Appetite for disruption: We’ve got to talk about Lidia Thorpe
The independent senator’s week of agitation ended with her being booted from a Senate fed up with her antics. Can she come back?
Even on her way out of Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport on Thursday night, Lidia Thorpe was still drawing attention to herself.
While the rest of the Senate sat late into the night in Canberra on Thursday, Thorpe had arrived on the Qantas shuttle to Melbourne at about 7.25pm.
As she made her way through the crowds in the terminal, the independent senator passed a member of the Australian Federal Police and then snapped.
According to a witness, Thorpe, still wearing her “Blackfullas Palestinians” tank top, turned to the officer and demanded to know if he was ready to use the weapon.
“A machine gun at the airport? For f---’s sake!” she shouted, and kept walking.
The officer said nothing (the AFP’s Counter-terrorist First Response team carries short-barrelled rifles at nine major airports around Australia, not machine guns). Passersby studied their feet, not sure what to make of the incident.
Before the flight to Melbourne, Thorpe had been spotted enjoying a drink with three companions in the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge in Canberra – one of the many perks of office available to all members of federal parliament – after spending hours on the lawn outside parliament at a rally denouncing what she called “colonial HQ”.
The AFP declined to comment on the incident. A spokesman for Melbourne Airport said no incident had been logged. Thorpe was contacted for comment.
Thorpe’s week of agitation began on Monday when she insulted other First Nations senators, including Labor’s Indigenous Australians Minister, Malarndirri McCarthy, and Senator Jana Stewart, and Greens senator Dorinda Cox, a former police officer – by describing them as “native police”.
The government leader in the Senate, Penny Wong, was infuriated.
“Senator Thorpe should withdraw what she said previously. I don’t care about me, but I do care about the comment which was directed at First Nations senators on our side. She should withdraw it. She speaks of respect and safety in this place. She should show some,” Wong thundered.
“What’s wrong with ‘native police’? I’ll say it every time,” Thorpe shot back, refusing to withdraw.
On Tuesday, Thorpe gave a footballer’s non-apology: “I’ve been dragged in here to withdraw something I said in the chamber yesterday, so I withdraw.”
Wednesday’s decision to “name” Thorpe and ban her from the chamber for a day, a highly unusual move for the Senate, was collectively taken by the upper house after she had thrown her papers at One Nation senator Pauline Hanson, as other senators flinched in their seats, wondering what she would do.
“All Australians have a right to be safe at work,” Wong said, even senators.
Thorpe had leapt into the fray after fellow crossbench senator Fatima Payman accused Hanson of spreading hatred. Hanson had tabled a motion questioning Payman’s eligibility to sit in parliament because she was born in Afghanistan.
On Thursday, when all eyes were on the doors of the chamber, wondering if Thorpe would storm in and defy the suspension, the maverick senator suddenly appeared in the press gallery viewing area, startling those who were looking for her, as she chanted, “Free, free Palestine”, and then left to address the rally on the lawn.
For hours afterwards, dozens of police and parliamentary guards were deployed around the building amid growing concern the Victorian senator would try to force her way into the chamber, but Thorpe remained outside with the protest.
The question that remains unanswered after an extraordinary week of disruption is: How will parliament respond to perhaps the most disruptive, norm-breaking senator it has seen in a long time?
As one senator, an institutionalist who respects the traditions of the chamber and asked not to be named, puts it, Thorpe is a professional protester with a serious message about the history of white settlement. But she overplays her hand.
“She has been slowly testing the tolerance levels of senators; she has been slowly losing goodwill. And as a consequence, senators are more likely to act and use the procedures of the Senate to act against her. If she continues on this trajectory, more and more the Senate will decide it has had enough of the disruption,” they said.
“A key rule of the Senate, one of the most fundamental, is you should be able to speak and not be intimidated. And she broke that rule ... there are only 76 senators in Australia, she is in the inner sanctum and she is protesting against something she is a member of. That’s the flaw in her logic.”
Thorpe’s ability to bring chaos to the usually genteel Senate is unmatched.
After a short stint in the Victorian parliament, Thorpe entered the federal parliament in September 2020 on a casual vacancy and then won a six-year term on the Greens ticket in May 2022, before quitting the Greens over the Voice to parliament referendum less than a year later.
She arrived with a reputation as a firebrand and an argument over her oath of allegiance to the Crown, but she has exceeded all expectations.
Her brief relationship with former Rebels bikie president Dean Martin caused alarm because she was serving on the joint committee on law enforcement; she had to apologise for insulting Liberal senator Hollie Hughes for not “keeping her legs shut”; and Indigenous leader Aunty Geraldine Atkinson claimed the verbal abuse she copped during a meeting left her shaken and ill.
There was also the small matter of her protest when King Charles III visited parliament last month and Thorpe called out, “You are not our king. You are not sovereign”.
Reflecting on Thorpe’s latest disturbance, Monash University emeritus professor of politics Paul Strangio says: “It brings to mind the 1982 judgment of former High Court Justice Lionel Murphy when, in relation to an Indigenous leader, Percy Neal, Murphy, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, declared ‘Mr Neal is entitled to be an agitator’.
“While her behaviour undoubtedly offends many, we may well ask if it’s reasonable to expect Indigenous Australians to be forever meek, polite and forbearing.”
Thorpe flipped the Senate the middle finger this week when she stormed out. For the first time, after countless provocations, the Senate responded in kind.
It was a collective response that asked the Victorian senator a simple question: What’s your next move, Lidia?
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