Bill Leak

 ( 1956 Births ) 

In April 2006, Leak drew a cartoon captioned "No Offence Intended", depicting an Indonesian person resembling then president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, as a dog mounting a Papuan native. The drawing was in retaliation to a cartoon in the Jakarta daily Rakyat Merdeka from the previous week, which had depicted the Australian prime minister and foreign minister as dingoes engaged in sexual intercourse, with the prime minister saying "I want Papua!! Alex! Try to make it happen!" The foreign minister, Alexander Downer, told media that he felt Leak's cartoon was crude, offensive and potentially racist.

In 2007, a Belgian company that controlled the rights to the cartoon character Tintin, issued Leak a copyright complaint for portraying the then-leader of the opposition, Kevin Rudd, as Tintin (accompanied by Snowy). The complaint was resolved when Leak agreed not to profit from sales of the cartoons.

A Leak cartoon published in The Australian in December 2015 depicted starving Indian villagers trying to eat solar panels delivered by the UN, a comment by Leak on the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference. The academic Amanda Wise, an associate professor of sociology at Macquarie University, told media that it was her view that the cartoon was racist. Social media commentary, including by Tim Watts, agreed with Wise and condemned the cartoon. The Australian Press Council dismissed a complaint about the cartoon, saying that "the cartoon is an example of drawing on exaggeration and absurdity to make its point" "by ridiculing the decision to provide solar panels at the expense of more appropriate aid". The Australian Press Council delivered a ruling on the work in November 2016 that it did not breach standards of practice.

In August 2016, on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children's Day, a Leak cartoon in The Australian depicted an Aboriginal policeman holding a teenage male and telling the youth's father that he needed to teach his son about personal responsibility. The father, with a can of beer in hand, replies "Yeah, righto, What's his name then?" Muriel Bamblett, head of the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, as well as Roy Ah-See, chair of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, and Nigel Scullion, the minister for Indigenous affairs, all labeled the cartoon racist. Western Australian Police Commissioner Karl O'Callaghan and academic Jeremy Sammut defended Leak's 2016 cartoon, saying it was an appropriate portrayal of some communities and families. Leak said the cartoon was not racist, reflecting that if the characters he had drawn were white, he would not have been accused of racially stereotyping all white parents as bad parents. A complaint by a woman who said she had been discriminated against as a result of the cartoon triggered an investigation into Leak and The Australian by the Australian Human Rights Commission. The complaint was later withdrawn after the woman behind the complaint was subjected to alleged intimidation and harassment from Leak's employers at News Limited. The investigation was thus terminated. Five years later, academic Anthony Dillon wrote that he and his father Col Dillon, Australia's first Aboriginal police officer, did not regard the cartoon racist at the time, and pointed out that "child abuse and neglect in the Aboriginal population" were still prevalent and that Leak was deeply concerned about those issues.

On 21 September 2016, during a nationwide debate about legalising same-sex marriage (SSM), The Australian published a Leak cartoon depicting a club-carrying, platoon, wearing rainbow-coloured NAZI SS uniforms, captioned "Waffen-SSM", which provoked significant controversy. Comedian Ben McLeay criticized Leak's cartoon, writing that it was harmful and morally repugnant. Peter Wertheim, Executive Council of Australian Jewry executive director, said that the cartoon was an inversion of history.