Australian senator Lidia Thorpe protested King Charles III’s visit to the Australian parliament on Monday, Oct. 21, and she was escorted out by security. The king and Queen Camilla were honored in a reception by the Australian government, and at the end Thorpe alone began shouting calls for reparations for Indigenous Australians. The king did not seem surprised by Thorpe’s outcry, and he did not respond to it either.
“You are not our king! You are not sovereign!” Thorpe said repeatedly. “You committed genocide against our people! Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want a treaty.” Thorpe repeated some of these lines as she was ushered out of the hall by security officers, saying: “This is not your land! You are not my king!”
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Thorpe mentioned “a treaty” in reference to one of the most popular ideas to reconcile the Australian First Nations with the British colonial government, now known as “the commonwealth.” When British colonizers first came to Australia, they did not sign treaties with the Indigenous people already living there. According to a report by The Guardian, other countries have already signed treaties like this, including New Zealand (Aotearoa), Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Japan, Greenland and the U.S.
Treaties like this can have a lot of nuance and can lead to very different outcomes. For example, treaties between the U.S. government and Native American nations were often used to force the Native Americans off of their land during westward expansion. However, in Canada and New Zealand, modern interpretations of treaties have allowed for First Nations to self-govern and regain some autonomy. In Australia, the idea is to give Aboriginal, Islander and other First Nations communities a formal voice in the government. Advocates say it would also be a symbolic victory that would be important to reconciling the past injustices against Indigenous people.
Thorpe was elected a senator for Victoria in 2020 – the first Aboriginal senator for that state. She has carried out several high-profile protest actions as a senator, including lying in the street to block a police float in a parade. In 2022 when swearing her oath of office, she referred to the monarch as “the colonizing Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II,” but she was forced to start over and recite the other verbatim.
The king has not responded directly to Thorpe’s protests on Monday. He is scheduled to visit Samoa later this week before returning to the U.K.
