The Senate is a circus and this senator is its clowning glory

The moment when many politicians finally gave up on Lidia Thorpe came a few days before the Senate’s most outrageous stuntwoman launched the tirade that got her suspended from the upper house on the final, exhausting day of federal parliament for the year.

Thorpe, the independent and Indigenous senator for Victoria, angered her colleagues with a flippant interjection in the Senate on Monday during a debate on a motion she moved about racism in parliament. In a vote that should have unified the chamber, Thorpe goaded her fellow Indigenous senators because they did not agree with everything she said.

Senator Lidia Thorpe protests in the marble foyer at Parliament House on Thursday.Credit: AAP

“We’ve got the native police sitting there. Shame!” she called out. It was an ugly taunt. Thorpe was likening the other senators – people like Liberal frontbencher Kerrynne Liddle and Labor cabinet minister Malarndirri McCarthy – to people who turned on their fellow First Australians to do the bidding of colonial authorities.

Nobody was surprised that Thorpe went too far – because she always goes too far. But her remark tipped senators over the edge in the conversations about whether she should be suspended. They were sure that Thorpe would keep blowing up until she was booted out. And they were right.

So the cheap stunts of this week, with Thorpe dialling up the outrage day by day to make herself the story, created a televised drama that told voters the story of a dysfunctional parliament that was utterly out of touch with ordinary Australians. And the story of a government that took too long to deliver on its promises – and had to resort to a chaotic rush to get results before deadline.

More on the chaos later. First, the dilemma over Thorpe. It is incredibly rare for senators to be suspended from the chamber, so the Greens think the major parties got it wrong when they agreed on the move on Wednesday night. Thorpe certainly appeared to exploit the outcome by staging a protest from the press gallery of the chamber on Thursday, flouting the bid to remove her and gaining even more attention.

Perhaps the majority, in approving the suspension, simply gave her what she craved. But the government leader in the chamber, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong, argued there had to be a sanction on Thorpe for making others feel unsafe. This was backed by crossbenchers including Jacqui Lambie and David Pocock – a measure of the way Thorpe offended people across the spectrum.

The stated reason for the suspension was Thorpe’s anger on Wednesday when she threw papers at Pauline Hanson during an argument about the One Nation leader’s claim that another crossbencher, Fatima Payman, had questions to answer about her citizenship, and therefore her eligibility to sit in parliament. But it was not just about documents being tossed in the air; the concern was about the sheer ferocity that Thorpe can display against her colleagues.

Thorpe ended up making Hanson look like the adult in the room. The One Nation leader sought to table documents on Wednesday to put her view that Payman has questions to answer under Section 44 of the Constitution because she had not done enough to renounce her Afghan citizenship. Hanson did not even try to make a speech about it.

The real story was Payman’s response. The West Australian is not just the youngest serving senator, and not just notable for being one of the few Muslims in parliament. She was passionate and eloquent in denouncing Hanson for trying to force her out of parliament. She scored a direct hit by challenging Hanson, who wore a burqa in the Senate in an infamous stunt in 2017, to try wearing the outfit in Afghanistan under the Taliban and see how she felt.

“You’re not just vindictive, mean, nasty. You bring disgrace to the human race,” Payman told Hanson in the Senate. “I kept on giving you the benefit of the doubt, Senator Hanson, despite your repetitive attempts to be racist to anyone who does not look like you.” Payman called out the racism that has been at the heart of One Nation’s campaigns for so long.

Thorpe seemed to want to support Payman by heckling Hanson at this point, but she also overshadowed her younger colleague. To nobody’s surprise, the news story that began with Payman ended up being all about Thorpe. By Thursday, Thorpe was displaying a messiah complex unlike anything we’ve seen in a parliament with more than its fair share of narcissists. “I am the mechanism. I am the body,” she said outside the building.

While the Senate got on with other business, the tail was clearly wagging the dog this week. Thorpe gained only 40,174 primary votes in her own name at the last election, while Hanson gained 26,550 out of about 15 million people who cast formal Senate votes nationwide. Both were elected on their party votes (and Thorpe soon dudded the Greens by leaving them), but the key point is they are both marginal voices.

It suited Peter Dutton to keep a low profile this week. The opposition leader had nothing to gain from being part of the story of Senate melodrama and hasty legislation. He has to bide his time until he is ready to release his nuclear energy policy in the weeks ahead – the point at which his rise in the opinion polls will be tested.

Anthony Albanese, meanwhile, had a lot to lose from Thorpe’s theatrics and the rush of draft law. The prime minister can claim victory with the passage of the Labor agenda, especially after staring down the Greens on housing reform earlier this week, but this was also a sign of how the government has taken too long to act on the promises it made at the last election.

How can it be that the “nature positive” package, delivering on an election pledge to set up Environment Protection Australia, has been shelved again? Why did it take so long for the help-to-buy scheme to be introduced to parliament, even if you accept that the Greens dragged out debate for months longer than necessary? Will the government ever be able to pass the $3 billion superannuation tax increase it announced in February 2023?

Showing his usual caution, Albanese halted a deal on the “nature positive” package even though Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek had a reasonable compromise with the Greens.

Credit: Matt Golding

This denied Plibersek an outcome after months of negotiation for the simple reason that the next election looks so tight: Albanese will not risk a backlash from voters who rely on industries such as mining and forestry.

Albanese will no doubt blame a troublesome Senate for stopping an elected government doing its job. And he can fairly claim a mandate for policies such as Environment Protection Australia and help to buy.

Most of all, however, he can now point to someone in parliament who is proving, in a more dramatic way every day, that the Senate is a circus that makes governing impossible.

Lidia Thorpe, the stage is yours.

David Crowe is chief political correspondent.

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