JENI O’DOWD: Senator Lidia Thorpe is a national disgrace and should resign after vile outburst at King Charles

Lidia Thorpe is a national disgrace. Her heckling of King Charles after his speech in Parliament’s Great Hall on Monday reminded me of a badly behaved child throwing a loud tantrum in public.

But Senator Thorpe is no child. She is a 51-year-old woman who should know better. Whether you support the monarchy or not, you do not behave like a spoiled kid on the world stage.

“Give us what you stole from us, our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people,” Senator Thorpe thundered. “You are a genocidalist; this is not your land. This is not your land. You are not my king; you are not our king.”

Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure King Charles got the memo. Senator Thorpe is nothing but a grand-standing politician who did a massive disservice to the very cause she claimed to champion: the rights of Indigenous Australians.

What was she expecting? That King Charles would acknowledge her outburst and instantly agree to hand back centuries of history?

Of course not. But Senator Thorpe was counting on the spotlight and the inevitable media coverage because, in the end, that outburst was not about the cause. It was all about her.

As Australia’s first female Indigenous senator, Olympian and republican Nova Peris said, Senator Thorpe was not only “embarrassing and disrespectful” but did not represent the views of most Aboriginal Australians.

“Senator Thorpe’s actions today do not reflect the manners, or approach to reconciliation, of Aboriginal Australians at large. They reflect only her,” Ms Peris wrote on X.

“Regardless of personal beliefs, respecting our nation’s constitutional framework is essential, especially as an elected representative.”

And that’s the real question. If Senator Thorpe feels so strongly about rejecting our constitutional framework, why did she become a Senator under it?

In fact, one could argue she should not even be a senator. She initially filled a casual vacancy created by the resignation of former Greens senator Richard Di Natale, who represented Victoria.

In the 2022 Federal election, she contested the election as a Greens candidate for the Senate. The Greens received 12.7 per cent of the first-preference vote in Victoria — more than 475,000 votes. As a Greens candidate, Thorpe was re-elected as part of the State’s overall Senate vote, securing one of the six Senate seats allocated to Victoria in that election.

However, although she was happily part of the Greens at her first appointment and re-election, she left the party in early 2023 after disagreeing with its position on Indigenous issues.

It’s hard to say if she would have been elected to the Senate as an independent. These candidates struggle to gain significant vote shares in Senate elections because they don’t benefit from party preferences or organised voter support.

In the 2022 Federal election, many independents stood for Senate seats but failed. The exceptions, of course, were true independents like David Pocock (2022) and Jacqui Lambie (2019).

So, how much actual support does Senator Thorpe command outside of the party system?

Last week, I received a lot of criticism (and that’s an understatement) from readers for writing that I thought it was wrong Aussie taxpayers were footing the bill for King Charles and Camilla’s visit while many of us are struggling to afford basic groceries and pay our bills.

The comments showed how passionately people feel about the monarchy: I was told I should move to Russia, I was rude, and I should keep my opinion to myself. One wonders what these same readers think about Senator Thorpe’s performance!

Today, Peter Dutton called on her to resign, questioning how she was happy to accept a quarter of a million dollars in salary yearly from a system she fundamentally doesn’t believe in.

He said that if Senator Thorpe was genuine, she would consider her position in the Senate.

“I think there’s a very strong argument for somebody who doesn’t believe in the system but is willing to take a quarter of a million dollars a year from the system to resign in principle,” the Opposition Leader told Sunrise.

But Senator Thorpe remains unapologetic. “I will be there for another three years, everybody, so get used to truth-telling,” she told ABC Radio.

This woman is living in la la land. No one wants to see any more of her grandstanding — her fist in the air during her 2020 swearing-in when she called the late Queen a “coloniser”, lying down in front of a Mardi Gras float to block the parade or her latest stunt of heckling King Charles.

Do us a favour, Senator Thorpe; resign. We deserve better of our elected officials.