The Australian Prime Minister has been criticised over a “failure of judgement” for wearing a Joy Division t-shirt.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, of the centre-left Labor party, was photographed on October 23 leaving his plane wearing a t-shirt featuring the cover art from the band’s seminal 1979 album ‘Unknown Pleasures’.
Five days later, Sussan Ley, leader of the conservative Liberal Party, criticised Albanese for wearing the shirt in a speech before parliament.
Ley accused Albanese of making a “profound failure of judgment”, and insinuated that the band were antisemitic for being named after “a wing of a Nazi concentration camp where Jewish women were forced into sexual slavery.”
@stereogum A major political controversy continues in Australia after Sussan Ley condemned Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for wearing a Joy Division t-shirt. In a speech to Parliament on Tuesday, the opposition leader said the PM’s “profound failure of judgment” was an “insult to all,” and that he should apologize. #JoyDivision #AnthonyAlbanese #SussanLey #Australia
♬ original sound – stereogum
The Guardian has pointed out that, though this is how the Joy Division was portrayed in the 1953 novella House Of Dolls, it is contested whether Jewish women were among those forced to work in this way.
A spokesperson for the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum also said: “As far as we know, there is no historical records of any ‘wing’ of a concentration camp where Jewish women were forced into sexual slavery.”
The spokesperson adds, “I am not an expert on the history of punk music,” but emphasises that while brothels and sexual servitude in the camps did exist, most of the women forced to work “were German social misfit prisoners imprisoned in Auschwitz for prostitution,” per the Guardian.
Albanese has not apologised for wearing the t-shirt, and his fellow Labor official Pat Gorman has defended him, citing the widespread popularity of the band and the t-shirt.
In an interview with the Guardian, Gorman said: “It’s a T-shirt of a band he’s a fan of … their music has been around for a few decades… There’s big issues in the world, I don’t think T-shirts of mainstream bands is one of them.”
In other Joy Division news, Peter Hook reflected on the band’s enduring legacy in an interview with NME earlier this year, telling us: “Who’d have thought that I’d be here 45 years later talking about the idea of Joy Division getting into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame? They literally only existed for less than two years.
It’s amazing what we achieved and what Ian has created for generation after generation of kids who were just like us: mixed up, confused, didn’t know what the world and the future held. They rely on that music to get them through, exactly the way that I did with The Doors. It’s wonderful to be a part of that.
“To be honest with you, I don’t need the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame to make me realise that. As long as I can go out there and play the music and meet those kids face-to-face, then that’s well enough for me. But it’s a great institution, and I would have been honoured to have been part of it.”
