Lidia Thorpe: Anyone who sparks outrage on both the left and the right must have something going for her

Senator Lidia Thorpe in a Melbourne strip club controversy. The politician was captured on camera at 3am this morning yelling profanities at a group of men. Picture: 7 News

If we learned anything this week it is that Lidia Thorpe is a neodymium magnet for trouble. For all that, I’m starting to warm to the independent senator. Anyone who sparks outrage on both the left and the right must have something going for her.

And let’s face it, she’s not the first parliamentarian to be seen in a state of heavy refreshment. Nor the first to have crossed the threshold at a strip club.

In an odd moment of hands across the political divide, the Greens tub thumping moralist, Mehreen Faruqi and One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson led the calls for a police investigation.

Amid audible tut-tutting with brows theatrically furrowed, Faruqi declared, “I think no one should actually behave in that manner.”

“People have been calling for investigations. I will just leave it and see where the investigation leads.”

Pauline Hanson is people and she had indeed called for the wallopers to play third umpire, examining the video where the girl who now sits next to her in class got a bit shouty and sweary.

“I think Victoria police should be carefully examining that footage to determine if Senator Thorpe has broken the law,” Hanson huffed.

“I think the people subjected to her abuse on the weekend should come forward and see that she is held accountable, because the Senate has shown it’s too gutless to do so.

“No one – least of all an elected representative of the people – is above the law and I think many Australians would be appalled at a senator abusing her privilege like this.

“While Senator Thorpe may not recognise the law or think other Australians belong here the fact is that we all share the public space, even if it’s a footpath outside a Brunswick strip club at 3am on a Sunday morning, and we have a right to be in it without being racially abused.”

The first thing to cross my mind is the more than passing resemblance in the way the two senators communicate. Despite sitting on the fringes on either end of the ideological spectrum, Faruqi and Hanson both begin telling us what they think by prefacing their remarks with the superfluous ‘I think’.

We already knew that. It’s why your mouths were open.

I think they need to calm down, just quietly.

Dragging Thorpe’s dad out for a character reference as Andrew Bolt did on SkyNews might seem to be a low blow but it was just another comic moment in an amusing career. It transpires that a woman who refers to Australia as a colony and claims victimhood at the hands of white occupiers, albeit in the studied gentrification of North Fitzroy, might just be a bit racist. Or at least her dad thinks so, who also confessed, again to the surprise of no one, to spoiling her when she was a child.

For all her outrages and scandals, the most intriguing element of Thorpe’s political career, laced with fiery rhetoric and hands dripping with fake blood, is where she stands on the Voice.

And you know, it’s really not clear.

Despite walking out of the First Nations National Constitutional Convention in Uluru back in May 2017 and staging a media conference outside the big, red rock, the ever-outraged senator is having five bob each-way.

And all this indecision comes after tormenting her Greens colleagues who support the Voice while she, as their indigenous affairs spokesperson, said she did not. At one point she did assert herself as sole spokesperson within the Greens on the Voice, forbidding anyone else from speaking publicly on or even about it. A clearly terrified Adam Bandt gave her the thumbs up.

Stills from a video of Senator Lidia Thorpe who laid down in front of the Australian Federal Police float during the Sydney Mardi Gras causing a short disruption to the parade.

The equanimity did not last. Back in February, Thorpe staged a solo walk out of the Greens party room. She and her federal parliamentary Greens bedfellows had been away for the previous weekend on a retreat (the mind boggles at the breakfast menu alone) before she decided she, in good faith, could no longer break organic wholemeal sourdough bread with them any longer.

“Greens MPs, members and supporters have told me they want to support the voice. This is at odds with the community of activists who are saying treaty before voice,” Thorpe declared and immediately took up a seat next to Hanson on the crossbenchers causing further anxiety.

If Thorpe’s political gymnastics and physical comedy means causing angst and anguish to the Greens and Pauline Hanson, I have to say, I am all for it.

Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe after attempting to disrupt British women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, also known as Posie Parker at a “Let Womaen Speak” rally outside Parliament House in Canberra on March 23.

Post-Greens, Thorpe has appointed herself as a representative of what she called a black sovereign movement (I’ve inserted a ‘c’ before the ‘k’ because well, you know, standards must be maintained).

“This country has a strong grassroots black sovereign movement, full of staunch and committed warriors, and I want to represent that movement fully in this parliament. It has become clear to me that I can’t do that from within the Greens,” Thorpe said before heading off to scare the bejesus out of Pauline Hanson.

You’d imagine that two months later, Thorpe would have a strong position on the Voice and either be furiously denouncing it or slamming her fists on the table in support of it.

Alas, no dice. In her public remarks not uttered outside strip clubs, Thorpe says she will ‘hold it right to the line’ in not declaring a position on the Voice.

She claims she won‘t make up her mind until the government and the parliament act to implement all the recommendations contained within two royal commission reports - Bringing Them Home (1997) and Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991) which might be a matter of principle but it is a principle she appears to only have held dear for the last two months.

Ultimately, it looks like a vision from the primary school playground where the last kid to be picked on the footy side stands silently waiting to be picked but is unwanted by either mob.

Indeed, what side she does take up, could find themselves losing by weight of her advocacy alone.