More thoughts on that Tremain cartoon

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Otago Daily Times cartoonist Garrick Tremain has been hung out to dry – or as seems to be the preferred metaphor these days, thrown under a bus.

I get the impression that Tremain now accepts that his cartoon making light of the Samoan measles epidemic was grossly insensitive. But he’s hardly the only person culpable.

All newspaper cartoons are supposed to be vetted by senior editorial people and we can assume that process was followed in this case, in which case editorial heads should be rolling too, metaphorically speaking.

The paper not only failed to see how wrong the cartoon was but also misjudged the public reaction, thinking it could get away with a low-key apology on page 10. The editor, Barry Stewart, has since tried to make amends by facing protesters yesterday and publishing a second mea culpa on the front page today.

But it’s Tremain who’s being made to bear the primary responsibility. Stewart says the cartoonist has been stood down while the ODT conducts a “review”, which sounds like a damage control exercise aimed at mollifying protesters in the hope that it will all blow over.

A particularly ignoble aspect of the controversy is the spectacle of a fellow cartoonist putting the boot in. Jim Hubbard has drawn not one but two cartoons taking a whack at Tremain, which strikes me as contemptible.

Hubbard’s cartoons are often close to the bone too, though at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Tremain’s, and it’s not hard to envisage circumstances in which he too might be publicly pilloried, in which case I’m sure he would appreciate a bit of solidarity.

As an aside, I can’t help wondering whether the ODT's display of tone-deafness over the Tremain cartoon is a Dunedin thing. No offence to the ODT – a paper for which I have great respect – or to the residents of that estimable city, but Dunedin is a bit isolated from the cultural mainstream and possibly not quite in tune with how issues are viewed in other parts of the country. Could that explain the ODT’s spectacular lapse of judgment?

That Garrick Tremain cartoon

Cartoons can be a tricky issue for editors. It’s not enough that they should simply be funny, and indeed some of the best are not. To be truly effective, cartoons need an edge. They should be provocative.

Accordingly, editors need to cut cartoonists a lot of slack. They will sometimes publish cartoons they know some readers will find offensive, and that they may even find offensive themselves.

The Media Council, formerly the Press Council, takes a liberal view of cartoons (by which I mean liberal in the classical rather than the lame, woke sense) and so do the courts. When Labour MP Louisa Wall took the Otago Daily Times to court over two Al Nisbet cartoons which she considered racist, Justice Matthew Muir agreed that they were insulting but held that they didn’t breach the Human Rights Act.

Whatever you thought of the cartoons, the decision could only be seen as a victory for free speech and a defence of the right to upset people. Regardless of their ideological persuasions, cartoonists would very soon be extinct as a species if they were denied that right.

Having said all that, sometimes a paper publishes a cartoon that seems to strike a sour note with almost everyone. The Garrick Tremain cartoon published this week by the aforementioned ODT was such a cartoon.

It lamely attempted to make humour of the measles epidemic in Samoa. But the deaths of 55 children are no one’s idea of a joke and the cartoonist couldn’t even claim to be making a point. Both the editor of the paper and Tremain himself admit it was a bad lapse of judgment. Tremain says it was a limp joke but he can’t wind the clock back.

Will that satisfy the vigilantes crying out for utu? Not a chance. They won’t rest until they have someone’s head on a platter.

The ODT’s apology, they say, is not enough. It never is. Among other things, they want the paper’s staff to undergo racism training. But where does race enter into it? The cartoon would have been offensive regardless of the ethnicity of the measles victims.

Auckland University of Technology journalism lecturer Richard Pamatatau has joined the pile-on, saying the ODT has a history of publishing racist cartoons and Tremain should be dumped. I wonder, am I the only one troubled by the irony of a journalism lecturer calling for someone to be silenced?

Pamatatau says Tremain’s cartoons are not what cartoons are supposed to be, but he’s no more entitled to present himself as the arbiter of what cartoons should say than I am.

Bottom line: being offended from time to time is the price we pay for freedom of speech, a quid-pro-quo that most people in a liberal democracy are happy to accept.

I would certainly far prefer to go on being offended – as I often am by cartoonists – than concede to people like Pamatatau the right to determine what views I may be exposed to. Given a choice between bad taste and puritanical censorship, I’ll take the bad taste every time.

Free speech is fine, just as long as it doesn't upset anyone

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, June 5.)

What do a world-famous historian, a British author and a New Zealand cartoonist have in common?

On the face of it, not much – except that all three have been embroiled recently in controversies that show how fragile the right of free speech has become in supposedly liberal democracies.

Let’s start with the historian: Niall Ferguson, arguably the most distinguished contemporary British historian, and a man whose face is familiar internationally as a result of several television documentary series based on his books. 

