Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has apologised for saying on Thursday that there was no slavery in Australia, after he was accused of ignoring the nation's history of forced labour.
“My comments were not intended to give offence and if they did, I deeply regret that, and apologise for that,” Morrison said on Friday, admitting that there have been “all sorts of hideous practices” in Australia.
He clarified that his Thursday comments were referring specifically to the first Australian colony of New South Wales, which was founded on the basis that there would be no lawful slavery. “And that was indeed the case, there was not the laws that have ever approved of slavery in this country,” he added.
With the Black Lives Matter movement coming into the spotlight again in the United States, so has anti-slavery sentiment worldwide. Protesters in the US have vandalised several statues linked to controversial personalities, especially Confederate monuments such as a statue of Robert E. Lee in Alabama.
Anti-racism demonstrators in Bristol, UK, last week tore down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston and rolled it into the harbour. A push has also emerged in Australia against statues of colonial figures, including a monument to Captain James Cook in Sydney and one to Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, on an Aboriginal burial site in Port Macquarie.
Speaking on a Sydney radio on Thursday, Scott Morrison argued against the idea and claimed that Australia’s record was better than that of other countries of the colonial era.
“Well, when you’re talking about Captain James Cook, in his time he was one of the most enlightened persons on these issues you could imagine,” he said. “While slave ships continued to travel around the world, when Australia was established, sure it was a pretty brutal settlement ... but there was no slavery in Australia.”
Critics, however, quickly pointed out that there’s plenty of historic evidence showing that Australia has quite a history of forced labour that was very close to slavery – from convict “assignments” to the kidnapping of Indigenous Australians to work for little to no money at all.
Scott Morrison: "There was no slavery in Australia"
— Solo Monk (@JJKALE2) June 10, 2020
What does he think the chains were for, PPE? #BlackLivesMatter #ScottyFromMarketing #Grub pic.twitter.com/BRLmVzsiAG
There are photos, taken between 1890 and the 1930s, of the mistreatment of Aboriginal people by white settlers, who shackled them by the neck and forced them to work on railways or at cattle and sheep properties.
"no slavery in Australia" ... https://t.co/g352aZ2zfphttps://t.co/SBhPUAbFF6
— Paul Syvret (@PSyvret) June 10, 2020
The exploitation of Aboriginal labour took place until the 1970s, with wages being paid not directly to them but to the state through special “Protection Acts”. Last year the Queensland government agreed to pay 10,000 Indigenous people a total of $190 million for wages unpaid between 1939 and 1972.
