NSW Politicians cynically create media storm

From the department of look at the evil painting:

The Premier and the Prime Minister are again appalled, but a young girl photographed nude by her mother says the image, on the cover of the latest Arts Monthly Australia, is her favourite.

In the latest row over the depiction of nude children, Morris Iemma and the state Opposition Leader, Barry O'Farrell, are so offended by the nude pictures of a young girl they want the magazine that published them stripped of federal funding. Kevin Rudd said he could not stand them.

But the girl says the picture is her favourite image and still hangs in the house.

"She just enjoys it. It's acting. She just loves it," said the 11-year-old girl's father, Robert Nelson. "Poli [Polixeni Papapetrou, the girl's mother] wrote a doctoral thesis on this. It's a highly researched body of work."

The images, part of a practice in which Papapetrou works with her daughter, were reproduced in an edition of the magazine that explores the storm over the Bill Henson photographs that were to be shown in Sydney in May.

Here is the offending painting:

That picture is NOT a form of paedophilic pornography. It's just a painting of a kid at the beach. It has nothing remotely to do with the Bill Henson photographs. The state government, so embroiled in other more worthy scandals, has basically created this media storm to deflect people's attention from them to the dirty paedophile elitist artistic community.

If that painting is pornographic, then this album cover is as well:

Time to burn our Led Zeppelin albums... 35 years after they came out onto the shelf.

Update:
The 1st picture above was sourced from The Sydney Morning Herald. It is different to the one that is actually on the front cover of the magazine. Here is the original:

So it's a picture of a child on a painted background, rather than a painting. Nevertheless there is nothing terribly offensive about this picture.