Why Australian senator Lidia Thorpe heckled King Charles

“I sovereign, Lidia Thorpe, do solemnly and sincerely swear that I will be faithful and I bear true allegiance to the colonising her majesty Queen Elizabeth II,” she said, as she was being sworn in.

After criticism from other senators, she then repeated the oath as printed.

So Monday’s incident wouldn’t have come as much surprise to anyone who follows Australian politics. Lidia Thorpe has made her views clear – that British settlement saw huge numbers of Indigenous people massacred and the scars of colonisation are still very apparent for many First Nations people in Australia.

Whether or not you agree with Lidia Thorpe’s approach, the fact is that there are deep disparities between First Nations people and non-Indigenous Australians when it comes to many indicators including education, health and life expectancy.

Last year Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said a young Indigenous man was more likely to go to jail than university, which is borne out by statistics, as ABC showed., external

And between 2020 and 2022, the life expectancy of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders was estimated to be eight years shorter, external than non-Indigenous Australians.

“I wanted to send a clear message to the King of England that he’s not the King of this country, he’s not my king, he’s not sovereign,” Thorpe told the BBC after being removed from the Great Hall after heckling. “To be sovereign you have to be of this land. He’s not of this land.”

She went on.

“How can he stand up there and say he’s the King of our country – he’s stolen so much wealth from our people and from our land and he needs to give that back. And he needs to entertain a conversation for a peace treaty in this country,” she said.

“We can lead that, we can do that – we can be a better country but we cannot bow to the coloniser whose ancestors he spoke about in there are responsible for mass murder, for mass genocide.”