Fiona Katauskas

Fiona Katauskas uses political cartoons and sharp, accessible commentary to pick apart how political decisions are made and felt, focusing on the drama of policy and power rather than straight news reporting.

Political cartoons as a lens on power

Katauskas is a political cartoonist and illustrator whose work appears regularly in The Guardian, where she provides an editorial cartoon take on the week’s politics. She has been cartooning since the late 1990s, with her work published across major newspapers and magazines, which gives her coverage a long view on recurring political characters and themes. Her Guardian pieces typically combine a central cartoon with a short written frame, using humour, caricature and visual metaphors to show who holds power, who is affected, and where rhetoric diverges from reality.

She often structures her coverage around a specific political moment or debate, then uses the cartoon to highlight the contradiction or unintended consequence at its core. In work examining Anthony Albanese’s challenge of navigating a perilous road to reform, she frames the government’s agenda as a precarious journey, emphasising competing pressures, internal party dynamics and public expectations around change. Her cartoons favour strong, emblematic images over detailed policy exposition, making complex political manoeuvres legible through recognisable figures, symbols and set pieces.

Australian policy debates and national values

A recurring focus of Katauskas’s work is how large policy shifts reveal underlying national values, particularly around welfare, inclusion and civic responsibility. In her Guardian commentary on cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, she explores what the reductions and tightened eligibility criteria say about attitudes to people with disability and the broader social contract, foregrounding the everyday impact of technocratic decisions. Her cartooning in this space often contrasts bureaucratic language with the lived reality of those affected, using satire to expose the gap between political messaging and outcomes.

Outside The Guardian, her cartoons and commentary for outlets such as Eureka Street have returned repeatedly to Australian electoral politics and constitutional debates. Pieces including “Voice to Parliament,” “The home stretch,” “The life of the party” and “For Pete’s sake” track campaign dynamics, party leadership and referendum debates, with an emphasis on how these contests are experienced by ordinary voters rather than just political insiders. Across these works, she treats policy questions as moral and cultural ones, asking what choices on issues such as Indigenous representation or social spending reveal about a community’s priorities.

Global populism and political spectacle

Katauskas also spends significant time on global politics, especially the theatre of populist leaders and the way spectacle shapes public understanding. In her work on Donald Trump, including pieces on the “Mar-a-Lago face” and Trump taking over America’s 250th celebration, she uses exaggerated portraiture and humour to capture the performative nature of his politics and the blend of entertainment and power that defines his public persona.

These cartoons often place Trump within grand, almost absurd settings, underlining the surreal quality of his influence and the way it dominates political coverage.

Her cartoons revisiting episodes from Trump’s election through to campus protests over the war in Gaza show an interest in the continuity of political spectacle across different crises, and in how images and protest movements reverberate internationally. She frequently draws on popular culture, awards shows and mass media imagery to reflect back the state of politics, as in her piece asking which Oscar-winning movie best reflects our reality, where film references become shorthand for complex political moods. This strand of her work positions politics as something lived through screens and stories, not only through parliamentary chambers.

Culture, technology and everyday political life

Beyond formal politics, Katauskas covers how technology, culture and institutions shape people’s experience of power. In her commentary on the “AI backlash,” she engages with concerns about automation and the ways artificial intelligence is deployed to replace human judgement, treating the issue as a political question about control and accountability rather than a purely technical debate. Her interest in the intersection of technology and oversight reflects a broader pattern in her work: she often looks at how systems designed to manage or explain complex issues end up distancing decision-makers from the communities they serve.

Her writing and illustration in other outlets include narrative work on sex education controversies, where she examines how schools, governments and publishers communicate about sensitive subjects to children and families. As an author and satirist, she brings the same direct, uncluttered style to these cultural topics, using humour to make charged debates approachable without softening their stakes.

Across politics, policy, global events and everyday institutions, her body of work is distinguished by its reliance on visual satire and concise commentary to translate abstract issues into clear, human stories.