Politics

People Are Slamming Scott Morrison Over His Ignorant Comments About Slavery

"WTF did he think the chains were for?"

by Rachael Conaghan  12 June 2020
scott morrison slavery

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Yesterday, Scott Morrison got on radio and tried to tell Australians, “there was no slavery in Australia”.

The problem, of course, is that there most definitely was — and he’s been rightly slammed for being so embarrassingly ignorant of a central part of Australia’s racist history.

Academics, historians, politicians — and anyone who’s ever bothered to pick up a history book — have spent the last 24 hours calling Morrison out, but one Aussie journalist has started a firestorm with a tweet in his defence.

People are not impressed that Morrison’s ignorance being pardoned.

The problem, as a lot of people are pointing out, is that he is the Prime Minister. Expecting the Prime Minister to understand the history of the country he leads should not be an extraordinary ask.

Making an excuse for it only leads to that kind of incompetence becoming acceptable, and allows misinformation to keep being spread.

The backlash has led to “he’s the prime minister” trending on Twitter — because really, that’s the only argument you need when trying to explain why the leader of our country should be more informed.

For decades Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were forced to work in Australia’s sugarcane, cotton, pearling and pastoral industries for little or no pay. They were often traded between colonisers and given basic rations instead of wages.

Australia was also responsible for trafficking more than 60,000 South Sea Islanders to Queensland and forcing them into indentured labour — a practice we now call “blackbirding”.

Even as late as the 70s Indigenous Australians had their wages stolen. Last year the Queensland government had to pay out $190 million to Indigenous workers who had their wages given to the state instead of them for decades.

Downplaying that history isn’t just insulting, it’s damaging.

The widespread use of this unpaid labour has massively contributed to the entrenched inequality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people — for the leader of our country to not have a basic understanding of the things that have contributed to this is concerning.

For him to lack the political drive to educate himself on that history is worse.

Scott Morrison has since apologised for his comments, explaining himself by saying when Australia was first colonised settlers did not want to have “lawful slavery”.

“There was not the laws that have ever proved to slavery in this country. So we don’t intend to get into the history laws, my comments were not intended to give offence and if they did a deeply regret that and apologise for that. This is not about getting into the history wars.”