A cartoonist’s fine line

One of the persistent curiosities of Tony Abbott’s time as Opposition leader and Prime Minister was the ridicule he attracted for his little red Speedos. As he is a volunteer surf lifesaver who wears the mandated uniform of a volunteer surf lifesaver, a reasonable person might conclude that Abbott has no say in the selection of his unfashionable beach wardrobe and that, on the whole, the unpaid public service he renders in keeping swimmers safe from harm might be worth a kind word or two.

But there was none of that. Instead, as countless cartoons established, a certain kind of newsroom habitué regards red Speedos as objects of immense mirth in themselves.  Take the cartoon above, for example, which is a typical attempt at humour by Fairfax’s exquisitely hip and excruciatingly unfunny Cathy Wilcox, who it must be conceded labours under a distinct disadvantage. When your editor, Darren Goodsir, has been found by the courts to have acted with malice and yet remains un-sacked, and your deputy-editor, Ben Cubby, is a warmists’ tool, how can a mere doodler sustain the hope that her half-measures of wit will ever inspire more giggles than the antics of the caricatures who are her bosses?

Abbott is now gone from the PM’s office, but Wilcox need not fret at the challenge of original thought and the prospect of finding fresh and original subjects, as it turns out that Malcolm Turnbull is another devotee of red Speedos. That’s him in the picture below, taken when he was the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources under John Howard. Unlike Abbott, his replacement’s choice in bathing attire was entirely his own, so we should expect Wilcox to continue emptying her hipster’s scorn on this latest prime ministerial example of the terminally un-cool.

If Wilcox requires further encouragement to give Turnbull a pasting, all she need do is remind herself that, just like Abbott, the PM is also a Catholic. Follow the link below to an earlier post on Wilcox’s apparent belief that, even after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, it is the Vatican, rather than Islam, which represents the very essence of toxic intolerance.

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