Bolt: Lidia Thorpe exposes the fraud of the Welcome to Country

These race rituals are increasingly preposterous and Lidia Thorpe became the latest to prove it when she abused King Charles.

Senator Lidia Thorpe didn’t just disqualify herself from sitting in Parliament by abusing King Charles. She also exposed the fraud of the Welcome to Country.

Largely overlooked in this furore is that Thorpe advanced on Charles, shouting “You are not my king! ... You committed genocide against my people!”, just after he’d been given a Welcome to Country by Violet Sheridan, claiming to represent Canberra’s traditional owners.

Indeed, Charles had just said he’d been touched by the “moving Welcome to Country ceremony” from “the traditional owners of the lands on which we meet, the Ngunnawal people”.

Some welcome. Welcome to another smack in the face, white guy.

Mind you, Sheridan did accuse Thorpe of being “disrespectful”, adding: “Lidia Thorpe does not speak for me and my people, and I’m sure she doesn’t speak for a lot of First Nations people”.

Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe shouted ‘you are not my king’.

But already I’m wondering: if even an “Aboriginal sovereignty” crusader like Thorpe can’t respect the “Welcome to Country”, why should anyone else?

There’s another embarrassment with this Welcome to what Charles called Ngunnawal country.

Another tribe, the Ngambri, also claims to “own” Canberra and is cranky the ACT government cut it out of this welcoming business, which can be a nice earner.

This brawl got so willing that the ACT last year formally apologised to the Ngambri for the “hurt and distress” in being wrongly excluded.

But it gets even sillier.

One guy doing Welcomes on behalf of the Ngambri has been Shane Mortimer, who’s said he grew up “in a life of privilege” until he was 34 and was told by his wife that one of his aunts in a family photograph looked Aboriginal.

Mortimer said he checked and found one of his 64 great-great-great-great grandparents was an Aboriginal woman who’d married a white pastoralist about 200 years ago. How Aboriginal is that!

Yet Mortimer has had to fight for recognition. He sued Professor Don Aitken, then chairman of the National Capital Authority, for $6m for saying Mortimer “looks about as Aboriginal as I do” after he’d performed a Welcome to Country at Parliament House.

If Lidia Thorpe can’t respect the Welcome to Country, why should anybody else?

Mortimer also refused to take part in an ACT Government Aboriginal genealogy project, denouncing it as racist: “I don’t have to prove who I am.”

He was again in the wars at the launch this year of a political group, Independents for Canberra. Sheridan turned her back on Mortimer as he spoke, claiming he “shares the same heritage” as her.

Which brings me back to Lidia Thorpe.

What of her own ancestry? Her father is white, as are many of her mother’s ancestors, yet she identifies exclusively as Aboriginal. Some may actually wonder: is she the coloniser or the colonised? Should she be the welcomed or welcomer at a Welcome to Country?

No, these race rituals are increasingly preposterous, and Thorpe is just the latest to prove it.

But there remains one urgent thing she must still prove – that she’s lawfully a senator.

When she told Charles “you are not my king” she broke the oath she swore under our Constitution in order to take her seat in parliament – to bear true allegiance to our then Queen and to her “heirs and successors”.

Thorpe last week briefly claimed she didn’t break her oath because she’d deliberately said “hairs” instead – something no one thought much of at the time, apparently assuming she was too thick to know how to pronounce it. Thorpe then admitted she’d mispronounced.

Either way, Charles is also the Queen’s “successor”, so the point remains that Thorpe publicly broke her oath.

King Charles III during his visit to the ACT.

Yet the Senate President, Sue Lines, of Labor’s hard Left, still won’t act against Thorpe.

I’ve argued that Lines should at least make Thorpe remove any doubt she’s raised about her oath by again swearing her loyalty to our sovereign.

But Lines’ adviser has told readers of this column Lines has “limited powers to intervene in the conduct of senators outside of their parliamentary work”.

That’s just avoiding the issue. I’m not asking Lines to intervene in Thorpe’s conduct outside parliament. I’m asking her to check if Thorpe still feels bound by the oath she swore in parliament as a condition of becoming a politician.

Many politicians deplore the lack of respect for our institutions. Let them now make a stand with one of their own. Make Thorpe restate her oath or kick her out.

Then let’s fight the cancerous racial division this race-baiting senator represents – starting with the Welcome to Country that even Thorpe now treats as worthless.