Independent federal senator Lidia Thorpe’s forthright haranguing of King Charles during his visit to the Australian parliament has made global headlines.
Reactions have been mixed. Many have criticised Thorpe’s decision to disrupt the event, labelling the 51-year-old’s behaviour as “disrespectful” and “grandstanding”
The federal conservative opposition are considering introducing a censure motion against Thorpe, a Gurnai Gunditjmara and Djab-Wurrung woman, when parliament resumes on 8 November.
Others, such the deputy leader of the Greens, Mehreen Faruqi, support Thorpe’s views and her right to express them directly to the king.
“It is a fact that the British committed genocide here. It is a fact that their racist legacy lives on in Australia today and that should absolutely be resisted and confronted,” Faruqi said.
As she was removed from the reception in Canberra on Monday, Thorpe shouted several claims about the status of Indigenous people in Australia.
“The truth is, this colony is built on stolen land, stolen wealth and stolen lives,” Thorpe said in a statement immediately afterwards.
Thorpe said later that she protested to highlight Australia’s poor record on Indigenous deaths in custody, child removals and the need for a treaty.
“We have 24,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care in 2024: it’s worse than the stolen generation. We have over 600 deaths in custody that we know about. That does not include babies who’ve died in the system,” Thorpe told the ABC on Tuesday morning.
The crown has ‘committed heinous crimes’ against First Nations people
Thousands of Aboriginal men, women and children were killed by British troops and later by government forces acting on instructions from the crown, in a deliberate effort to eradicate all resistance to colonisation.
Almost half of all frontier massacres were perpetrated by colonial forces.
This finding was made by the first major research project to document frontier violence in Australia, led by the University of Newcastle’s Emeritus professor of history, Prof Lyndall Ryan.
Prof Ryan and her team’s eight-year study of the colonisation of Australia concluded: “From the moment the British invaded Australia in 1788 they encountered active resistance from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander owners and custodians of the lands. In the frontier wars which continued into the 1920s frontier massacres were a defining strategy to contain and eradicate that resistance. As a result thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men, women and children were killed
Calls for treaty
Despite this legacy of frontier conflict, no treaty has ever been negotiated between Aboriginal and Islander nations and the commonwealth.
Because of this, according to the Human Rights Commission, state institutions and laws, including the national constitution, have developed without any negotiation with First Nations.
Calls for treaties go back decades. A line is often traced from the 1963 Yirrkala bark petition – in which Yolngu (the Indigenous people of north-east Arnhem Land) asserted their sovereignty over lands where the federal government had allowed a bauxite mine, all the way to 1988, when the Treaty 88 campaign took off amid huge Aboriginal protests against the bicentennial of European settlement.
In June that year, traditional owners presented the Barunga statement to Bob Hawke, who promised there would be a treaty by the end of 1990. That did not