In response to a question at a recent seminar in California, Ferguson referred to the fact that John Maynard Keynes, the British economist whose writing had a huge influence on 20^th century governments, was homosexual.

He went further, suggesting that Keynes’ economic philosophy was influenced by the fact that he was childless. According to one reporter’s notes, Ferguson implied this meant that Keynes was indifferent to the long-term effects of economic policies.

The historian’s off-the-cuff comments sparked a storm of indignation. One overwrought commentator, journalist Tom Kostigen, wrote that it took gay-bashing to new heights. “Anyone with a moral conscience should be outraged,” Kostigen spluttered.

What Ferguson said about Keynes wasn’t new. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, in his obituary of Keynes, had made an explicit link between Keynes’ childlessness and his “short-run” philosophy of life. Other scholars have suggested that Keynes’ famously fatalistic remark, “In the long run we are all dead”, was influenced by the fact that he had no offspring to be concerned about.

But it seems we have become a much more touchy society. Certain ideas are no longer allowed to be expressed. The uproar over Ferguson’s remark was such that he felt compelled to apologise and retract.

No doubt he had his reasons for doing so. However it’s hard to escape the impression that more and more often, public figures who have made controversial statements feel forced to back down not because what they said was indefensible, but because their wrathful critics promise to make their life intolerable unless they do.

A man as scholarly and experienced as Ferguson is unlikely to be in the habit of blurting out silly remarks without any forethought. He would have studied Keynes’ life and formed certain conclusions about him. So you have to wonder whether he was intimidated into backing down despite genuinely believing what he had said.

Even if his theory about Keynes is pure speculation and possibly erroneous, so what? People are entitled in a free society to get things wrong.

Academics float theories all the time. Some are wacky and die a natural death, while others extend the boundaries of human understanding. If people were barred from expressing unpopular or unorthodox ideas, conventional wisdom would never be challenged and human thought would be at a standstill.

The worrying thing about the Ferguson controversy is that it adds to a growing body of evidence that certain subjects are off-limits. Ultra-sensitive minority groups – the gay lobby being one – are primed to react explosively to every imagined slight.

Anyone who opposes same-sex marriage risks being labelled a gay-basher, just as people espousing welfare reform are routinely condemned as beneficiary-bashers. If you question the politics of separatism, you’re a racist; if you criticise Israel, you’re an anti-Semite.

These are tactics designed to stifle legitimate debate and intimidate people into silence. Ferguson is simply the latest to learn that in today’s discrimination-obsessed society, you express an opinion at your peril.

Now let’s look at the case of British author David Goodhart, whose recent book The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Postwar Immigration has polarised reviewers.

Goodhart’s book argues that mass immigration is damaging to social democracy, erodes national solidarity and is not in the interests of the source countries, because it deprives them of some of their most dynamic people.

It’s a view that has not gone down well with some on the British left, who consider it an obligation of the prosperous West to throw open its doors to people from less advantaged countries, even when some of those immigrants violently turn against their host society.

The director of Britain’s leading literary festival, the Hay festival, was so affronted by Goodhart’s book that he refused to invite him to appear. Effectively, Goodhart was barred. The director, Peter Florence, arbitrarily pronounced that his book wasn’t very good.

So much for free speech, then. Having hijacked the once honourable word “liberal”, which my Oxford Dictionary variously defines as “directed to general broadening of the mind” and “generous or open-minded”, the so-called liberal left has once again demonstrated that it’s capable of being breathtakingly illiberal.

Mr Florence didn’t want his rigid world view challenged. Neither did he want festival-goers exposed to dangerous alternative opinions. I wonder if it has occurred to him that it’s only a short step from barring authors to burning books, as the Nazis did.

A former Labour cabinet minister, Lord Adonis, was appalled. “How about some free speech at the Hay festival?” he tweeted.

For the third instance of free speech coming under attack, we can look a lot closer to home. Al Nisbet’s two newspaper cartoons on the subject of free school breakfasts brought out the enemies of free speech in droves.

Remarkably, his critics included journalists, which shows how far the rot has set in. When the people who have the most to lose from the suppression of free speech are calling for someone to be silenced, we’re in deep trouble.

For the record, I thought they were crude cartoons; but the issue was not whether they were good cartoons, still less whether they were funny. The issue was whether freedom of speech includes the right to give offence, and it has long been recognised in liberal democracies that it does, and must. Even conservative judges have repeatedly upheld that principle.

There is an insidious double standard at play here, and it was typified by the stance of the activist John Minto, who complained about the cartoon to the Human Rights Commission.

Mr Minto’s own views upset and offend a lot of New Zealanders, but to my knowledge no one argues that he should be punished or silenced. Yet he seeks to deny others the right that he enjoys himself – and I suspect that he’s incapable of seeing the contradiction.