The move to protect the statues comes after a statue of early explorer Captain Cook was sawn off from its ankles by anti-Australia Day protestors weeks earlier.
Further, concerns about statues became more prominent following the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States which grew following the murder of African-American man George Floyd by a white Police Officer in Minneapolis in 2020.
It was the lightning rod for global civil unrest and demonstrations over the treatment of minorities by governments with their origins in colonialism.
Anti-colonialist rhetoric on social media has manifested into several acts of wanton damage around the world including the toppling in Bristol of a statue of Merchant Edward Colson who made part of his fortune from involvement in Britain’s historical Atlantic slave trade.
Supporting Ms. Mihailuk’s proposal was Liberal MP Rachel Morton who said the state should recognise the“great men of history who were at the heart of the founding modern Australia.”
Yvonne Weldon, from the Wiradjuri people, is the first Indigenous councillor in the City of Sydney’s history, and in October, introduced a motion to have the Council revisit the inscriptions on 25 statues bearing the likenesses of leaders from the colonial era and “promote truth-telling in the public domain.”
Ms. Weldon told VOA news last October that the current inscriptions were “inaccurate, misleading and offensive, “ and cited a memorial to former New South Wales state Governor Lachlan Macquarie upon which he is described as the ”perfect gentleman.”
The City of Sydney Council has promised to review statue inscriptions deemed by Ms. Weldon as offensive.
In voting down the motion in the State Parliament, Minister Sharpe noted that many colonial statutes were already afforded protection under state law.
Labor MP Cameron Murphy told the house he was in favour of replacing contentious statues with new artistic sculptures.
“Frankly, a statue of someone that is one person’s pioneer or hero is another person’s genocidal maniac,” he said.
