Do we like Andy Griffiths?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A decent, kid-focused career with a national honour and no harmful words or acts found, but not much detail on his wider views.
Andy Griffiths is the bloke who made Australian kids giggle at bums, burps and bad ideas for three decades. He broke through in the 1990s with the Just! books, then became an international bestseller with the 13-Storey Treehouse in 2011. He has written 43 books and sold more than 20 million copies.
The Treehouse series grew out of a school visit where students shouted out ideas. One of them, a ninja snail training academy, helped spark it. He says every book has a contribution from a reader, which tells you how he works: he listens to the kids he writes for.
On the harm test, we found nothing. Searches on LGBTQ+ issues, women, vaccines, climate and politics turned up no harmful statements, campaigns or donations from him. We also found no sign of him working with people who push that stuff. That's a clean sheet, but it's partly a quiet one: he mostly keeps his politics out of the public record. Some low-quality sites mention edits to his books after feedback, but we couldn't verify any of it from a reliable source.
On the good-person test, no court cases or allegations against him turned up in the reporting we read. His partnership with Denton ran for over three decades, and when Denton died Griffiths wrote that working and playing with him had been an incredible honour and a pure delight. That reads like a mate who valued his collaborator, not a bloke who burns through them.
The recent news is a high point and a sad one. In February 2026 he was named the ninth Australian Children's Laureate, a two-year national ambassador role for reading. His theme is Reading is an Adventure, and he says he wants kids to see that reading takes courage. Then in September came the loss of Denton, whose drawings were half the Treehouse magic.
The good stuff is simple but real. He gets kids and families into books, which is the whole job of the Laureate role. He travels widely, speaking with children, families, educators and librarians in cities and regional areas. Not a sexy cause, but a lot of Australian kids first fell for reading through his silly stories.