Anthony Albanese and Katy Gallagher have rebuked the deputy Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, for drawing parallels between the arrival of the First Fleet to Elon Musk’s SpaceX mission to reach Mars, describing the comparison as “disrespectful” and “nuts”.
But Ley is standing by the comparison as her office accuses the prime minister of lacking the “imagination” to understand Australia’s founding story.
The prime minister said on Monday that the analogy Ley made in her Australia Day address was “very strange”.
“I thought when someone said that to me yesterday they were making it up,” Albanese said of Ley’s comments, which were part of an Australian Day speech to a church service in Albury.
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“There aren’t people that we know of in Mars,” Albanese said. “Australia was not terra nullius when Captain [Arthur] Phillip and the First Fleet came through Sydney Cove.”
Ley had said in her speech that citizens should be proud of 26 January and denied that the First Fleet had arrived “as invaders”.
“In what could be compared to Elon Musk’s SpaceX’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,” she said.
“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. From that moment our national story stood at a crossroads.”
But Albanese said it was a “very strange analogy to draw, and one that was disrespectful of the fact that there were people here”.
“First Nations people [were] here for tens of thousands [of years and] we have a great privilege of sharing this continent with the oldest continuous culture on Earth,” the prime minister said.
Ley was on Monday defending the analogy, which Guardian Australia understands was a reference to the historical significance of the First Fleet rather than an attempt to overlook Indigenous Australians.
“It is not surprising to see Anthony Albanese lacks the imagination to understand the significance of Australia’s founding story,” Ley’s spokesperson said in a statement.
“This is the problem when you have a prime minister who was an activist at university instead of a student – he may see Australia’s founding as an invasion story, but I do not.”
Gallagher, the finance minister, said the comparison drawn by Ley was “nuts”.
“[It] took me a while to understand what she was trying to say there. But, you know, I’ll leave that to Sussan Ley to explain,” she told reporters on Monday.
Ley’s speech came a day after the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, added a new government efficiency portfolio to his shadow ministry, a role that drew immediate comparisons with the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in Donald Trump’s new US administration.