Speaking at an international business breakfast in Sydney this morning before an audience that included British Prime Minister David Cameron, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has again reiterated a legal fiction that hasn’t been accepted or acceptable since 1992 by stating that pre-British colonial Australia was “nothing but bush” and “extraordinarily basic and raw”.

Here are Abbott’s ham-fisted remarks, which ignorantly eschew mention of Australia’s Indigenous population, their status as the inhabitants of this land for some 60,000 years prior to British settlement and their subsequent enslavement and slaughter on the part of those “Marines, and the convicts and sailors that struggled off those 12 ships.”

Those poor Marines, they must’ve been so scared:

“As we look around this glorious city, as we see the extraordinary development, it’s hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush and that the Marines, and the convicts and the sailors that struggled off those 12 ships just a few hundred yards from where we are… must have thought they’d come almost to the Moon. “Everything would have been so strange. Everything would have seemed so extraordinarily basic and raw and now a city which is one of the most spectacular cities on our globe, and in a country which is as free and as fair and as prosperous as any.”

You know what else is extraordinarily basic and nothing but bush? Tony Abbott.

via New Matilda

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