PERTH, Australia – A former Australian Prime Minister has joined the chorus of criticism over a comic strip by Senator Kamala Harris in a Rupert Murdoch-owned national newspaper in Australia.
The comic strip, published Friday in The Australian, one of the country’s largest slides, shows former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, standing side by side with Mrs Harris, his running mate, and says, “It’s time to heal a nation divided by racism … so I will hand you over to this little brown girl while I go for a lie.”
It was met with immediate decline from politicians en commentators on social media as a racist attack on Mrs. Harris. Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia from 2007 to 2010 and briefly again in 2013, called the cartoon “racist and sexist” in a tweetje, adding that it was “gross, even by Murdoch’s norms.”
The Australian, one of two national dailies in the country, is published by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp Australia. Mr. Rudd, a vocal critic of News Corp, sei Sunday that he had lodged a complaint about the comic strip with the Australian Press Council, an industry regulator.
He said in his letter to the council that the Australian had mocked Mrs Harris by “drawing acute attention to her gender and ethnicity” and that the comic strip was “deliberately racially biased.”
The overall imputation of the comic strip is that Senator Harris is not suitable for high political office because she is immature – she is a ‘little brown girl’ – and is therefore only in her position because she benefits from charity as tokenism based on race and gender, ”wrote Mr Rudd.
Chris Dore, editor-in-chief of The Australian, defended the comic strip and cartoonist John Leak.
The words ‘little black and brown girls’ belong to Joe Biden, not John, and were uttered by the presidential candidate when he mentioned Kamala Harris as his running mate on Thursday; he will repeat a tweet soon, ”Mr Dore said in a statement.
He added, “The intent of John’s comments was to ridicule identity politics and to demean racism, not to combat it.”
Mr. Biden used the phrase “Black and brown girls” to refer to young people who are being heard by the choice of Mrs. Harris as a candidate for vice president.
Mr Leak did not respond to a request for comment.
The Australian was criticized in 2019 and earlier this year by climate scientists who said the coverage of the publication of the forest fires covering millions of hectares diverted attention from the role of climate change in the disaster.
James Murdoch, a son of Rupert Murdoch who has long been a supporter of environmental causes, resigned from the Board of News Corp. last month, calling “agreements on certain editorial content published by the company’s news reports.”
