The Australian Financial Review is being scolded for running what some see as a racist cartoon advertisement.
The no campaign has been accused of using a “racist trope” in a newspaper ad which included a cartoon figure of an Indigenous voice campaigner appearing to dance for money.
Matt Kean, a New South Wales Liberal MP, lashed the Advance conservative lobby group for “a throwback to the Jim Crow era of the deep south”, saying the full-page ad in the Australian Financial Review had no place in Australian politics.
A controversial full-page advertisement printed in Thursday’s edition of the Australian Financial Review has sparked outrage and been labelled “grotesque” and “racist” as tensions continue to rise over the Voice to Parliament proposal.
The cartoon, paid for by right-wing group Advance Australia, depicts a towering Wesfarmers Chairman Michael Chaney dangling a $2 million stack of cash in front of Voice to Parliament architect Thomas Mayo, who appears to have been made to look like a little boy. Teal MP Kate Chaney can also be seen sitting on Mr Chaney’s lap, wearing a child-like dress and crown.
Advance Australia denied the cartoon was a stereotype or trope showing Indigenous Australians as childish or beggars.
‘We utterly reject the premise that this cartoon racist,’ a spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday.
‘It is a parody of the close relationship between Teal politicians, do-gooder corporate elites and the radical activists of the Yes campaign, such as Thomas Mayo.’
Efforts by The Daily Cartoonist to identify the cartoonist have failed.
On the other side of the world, in The Mother Country, The Independent is being taken to task for publishing a David Brown cartoon about the current Israel/West Bank conflict.
British newspaper The Independent has stirred controversy and condemnation from the United Kingdom’s Jewish community after it published a cartoon on Wednesday comparing the week’s IDF operation in Jenin to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Cartoonist Dave Brown, who drew the image, has previously come under fire for depicting Israel’s former prime minister Ariel Sharon as a deformed monster consuming Palestinian children, imagery closely associated with blood libel.
Caricature in Independent seeks ‘to deny Israel’s right to defend itself by casting a false equivalence between Ukrainians and armed Palestinian terrorists,’ says Jewish group