was so anxious to haul Leak up on a charge of “racial stereotyping” that he was advertising for plaintiffs:
He urged anyone who was offended by it to lodge a complaint under the Racial Discrimination Act.
As Bill’s mate Tim Blair observed:
This is extraordinary. The Human Rights Commission is now preparing to sit in judgment in a case clearly already decided by one of the HRC’s most senior officials. As Homer Simpson once asked: ‘Who made you Judge Judy and executioner?’
In the way of sleazy apparatchiks everywhere, Commissar Soutphommasane insisted that his verdict-first-trial-afterwards approach was all part of the vigorous public debate of a healthy democracy:
Cartoons will be subject to all matter of public debate. It’s a healthy part of our democracy that we have that debate.
To which I responded:
Sorry. A legal action is not a “debate”. Mr Leak is being “subject to” not debate but state thought-policing – because ideological enforcers like Soutphommasane find debate too tiresome and its results too unpredictable. Which is why he gets a third of a million a year from Australian taxpayers to prevent debate.
Continue reading “That’s Not How We Do Things in Australia” Bill Leak, 1956-2017






















