Indigenous senator yells at King Charles as his Australia trip causes a stir
An Indigenous senator told King Charles III that Australia is not his land as the British royal visited Australia’s parliament, while Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the monarch is no longer needed as the country’s head of state.
Sen Lidia Thorpe was escorted out of a parliamentary reception for the royal couple yesterday after shouting that British colonisers have taken Indigenous land and bones.
“You committed genocide against our people,” she shouted.
“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.”
No treaty was ever struck between between British colonisers and Australia’s Indigenous peoples.
Charles spoke quietly with Albanese while security officials
stopped Thorpe from approaching.
“This is not your land. You are not my king,” Thorpe yelled as she was ushered from the hall. Thorpe
is renowned for high-profile protest action. When she was affirmed as a senator in 2022, she wasn’t allowed to describe the then-monarch as “the colonising Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II”. She briefly blocked a police float in Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras last year by lying on the street in front of it. Last year, she was also banned for life from a Melbourne strip club after video emerged of her abusing male patrons.
Albanese, who wants the country to become a republic with an Australian head of state, also told the king it was time for his role to end. “You have shown great respect for Australians, even during times when we have debated the future of our own constitutional arrangements and the nature of our relationship with the Crown,” Albanese said. But, he said, “nothing stands still”.
Australia’s six state government leaders underscored the political divide on the country’s constitutional relationship with Britain by declining invitations to attend the reception. All six would prefer an Australian citizen was Australia’s head of state. They each said they had more pressing engagements yesterday, but monarchists agreed the royals had been snubbed.
Meanwhile, Charles joked about past encounters with Australia’s formidable wildlife – brown snakes, leeches, funnel web spiders and bull ants during his time at a rural grammar school called Timbertop when he was 17.
He did not mention being sneezed on by a nine-year-old suit-wearing alpaca named Hephner.
Greeting supporters at the Australian War Memorial, Charles stopped to admire a sartorially suave alpaca that was wearing a gold crown and suit. He reached out to “Hephner”, as the woolly camelid is known, and gave him a quick rub on the nose.
However, that caused Hephner to sneeze all over the king and his bodyguard who was also in the line of fire. — Agencies
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