Do we like Tom Scott?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing harmful or dodgy turned up, but the searches found little recent coverage, so a 6 is as far as the record lets us go.
Tom Scott is the New Zealand cartoonist who spent decades drawing the nation's politicians for the Wellington papers. A 1News profile called his cartoons the only part of the Dominion Post still drawn by hand. He's the sort of bloke prime ministers ring up to chat about how they've been drawn.
His most famous stoush was with Robert Muldoon, who banned him from his press conferences. Scott's take was that Muldoon couldn't bear being mocked by a redhead, and that he never liked press conferences anyway. The ban, he said, only made him more popular with the public.
The harm check came up clean. Searches on trans people, women, race, migrants and climate found no cartoon or statement of his that targets any of them. Scott's targets are politicians, and angry politicians are what he says delights his readers. Those same searches turned up complaints about individual cartoons over the years, but we could only open the 2021 ruling and a 2002 one, and neither matters here.
Recent work leans towards history and storytelling. He left the daily cartoon slot to write Searching for Charlie, a biography of war hero Charles Upham. A reviewer in the NZ Herald found it mixed: a readable portrait that adds little new, with some imagined scenes that Scott admits to. Nothing in it points anywhere harmful.
Nothing new on him lately, and no court cases or allegations turned up in our searches. We also couldn't find charity work to point to, so this is a thin file rather than a glowing one. A satirist who has punched at the powerful for this long, with a clean record, gets a comfortable pass.