The Festival and a major bank review their advertising with The Australian following Leak’s cartoon, widely criticised as racist.

The Adelaide Festival has described Bill Leak’s Indigenous cartoon in The Australian on August 4 as “disgraceful” and is reviewing its future advertising with the newspaper. SunCorp Bank has also said that it has temporarily suspended any future advertising.

The cartoon, which has also been criticised by the Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion, The Greens, Greenpeace Australia and the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, among others, showed an Aboriginal man with a beer unable to remember the name of his son, who has been collared by a policeman.

^{Bill Leak cartoon published in The Australian on August 4}

In a statement on Facebook, the Adelaide Festival said that its advertisements in The Australian on August 5 and 6 announcing Barrie Kosky’s production of Saul as the centrepiece of the 2017 Festival had been booked “well in advance of Bill Leak’s disgraceful cartoon”.

“The Adelaide Festival does not endorse the sentiments of Bill Leak’s cartoon. The Festival deplores all forms of racism and editorial commentary that vilifies Australia’s First Nations people: it betrays the complex...