Andrew Bolt: Why Lidia Thorpe and Adam Bandt must leave parliament
Lidia Thorpe is a poisonous influence, unfit for parliament — and as long as Adam Bandt protects her, neither is he.
Andrew Bolt
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Lidia Thorpe is not fit to be a member of parliament, in my view. Nor is Greens leader Adam Bandt while he keeps protecting the nastiest politician in Canberra.
Just imagine if any Liberal MP abused an elderly Aboriginal woman so viciously that she needed medical care from the parliamentary nurse.
I can hear Bandt already screaming: “Bully!” “Sexist!” “Raaaacist!” But not this time. This time it’s silence, and not just from the Greens, but the Greens-leaning ABC.
Once again, the Greens seem excused from the standards they set for everyone else, and are the barbarians in our parliament.
Exhibit A: Senator Lidia Thorpe.
Thorpe last year had a meeting in her office with two people identifying as Aboriginal – Geraldine Atkinson and Marcus Stewart, co-chairs of Victoria’s Aboriginal-only parliament.
It was a shambles. Atkinson, in her 70s, last year said Thorpe talked over her, and was so
nasty that Atkinson needed medical attention.
Bandt didn’t say boo back then. There was no public reprimand of Thorpe, and no apology.
But this week, we learnt one person did privately say sorry – Thorpe’s now-ex chief of the staff, David Mejia-Canales, who sent Atkinson an email.
“The conduct that I witnessed at that meeting was by far one of the most unprofessional displays I have ever seen, not just during the length of my career, but in my life,” he wrote. “I was scared and in shock.”
Again, imagine if that was written about a Liberal. Or me.
But the Left is tribal, so tends to put the side above the principle. They are hypocrites because it is in their nature.
Once again, Bandt has said nothing. He left it to a spokesman to issue flim-flam: “Following correspondence from the First People’s Assembly of Victoria, Mr Bandt spoke with Senator Lidia Thorpe about the June 2021 meeting”.
But we’re not told what Bandt said. It can’t have been much. Thorpe never said sorry.
This scandal now goes to the wider culture of the Greens and Adam Bandt’s failure of moral leadership.
The Greens are promoted by the media Left as the most moral party in politics.
In fact, it is secretive and has plenty of scandals of its own.
A former Greens leader in Victoria was accused of marginalising female staffers and referring to women in the workplace as “fat, hairy lesbians” and “hairy-legged feminists”. He settled that matter confidentially.
In 2018, 18 Greens volunteers laid an internal complaint against a veteran Greens candidate, accusing her of intimidation and bullying.
She denied it.
In NSW, Greens MP Jenny Leong used parliamentary privilege to accuse fellow Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham of an “act of sexual violence”. He denied that, and said an independent investigation found insufficient evidence.
But with Thorpe, her behaviour is not in the shadows and deniable. It’s in the open.
In May, Thorpe abused police at a violent protest, screaming: “You are the criminals. You are the criminals in this country.”
Last December, she hurled a disgusting slur in parliament at a female Liberal senator, telling her to shut her legs.
Also in December, she gloated when protesters, many Aboriginal, burned the doors of the Old Parliament House, tweeting: “Seems like the colonial system is burning down. Happy New Year everyone.”
Last month, Thorpe made a mockery of her official swearing of allegiance to the Queen, holding up a fist and falsely accusing the Queen of “colonising”.
Her inflammatory race-baiting includes telling the most outrageous untruths. She’s falsely accused prison warders of committing genocide of Aborigines in jail – of killing them – and falsely accused whites of burying Aboriginal children in sand and competing to kick “off their heads”.
On the day of mourning for the Queen to whom Thorpe had promised in parliament to “be faithful and bear true allegiance”, Thorpe instead wiped her hands, covered in fake blood, on an Australian flag and told a cheering mob “the Crown has blood on their hands”.
Thorpe is a poisonous influence in our parliament. She tells untruths, breaks her oaths, cheers on arson, abuses police, exploits racial divisions, trashes our national symbols and sovereign, and shatters an Aboriginal elder with an aggression that shocks her own staff.
I know, every political party has its misfits and its bullies. The difference with the Greens is that it refuses to criticise Thorpe, and instead rewards her by making her its spokesman for “justice”.
To repeat: Lidia Thorpe is not fit to be in our parliament. And while Adam Bandt protects her, nor is he.
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