The incident occurred as King Charles and Queen Camilla are currently in Australia on a five-day visit…reports Asian Lite News
An independent Australian senator on Monday interrupted King Charles’s parliamentary reception during his visit to the country, shouting anti-colonial slogans like “you are not my king”, before being whisked away by security personnel.
“You are not my king. You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people,” charged Lidia Thorpe, who is known for her fierce opposition to monarchy and an outspoken advocate for Indigenous rights, in remarks that went viral on social media.
The incident occurred as King Charles and Queen Camilla are currently in Australia on a five-day visit. The King addressed Australian MPs and senators in the Great Hall of Parliament House in Canberra today. This was King Charles’s first visit to Australia as a monarch and also the first since his cancer diagnosis earlier this year.
As King Charles finished his speech during his reception, Thorpe, an Indigenous senator from Victoria, who was a guest at the event, strode up from the aisle of the hall and shouted at the monarch seated a few metres away, “This is not your land. You are not my king.”
“You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want a treaty in this country. You are a genocidalist,” said Thorpe, wearing a fur cloak. As security personnel escorted her to the hall door, the senator again shouted, saying, “This is not your land. You are not my king. You are not our king. F*** the colony.”
As security personnel moved to prevent Thorpe from reaching King Charles, the monarch pulled Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese aside for a discussion on the hall’s podium, ABC News reported.
Australia was once a British colony for over 100 years and thousands of Aboriginal Australians were killed or displaced during that time. While the country gained de facto independence in 1901, it is not yet a full-fledged republic and remains a constitutional monarchy. King Charles is the current head of state.
Earlier before the incident, Thorpe had turned her back while a choir performed the Australian anthem for the royal couple. Thorpe’s outburst led to condemnation from several Australians, with former Prime Minister Tony Abbott calling it “unfortunate political exhibitionism”.
“It’s unfortunate political exhibitionism. That’s all I’d say,” Abbott, who was present at the event, said. Dick Smith, an Australian businessman, who was also there at the Great Hall, said, “I think that’s the wonderful part of our democracy – that she’s not going to be put in jail.”
This is not the first time that Thorpe grabbed headlines for her remarks and actions against the monarchy. In 2022, Thorpe raised her right fist and used the word “colonising” when she was asked to declare her allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II, who was then Australia’s head of state, and the mother of 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 before being rebuked by a Senate official who asked her to recite the oath printed on the card.
Last year, Australians overwhelmingly rejected a referendum on including Indigenous Australians in the constitution and to create a separate assembly for the community.
In 1999, more than half of Australians voted against removing the queen amid a row about whether her replacement should be chosen by MPs or the people.
PM urged to open reparations talks at Commonwealth summit
Keir Starmer is under pressure from Labour MPs and Caribbean governments to open the door to reparatory justice when he travels to Samoa this week.
The UK prime minister is due to visit the small Pacific island state for the Commonwealth heads of government meeting (Chogm), which starts on Monday. At the summit, leaders will elect the new secretary general for the Commonwealth to replace Patricia Scotland, the former Labour cabinet minister, who has been in post since 2016. All three candidates to succeed her have called for reparations for countries that were affected by slavery and colonialism.
The UN judge Patrick Robinson concluded last year that the UK owed more than £18tn in reparations for its historical involvement in slavery in 14 countries.
Successive UK governments have resisted calls for reparations. Downing Street sought to shut down the discussion before the Commonwealth summit this week by saying that reparations were “not on the agenda”. The government has also ruled out making a formal apology this week.
But five Labour MPs said that the UK should be open to discussing reparatory justice for its former colonies. Caricom, a group of 15 Caribbean countries, is expected to push Starmer and the foreign secretary, David Lammy, on the issue in Samoa.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill, said: “The UK has both a moral and legal duty to address the injustices of the past. If reparations is on the agenda for Commonwealth countries then the UK government must be willing to discuss it. Refusing to address our role speaks volumes about the regard in which we hold people who still live with the impact of enslavement and colonialism.”
Nadia Whittome, the Labour MP for Nottingham East, said: “We should be responsible enough to confront our nation’s history and the legacy it continues to leave today. That should start with opening up a dialogue with those countries whose wealth we extracted, about the impact of colonialism and slavery on their society and how the wrongs of the past can be righted.”
Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, said: “You’d like to think on the eve of going into the Commonwealth meeting, a new Labour government would be looking to have a better and closer relationship with those countries … David Lammy is a son of the Caribbean, from Guyana. There will be high expectations that he will move the dial in their direction.”
Marsha de Cordova, the Labour MP for Battersea, and Dawn Butler, the Labour MP for Brent East, also said ministers should be willing to discuss reparations.
Lammy is the son of Guyanese immigrants and was a champion for justice for the Windrush generation in the UK. He has said in the past that “hard truths” need to be told about slavery.
A Commonwealth spokesperson said: “The Commonwealth has historically facilitated frank conversations about difficult issues that have resulted in positive outcomes. Reparatory justice, which is more than just about reparations, may be discussed at Chogm, if any government proposes it. If so, the heads of government will decide how the discussions will proceed.’”
As the meeting in Samoa approaches, the Commonwealth, which was created from the ashes of the British empire, faces bigger questions about its usefulness as an association.
Summit attendance by heads of government has declined. The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, and the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, are set to snub this week’s meeting in favour of the BRICS summit in Russia.
Scotland has been a divisive secretary general – critics have accused her of cronyism, and a group of countries, including the UK, unsuccessfully attempted to remove her in 2022.
Pat Conroy, Australia’s minister for the Indo-Pacific, told the Guardian the meeting was “an opportunity for the Commonwealth to demonstrate its relevance to its members” and that it had on occasion “spread itself too thin”.
There is nervousness among larger Commonwealth states about whether Samoa, a tiny country of 200,000 people, will be able to successfully pull off the summit – which is King Charles’s first as head of the Commonwealth.
ALSO READ: Archbishop reveals links to slavery
