Dear Sussan Ley - Australia deserves an(other) apology
Deputy Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s imbecilic Australia Day speech was more evidence that the coalition is planning a fact free, say anything, Trumpesque election campaign in 2025.
Sussan Ley’s imbecilic Australia Day speech was more evidence that the coalition is planning a fact free, say anything, Trumpesque election campaign in 2025.
The Deputy Opposition Leader's likening of British colonisation to Elon Musk’s Mars fantasy is an affront to both the colonised and the colonisers of Australia.
To imply our continent was unoccupied is an obvious slur and contemptuous of history and our First Peoples. You wouldn’t sanction such historical nonsense from an infant.
An apology to First Peoples, history and curious infants please Sussan.
I have read nothing of the penal colony’s founding in 1788, that would indicate Captain Arthur Phillip or any of his senior officers exhibited the anti-semitism or toxic megalomania of Elon Musk nor the ignorance of Sussan Ley. They deserve an apology too.
Ley's audacious affront to knowable, documented history would impress totalitarians from the old Soviet Union to China to Japan to Germany and anywhere looking to turn established, complex history into junk.
She said,
All those years ago those ships did not arrive, as some would have you believe, as invaders.
They did not come to destroy or to pillage.
In what could be compared to Elon Musk’s Space X’s efforts to build a new colony on Mars, men in boats arrived on the edge of the known world to embark on that new experiment.
A new experiment and a new society.
And just like astronauts arriving on Mars those first settlers would be confronted with a different and strange world, full of danger, adventure and potential.
Ley compares the arrival of invaders on Australia's shores in 1788 with Elon Musk's Mars fantasy
It's unfortunate that Ley would choose to embed Musk in an Australia Day address at this time. He has a history of anti-semitic tolerance on his platform X. Last week he dabbled in Nazi theatrics at the presidential inauguration.
While Ley was lionising the world's richest man on Australia's National Day, Musk was busy endorsing Germany's far-right AfD party - imploring them to move on from the "guilt" of the holocaust.
Ideally, Musk's industrial scale peddling of misinformation and hate on X would preclude him from glowing mentions in an Australia Day address by a senior Australian political figure. For many of us, he is the antithesis of everything good and decent about our country. He is hateful and extreme.
We should hope his strange hold on Dutton and Ley - perhaps channelled through Gina - will soon pass.