Australia on verge of combusting: Leunig

Michael Leunig is more worried than usual at the moment.

He believes his role as an artist and a satirical cartoonist is to reflect what he sees in the community, and he believes something in the Australian social fabric is about to combust.

"The nature of my work is to get to the heart and the soul and the psyche of us all," he said, speaking to AAP at the Sydney Writers' Festival on Friday.

"So I'm simply doing what the poets, the bards and the artists have always done. You speak, you express what is repressed. I'm trying to get to the understory.

"There's a perception there's been a growth of corruption, on both sides of politics, and there's a sense that democracy is not effective, that people are not represented."

He said it's not just an Australian problem, but Australia was particularly vulnerable to it right now.

"The culture is always changing, but at the moment something is being degraded or lost and there's a great sense of exclusion because of artificially constructed cultural wars," Leunig said.

It shows in politicians' attitude to the environment, to asylum seekers and even the way we build our cities, he said.

"Australia had a sense of its own decency or at least tried to speak of it and that friendliness, keenness to embrace those less fortunate, the Good Samaritan has gone and people are really disturbed when they see this value just being flagrantly abused and neglected; the ethical, moral and emotional idea that we look after each other.

"We have become more racist than ever. We got rid of the old racism and now we've adopted a new one. And when we push the other out we're pushing part of ourselves away."

Leunig believes the Abbott government's budget delivered last week will be the catalyst for unprecedented social change.

"A lot of people looked upon the coming of the Abbott government with dread and doom and gloom. And I said, 'Yes, but let us be brave and accept what is inevitable'. But it's going to be a catalyst for something of which we know not what at the moment.

"I think this budget is a flashpoint for something that has been building for a long time in the spiritual and philosophical sense of the nation; there's a sense it's the last straw.

"Whether it's the last straw or not, it feels as if some sort of critical point has been crossed and people have put up with a lot for a long time. They have a sense of losing their participation in the political process.

"There seems to be a coldness in politics now."

"I'm starting to observe in a younger generation and in the very old a common resistance to and a revulsion about the heartless quality of politics, the pugilistic quality that Tony Abbott would seem to represent, this desire to take people on, to punch the wall behind their head and to intimidate.

"There's a sense of punishment and this is how people are feeling it. And we have to watch out for breaking the spirit of a people.

"It's too narrow, too hard, too heartless."

"When we push our neighbours away, we're pushing all of our fellow community and the community dies a bit when you start hurting the world community. I think it rebounds on us, so the temperature of our nation is dropping.

"But the redemption lies in the people, ultimately, and how that's going to play out I really do not know. Something is either forming or something is dying and I'm not sure which it is.