It looks like the latest form of protest, and Lidia Thorpe is its master

Is taking offence the new form of protest? If so, then senator Lidia Thorpe, the Green-turned-independent whose disruptions of parliament have become commonplace, could teach a masterclass in it. Under Thorpe’s model, the more performative the offence-taking, the better the protest.

On Wednesday, the Victorian senator caused another parliamentary ruckus. It began when One Nation senator Pauline Hanson questioned the eligibility of senator Fatima Payman to sit in parliament. Payman – who defected from Labor to the crossbench in July – was born in Kabul, but her family fled the Taliban, and she came to Australia as a child in 2003.

Lidia Thorpe and Pauline Hanson after a division in the Senate on Wednesday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

She was made an Australian citizen in 2005, but has had trouble cancelling her Afghan citizenship because the Taliban government does not have diplomatic relations with Australia. Nonetheless, the legal advice is that Payman is eligible for parliament, having taken “all reasonable steps” to renounce her other citizenship. In the Senate, Payman said Hanson was “vindictive, mean, nasty” and that she “[brought] disgrace to the human race”.

I am sympathetic to Payman’s anger.

Hanson attempted to table documents relating to the matter, but Thorpe seized the papers and ripped them up. She appeared to throw them at the One Nation senator.

Thorpe was subsequently ejected from the chamber, and as she departed, she raised her middle finger in an act of defiance you might call adolescent, except it’s insulting to adolescents. The teens I know would never do anything so rude.

Independent senator Lidia Thorpe leaves the Senate chamber on Wednesday morning.Credit: AAP

Afterwards, Thorpe barged into the Senate press gallery, upsetting the scholarly calm within, and used the elevated position to shout a pro-Palestine statement down at the senators she had just been separated from.

Speaking afterwards, Thorpe said there is “one rule for white people who get away with racism, and there’s one rule for us when we call this out. We’re then the ones that are naughty little black girls again.”

Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie said what many people were surely thinking when she responded to this: “Calling people racist actually is just a way, I think, that this senator is trying to excuse her own very, very bad behaviour.”

The Second Wave feminists of the 1960s used to say that the personal is political, a slogan that was adopted, rightly, by other civil rights movements. Why? Because it’s true. But the slogan was never meant to be twisted to cover the use of political issues as vehicles for personal grievances.

Racism is undoubtedly a problem in Australia – a truism so banal it is barely worth writing it, except that it is always worth reminding ourselves of how persistent and misery-making racism is. That’s particularly the case for people (like me) who have never personally experienced it.

This week, after publishing a comprehensive national plan to eliminate racism, Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman said there had been “alarming rises in racism during recent times”, and that “interpersonal racism is one symptom of the disease of systemic racism”.

I have no doubt that Thorpe has copped a lot of racism in her life, as, I’m sure, has Payman. In October, Thorpe interrupted a reception for King Charles and Queen Camilla in Parliament’s Great Hall with cries of “you are not my king!” and accusations of genocide. She was later censured.

I quite admired her audacity – I have enough imagination to conceive that the head of the British monarchy, presiding over Australia like some sort of … king, might be enraging to Aboriginal people. Why shouldn’t Thorpe shout about it?

“You’re not my king”: Lidia Thorpe heckled the visiting King Charles in Canberra.Credit: Getty Images, Alex Ellinghausen

But the more apposite question might be – will the shouting help the cause or hinder it? And, can you remind me what the cause is, exactly?

The tension between passion and pragmatism, between purity and practicality, has long been a fault line in progressive politics. When should an activist movement work with the status quo to change it, and when should it reject the status quo entirely? When to shout, and when to negotiate?

The conflict is old, but its urgency is fresh.

Following the pummelling of the Democrats in the US presidential election, much commentary has been spilled about the party’s mistakes. Many have blamed the censoriousness of the hard-left, and the righteous pleasure with which some of its members seem to take offence.

It was interesting to read, this week, a story in The New York Times (and reprinted in this masthead) about trans rights activists who are questioning the confrontational approach of the movement. The argument was that the rhetorical violence of some trans activists has alienated ordinary people. These are people who overwhelmingly believe in the substance of trans rights, but don’t like having their language policed, or their belief in biological sex dismissed as bigotry.

A change in tactics is badly needed because trans rights are in grave danger. President-elect Donald Trump, and members of his cabinet, have made their hostility to trans people known. MAGA Republicans, heady with their newly won power, have spent much of the past couple of weeks campaigning for a “congressional bathroom ban”, barring trans people in Congress from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender.

It is a nasty crusade clearly targeted at Representative-elect Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware who is the only openly trans person in Congress.

Meanwhile, a video this week made public by failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris was full of milquetoast Oprah-isms that did not match the level of threat faced by the left. The Vice President urged supporters to “not let anybody … take your power from you”.

The video was a timely example of how progressive rhetoric collapses when it doesn’t have a firm basis in concrete policy. Such rhetoric doesn’t win hearts or minds. But neither does the performative umbrage-taking of some of the left’s more self-indulgent activists.

There will always be a place for protest. But people will listen best to those who invite their respect. And I still can’t think of a better way to do that besides using the now-quaint tools of reason and forceful argument.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.

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