The Meghan Markle of Australian politics

Lidia Thorpe made headlines again this week when she quit the Greens, but her career in politics has a taught us all a very important lesson.

OPINION

Lidia Thorpe is the Meghan Markle of Australian politics. Her only value in public life is as clickbait for increasingly bizarre comments and a salutary lesson to children about what happens when extreme victimhood meets extreme narcissism.

Actually, that is not fair.

Thorpe has also performed a great public service in proving how utterly dysfunctional, delusional and anti-democratic the Greens really are as well as providing the glorious spectacle of a party that tries to project a collectivist image desperately prostrating itself on the altar of a rampant egotist.

The fact that said egotist simply s**t all over them anyway and stole one of their Senate spots for another five years only makes the spectacle all the sweeter.

This is a masterclass in the extreme left eating itself, a cliché that has always been true but rarely belted out so thumpingly on the national stage. It makes the human centipede look like an Oxbridge tea party.

Senator Lidia Thorpe announced she is resigning from the Greens and moving to the cross bench. Picture: AAP Image/Mick Tsikas

So far, so good.

But the downside is that Thorpe could also destroy something that actually is of public value, namely the creation of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

This is of course the issue over which she abandoned the Greens, for reasons so simultaneously esoteric and infantile that no normal person could possibly understand them.

Apparently enshrining an Indigenous Voice in the constitution would disempower First Nations people or cede sovereignty or stop treaties or some other knuckle-dragging leftist grab-bag of meaningless concepts accompanied by a raised fist.

These are arguments that cannot be countered because they’re not really arguments at all, at least no more than those offered by a lolly-deprived toddler screaming in the supermarket.

Indeed, it is the closest we have yet come to a real-life re-enactment of Monty Python’s famous argument sketch in which one person says “Yes it is!” and the other keeps saying “No it isn’t!”

Questions remain around the Voice to Parliament, a referendum that would allow Indigenous people to advise Parliament on policies that affect their lives. Picture: Martin Ollman/Getty Images

As the understandably perplexed NT Labor senator Malarndirri McCarthy said of Thorpe and the Greens’ intellectual miasma: “Treaty is occurring in each state and territory jurisdiction. I find it curious they think that treaty is not occurring.”

The truth is they either don’t know or don’t care. Or, to be more precise, they both don’t know and don’t care. They are just blockers and wreckers.

And they have to be. Because the dirty truth is that if the extreme left don’t block and wreck every attempt at progress then there is no point to their existence.

The fact is these pseudo-intellectual thugs value themselves more as radicals and revolutionaries than they value ordinary citizens hoping for a better future – including the most disadvantaged people in our community.

The revolutionary business model collapses if society improves because if there is no oppressive society there is nothing to revolt against.

You can actually trace this sentiment right back to the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution.

The Tsar was long gone and parliament was already in power when they launched their bloody coup.

Lidia Thorpe last September during an Abolish the Monarchy protest. Picture: Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

Socialists pretend they are fighting fascists but their true enemy is democracy. They love pretending they are on the side of “the people” but their worst nightmare is that the people might actually want something different to their minority groupthink utopia. This is why the “People’s Republic of …” or “Democratic Republic of …” countries are never governed by the people or democratic.

This brings us back to Lidia Thorpe, who got elected solely by being on the Greens’ party ticket but will now sit for half a decade in the highest house of the national parliament on her own non-existent mandate.

The fact that she doesn’t even recognise the parliament whose cushy salary she happily trousers only makes it more peak Greens. Indeed, the only thing more exquisite is Julian Burnside’s calls to unseat her, presumably so that he can take her spot.

Only in the Greens could a rich, white, straight, eastern suburbs male demand the removal of an Indigenous woman so he could finally get some representation.

It’s a beautiful hot mess. But what of Thorpe’s apparent determination to kill off the Voice?

It would be nice to think she’s harmless but the problem is history says otherwise. By attacking the Voice from the left Thorpe is singing from the same songsheet as those who killed off the republic in 1999 (Phil Cleary) and the carbon price in 2009 (Bob Brown).

You could set your watch to these drones.

Thorpe last January 2022 during a rally outside the Park Hotel in Carlton, calling for refugees detained there to be freed. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

The template never changes but they are so dumb it’s probably less a political manifesto than a primordial mindset: Destroy anything good that doesn’t meet your moronic undergraduate worldview and then bitch and moan about the country not moving forward and preach about how we need to change the system.

And then the whole angry mob goes out to brunch at their favourite cafe or sinks a few cones and either way ends up signing a petition from GetUp.

Well this time they have a chance to actually stop whingeing and use their democratic privilege to back something that could improve the lives of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged Australians.

But perhaps, like Meghan Markle, the only people they really care about are themselves.