Lidia Thorpe’s expensive wailing

Unless parliament changes the rules, Australians are stuck with paying ex-Greens Victorian independent senator Lidia Thorpe almost $1m until her term ends in June 2028. On top of her $233,660 salary she receives a $25,700 allowance for chairing a committee, and from mid-2022 to mid-2024 she lodged eight quarterly expenditure claims totalling $618,157. No wonder she won’t budge. Given her contempt for the nation and parliament, Peter Dutton has rightly called on her to resign. She is bad value for money. And her foul-mouthed tantrum in front of King Charles on Monday shamed her people before the world, for which Indigenous academic Marcia Langton graciously apologised to the King on behalf of Indigenous Australians.

Like all Senator Thorpe’s ugly stunts, her tantrum, which many expected, was purely to grab headlines. Whatever penalty the Senate imposes should be as severe as possible but, ideally, starve her of the oxygen of publicity she craves. In the past year, she has also harmed her people’s cause by taking up the fight for Palestine against Israel, alienating longstanding Jewish Australian supporters of Indigenous reconciliation.

The last time a federal MP was expelled was in 1920, when Irish-born activist Hugh Mahon, the Labor member for Kalgoorlie, was ousted for “seditious and disloyal utterances”, which the lower house found was “conduct unfitting him to remain a member”. He wanted “the foundations of this bloody and accursed empire” shaken. The same cap fits Senator Thorpe. Neither House retains the power of expulsion. But she, not taxpayers, should fund her offensive harangues.