Was Lidia Thorpe’s attack on Hollie Hughes a greenwash?

Lidia Thorpe, left, and Hollie Hughes. Pictures: News Corp

There is, if we are to understand correctly, a sinister and spectral presence that lurks in the Senate chamber at Parliament House. It is a force both malevolent and omnipotent. So much so that it can possess serene and pure social justice types and compel them to act in a manner contrary to their principles.

We saw this just last Wednesday, when Greens senator Lidia Thorpe said to her Liberal counterpart Hollie Hughes “At least I keep my legs shut” during a Senate debate.

To be clear, I do not deny this is hateful and misogynist slur against Hughes, but there is no doubt Thorpe was experiencing distress at the time, as evident by her subsequent statement when she was called out.

“I just got a view of something over there that disturbed me, but I’m happy to retract,” she said.

Shallow and partisan individuals may well claim this was a manufactured excuse, and a nonsensical one at that, but I believed Thorpe’s explanation.

I, too, have experienced this disturbing phenomenon. Only yesterday I was at the local supermarket when I just got a view of a packet of brussels sprouts, a vegetable I truly detest. Triggered, I turned to a random stranger in the aisle. “You are nothing but a two-dollar whore,” I screamed at her.

As to what Thorpe supposedly saw that prompted her to make the remarks in question, she did not elaborate, presumably because it was too disturbing for her to revisit.

Indeed, there are any number of horrific hypotheticals that could have caused her outburst. She could have been contemplating the possibility of Qantas withdrawing her Chairman’s Lounge privileges. Unlikely as it is to happen, she may have believed she was about to be reassigned a portfolio where she would be expected to actually do something other than incessantly whine. Few things would be more traumatic to the likes of Lidia than the derailing of their gravy train.

There is the remote possibility Thorpe was not distracted by a mysterious object or presence at the time, and that she knew full well the significance of her slur, which would mean that her excuse was a big fib.

Anti-misogynist credentials

Perish the thought, for Thorpe herself has impeccable anti-misogynist credentials.

As she said in the Senate following the women’s ‘March 4 Justice’ protests this year, “Yesterday was so uplifting, to see so many thousands of people, largely women, come together, united in our message that rape, sexism, violence and misogyny are not women’s issues; these are issues for our entire society to reckon with”.

Lidia Thorpe says she saw ‘something over there’ which disturbed her, but did not elaborate on what it was. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Only days later Thorpe outlined the misogyny she had allegedly experienced at Parliament House, saying MPs had made “suggestive comments” about her hairstyle and clothes.

“I’ve got to work with these people,” she said. “I’m a friendly person and they somehow think that that gives them permission to violate and sexualise me and other women in this place.” Who among us would think the friendly Thorpe would intentionally besmirch another woman by means of a sexist and vile slur?

That, as we know, would be hypocrisy, and I will not be silent when someone maligns the Greens with that accusation. Witness for example Greens leader Adam Bandt’s spirited address to the House of Representatives in 2018 regarding the need to combat misogyny. “Family and domestic violence is a problem that begins and ends with men,” he said.

Bandt’s view

“Mainly it is men who perpetrate this violence against their partners and their family. It is men, imbued with entitlement and misogyny, who scar our collective national consciousness.

“And it is men, not women, who must change their behaviour. It’s clear that we need to alter the way that we raise our boys. We need to teach them to respect women and that violence is abhorrent. It’s clear that we all have a role to play to stop this from happening.”

Exactly what role Bandt plays in teaching others to respect women is unclear. As the Sydney Morning Herald noted last week on the day following Thorpe’s offensive remarks, “Bandt did not publicly discipline his MP on Thursday or address the controversy, despite repeated requests for comment”. He finally responded on Friday, saying what she said was “wrong” and “inappropriate”.

‘She didn’t try to excuse it’

“She didn’t try to excuse it,” he said in her defence, noting that Thorpe had apologised to Hughes. Aside from attributing the cause of her remarks to a cosmic apparition, that is. Claiming Thorpe had “took ownership of it straight away,” he insisted her apology reflected well on her. “What is lacking in parliament often is people taking responsibility for the things that they say and acting on it and trying to pass the buck,” he said.

Asked whether he had apologised to Hughes on behalf of the Greens, Bandt said this was not necessary. This was despite Hughes’s decrying that not a single member of the Greens had contacted her following Thorpe’s repulsive insinuation. A classic example, you could say, of Bandt trying to pass the buck.

Adam Bandt says Thorpe was ‘wrong’, but the Greens didn’t reach out to Hollie Hughes. Picture: Jay Town

“If Senator Hughes wants more, she can reach out,” he said.

It would be easy to interpret Bandt’s casual response as that of a weak and insipid leader. But that is to misconstrue both him and the Greens’ ideology. His breezy dismissal of the need to do anything further was a passive-aggressive act, a tacit suggestion that Hughes is overreacting and undeserving. The unspoken corollary is that conservative women are not entitled to the same level of respect as their progressive counterparts.

In fairness to Bandt, he is simply observing a party tenet. Take for instance Greens senator Jordon Steele-John and his bizarre and angry outburst against West Australian columnist Gemma Tognini in 2019. Tognini, who also writes for this newspaper, had asserted that schoolchildren were being used for political leverage in the so-called climate strikes. Tweeting in response, Steele-John labelled her a “right wing nut job” and told her to “shut the f … up”. He later apologised and deleted the tweet but suffered no other consequences for his behaviour.

That same year then Greens leader Senator Richard Di Natale refused to disendorse George Hanna, the party’s candidate for the Northern Territory federal seat of Lingiari. Hanna had shared a meme on Facebook that used the racist epithet “coconut” to describe his Country Liberal rival and Indigenous woman Jacinta Price. Not only that, he claimed in a previous Facebook post she was a “little gremlin” who had crawled out of the sewer. Forced later to apologise to Price for the coconut slur, he said he “posted the meme in the jest of the moment”.

Hilarious, no? Presumably the number of Greens who “reached out” to Price following this abuse was the same as those who contacted Hughes last week – zilch.

As for Thorpe, it is not the first time she has been accused in her current role of verbally abusing women. The Age reported in June she had allegedly berated First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria co-chair Aunty Geraldine Atkinson at a meeting in Parliament House. In addition to speaking over the top of the Indigenous elder, Thorpe allegedly told her in an aggressive tone: “I am an Australian senator. You are in my meeting”. Atkinson, who is in her seventies, was so distressed and intimidated she left the meeting to seek treatment from the parliamentary nurse.

History of clashes

In the lead-up to Thorpe’s slur against Hughes, both women had clashed over procedure. Thorpe had interjected when the Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Linda Reynolds, was answering a question, the former protesting that two Indigenous women had died in custody in the previous eight hours. Hughes had reminded Thorpe this was the International Day of People with Disability. When Thorpe later said “At least I keep my legs shut,” the comment was inferred not only by Hughes but by other senators across parties to be a reference to the latter’s autistic son. Thorpe denies she intended this meaning.

As for what supposedly disturbed Thorpe in the Senate chamber, we can be confident it was not her conscience. She is without one.