SYDNEY, Australia (CU)_Australia’s Acting Prime Minister Michael McCormack on Monday (Jan 11), attempted to draw a comparison between the violent protests in the US Capitol last week, to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2019.
McCormack, who is standing in while Scott Morrison is on leave this week, told ABC Radio National that US President Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his election defeat, his inflammatory tweets and the deadly storming of the US Capitol building by Trump-supporters were “unfortunate” events.
Nevertheless, he criticised the decision of social media giants to ban the accounts of the US President, noting that it should not be up to Big Tech to decide whose voices were heard.
However, it was the Acting Prime Minister’s comparison of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests to last week’s riot on the Capitol, which sparked criticism, especially from human right groups.
On the discussion on the riots in the Capitol building during the ABC’s RN program, McCormack said, “It is unfortunate that we have seen the events at the Capitol Hill that we’ve seen in recent days, similar to those race riots that we saw around the country last year.”
Last year, the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, prompted hundreds of protests against police brutality and institutional racism across the globe, some which ended in violence.
However, human rights groups have condemned the Acting PM’s “deeply offensive” comparison, and have demanded McCormack to withdraw his comments.
Amnesty International’s Indigenous Rights Lead Nolan Hunter said McCormack “must be condemned in the strongest terms”.
“The Acting Prime Minister must immediately withdraw his deeply offensive comments that compared the violent attacks on the US Capitol to the historic and important Black Lives Matters movement that swept the world last year,” he noted.
Hunter added that calling the Black Lives Matters movement ‘race riots’ proves that McCormack has ignored the incredibly important message the movement shared.
Meanwhile, the Aboriginal Legal Service, the country’s first legal service dedicated to the Indigenous people of the Australia, also criticised the comparison, tweeting: “It’s a disappointment (to say the least) to see the Acting PM mischaracterise our fight for justice as ‘race riots’.”
The collective call on Black lives be valued and defended against state-sanctioned violence cannot be compared to an attempt to violently overthrow an election, the organisation added.
On Tuesday, McCormack responded to these comments, claiming that “all lives matter”.
“Amnesty International and others, and I appreciate there are others who are being bleeding hearts about this and confecting outrage, but they should know those lives [lost during the Black Lives Matter protests] matter too,” he said.
“All lives matter, people shouldn’t have to go to a protest and lose their life.”
However, McCormack’s previously came under criticism last year, for falsely claiming that the second Coronavirus outbreak in Victoria was owing to a Black Lives Matter rally in Melbourne.
