Anyone who believes Kevin Rudd has changed will believe anything. So says the great cartoonist Bill Leak, unloading during the week at Gleebooks when launching Russ Radcliffe’s Dirt Files, a treasury of Australian political cartoons from John Howard’s demolition of Mark Latham in 2004 through to Julia Gillard’s growing debacle in 2012. The book went to press before Rudd’s resurrection and could not include, for example, Leak’s recent cartoon of Rudd declaiming: ‘There will be no broken promises under a government I promised never to lead.’ But there are a few gags from his earlier prime ministership, during which Leak created Rudd the self-obsessed Narcissus — an image for the ages.

Leak’s criticism of the times we live in goes beyond Rudd’s vacuity. At Gleebooks he also got stuck into the new humourless wowsers who target (anti-ALP) cartoonists at every turn. At the time of last year’s anti-business federal Budget, Leak did a front-page spoof of a Soviet poster in which Treasurer Swan waves a hammer-and-sickle flag. Some dullard complained to the Press Council, and, hard as it may be to believe, the Council spent several months considering this piddling complaint before dismissing it. Leak recalled an even sillier complaint that still rankles. Years ago he did a spoof of Delacroix’s famous bare-breasted, bare-footed Liberty (‘Marianne’) leading a revolutionary French mob over the bodies of the dead. Leak’s spoof showed a bare-breasted Cheryl Kernot waving an ALP flag as she leads an Australian mob over sundry Liberal corpses. A couple of enraged feminists, lesbians Leak says, denounced him as a sexist pig. It was the same with Premier Joan Kirner. If he drew her fat — as someone ‘who knew her way round the pie shop’ — the ‘sisterhood’ would flog him for sexism, but if he sketched her as svelte, they would condemn him as patronising. Cathy Wilcox, another cartoonist in the Gleebooks panel, offered the observation — surely ‘sexist’ — that women, more than men, resent being caricatured. That’s why she does not go in hard on women in politics. But Leak quoted Kudelka’s ruling that a cartoonist must be equally unfair to all politicians, whether men or women, whatever their party. He respects the irrepressible Amanda Vanstone, who always enjoyed his caricatures of her and rang him to laugh about them. Intelligent people, in his experience, have a sense of humour.

I have one small complaint about Dirt Files. Larry Pickering, one of Australia’s most famous cartoonists who does a daily cartoon on his blog, is not represented. When I asked why not, the editor Radcliffe said he does not find Pickering funny any more. He has become a propagandist for the Coalition. Lindsay Foyle, another panellist, thought Pickering had become obsessed with Julia Gillard. (She called him ‘a misogynist nut job’.) Leak agreed that he is too staunch an advocate for one side of politics, but ‘Larry often makes me laugh’. (He added: ‘I’m also at my best when I’m nasty.’) Is banning Pickering a case of censorship?

Imagine bringing together the director-general of ASIO with half a dozen of his predecessors to discuss in public their successes, failures and mistakes over the past 30 years in combating subversion, terrorism and murder. It’s not going to happen in Australia or in almost any country in the world. Except Israel. It happens in a new Israeli documentary, soon to be released in Australia. It is The Gatekeepers, the label given to six men who have headed Shin Bet, the Israeli ASIO, since about 1981. It will provoke huge controversy. Conservative friends of Israel will deplore the film’s coverage of assassinations, ‘collateral damage’ and horrendous mistakes (especially in not preventing the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a fanatical Israeli). The film made Melanie Phillips want to throw up. It presents Israel sinking into ‘a pit of moral infamy’. It will, she believes, help the terrorists. But liberals will also welcome these very same criticisms. The directors-general of Shin Bet belong broadly to what one might call the Anti-Terrorist Left. They want to kill terrorists before they kill you, but they also believe that Israel must give high priority to reconciliation with moderate Arabs and to a two-state solution. They are mostly critics of the Netanyahu government and the Likud party. Here are some of their comments: ‘We win every battle but lose the war.’ ‘Forget about morality. When terrorists are moral, we’ll be moral.’ ‘We’ve become cruel.’ ‘When you retire from the Service, you become a bit of a leftist.’

But liberals are not the only ones to welcome the film. The tough-minded Daniel Pipes strongly recommends it. He finds it useful and subtle. He concentrates on sub-themes which show Palestinians as mindless murderers and Shin Bet as bold and resolute. Pipes believes the answer to fanatical Islamists who aim to obliterate Israel is moderate Islam.

To the outside observer the film leaves one inescapable question unanswered or not even asked. Reconciliation with the Palestinians is obviously in Israelis’ interest. But how do you appease Arab terrorists who will settle for nothing less than the destruction of Israel? Shin Bet’s leaders insist Israelis must persevere, with tireless patience. As one put it: ‘Talk to everyone. That’s how you get to the bottom of things. I find out he doesn’t eat glass and he sees I don’t drink oil.’ The alternative is continual war. Forever. Yet when Israel withdrew from Gaza hoping to advance reconciliation, all it got in return were rocket wars. But whatever its limitations, The Gatekeepers is highly recommended — and not just as a model for ASIO.