Thank You Michael Leunig For Your Cartoons On Vaccines, Freedom And Choice

This powerful image was published in the papers at the time Australia’s No Jab No Pay law, which withholds payments to parents of unvaccinated children, was passed into law, in 2015. It was a dark time for those of us in the know, and seeing this image had a profound effect on us.

All images courtesy of Michael Leunig. These cartoons are available on Leunig’s website.

[Sad update December 20, 2024: yesterday Michael Leunig passed away, in the early hours of the morning. The announcement is on his Instagram account.]

Michael Leunig–usually referred to as Leunig–is a cartoonist based in Victoria, Australia, and for many years he has been supplying cartoons to Australia’s two main broadsheet papers The Age (Melbourne) and The Sydney Morning Herald.

In Australia he has been much loved (mostly) and considered to be a “national treasure”.

Any good cartoonist is going to go out on a limb and ruffle some feathers now and then, and Leunig has done that with the issue of vaccines and the covid response.

A few months ago the papers let him know his cartoons were no longer wanted, so we are currently not seeing new cartoons; perhaps he will find other places to publish new political cartoons. Of course he does other types of art and writing, including cards, books, art prints and calendars; find them on his website.

This post has some cartoons you might like to see. Firstly see two more cartoons relevant to the laws that have been introduced to mandate childhood vaccines over the years, and then cartoons from the covid era.

This cartoon “Mothers” came out when the No Jab No Pay law was first announced, in April 2015.

The next one was published in the 1990s when the Federal government were in the process of bringing in mandatory vaccines for school attendance. The Australia Vaccination-risks Network (AVN) lobbied parliamentarians successfully and got a philosophical objection included.

Covid era

This image appeared in the week Victoria’s Premier announced all workers had to get the covid vaccine. It was a terrible time for us; we all had friends and family who were going off to get the vaccine, and we knew it was dangerous. The papers didn’t publish this one, we saw it in the Leunig Facebook group.