Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says comments made by deputy Opposition leader Sussan Ley likening the arrival of the First Fleet to a mission to Mars was a "strange" analogy and "disrespectful" to Indigenous Australians who inhabited the land for tens of thousands of years.
Ley used an Australia Day speech to compare tech billionaire Elon Musk's Space X's efforts to build a colony on Mars with the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788.
"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," she said.
Albanese said on Monday he found it a "very strange" analogy.
He said Australians shared "a great privilege" of sharing this continent with the oldest continuous culture on Earth.
"Find someone who finds that as a good analogy," he told reporters.
"I thought when someone said that to me yesterday they were making it up.
"Australia was not terra nullius (land belonging to no one) when Captain Phillip and the First Fleet came through Sydney Cove."
"I thought that was a very strange analogy to draw, and one that was disrespectful of the fact that there were people here. Of course First Nations people here for tens of thousands of years."
There is no evidence of past or present life on Mars.
In 1992, in what is known as the Mabo Case, — that Australia was once land belonging to no-one. It allowed for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to have rights to their land.
Ley's Coalition colleague Matthew Canavan took to social media to defend the comments, saying she was "spot on".
"One of the regrettable features of woke history is the whitewashing of the tremendous hardships endured by our convicts, settlers, pioneers and squatters. We all live comfortably thanks to their sacrifice," he wrote on X.
