Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to condemn the acts of vandalism perpetrated against the statues of James Cook and Lachlan Macquarie in Sydney over the last fortnight. Defacing statues is usually associated with the liberation from tyranny of places like the former Soviet Eastern Europe or Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but to equate two of the most liberal men of their era to those tyrants shows the bankruptcy of thinking on the Left.

Captain Cook is one of the most remarkable men of his era. His voyages greatly contributed to the expansion of human knowledge. Responsible for navigating and mapping among other places Labrador, Newfoundland, New Zealand, Hawaii, New Guinea and the east coast of Australia and Tasmania, Cook created accurate maps, confirmed centuries later by satellite images, using what were quite unsophisticated tools. With Sir Joseph Banks, he promoted greater understanding and knowledge of a wider variety of Australian flora. He was fastidious about health and hygiene and, on his long voyage between 1768 and 1771, he lost not a single person to scurvy. This was an amazing feat because, although scurvy had been linked to bad diet, the link between it and vitamin C had not been established until Cook's voyage. Lachlan Macquarie was similarly one of the great liberal reformers of the colonial period. He treated emancipists with great respect, giving those convicts who had served their time equal rights as citizens, and this didn't make him popular. Rather than tearing down the statutes of these great men, we should celebrate their contribution to Australia and to global knowledge.

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