Staunch critic of colonisation Senator Lidia Thorpe wants an audience with King Charles, for First Nations’ sovereignty written into the Constitution, and for the Albanese government’s Voice expert working group to meet with the black activist movement.
In an interview with the ABC, her first since quitting the Greens to become an independent, Thorpe said she would be “on the first plane” if she were to be invited to meet the King.
Senator Lidia Thorpe said she would be “on the first plane” if she were to be invited to meet King Charles.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
“I really want to meet with the King,” the Victorian senator said. “Why not? I am a senator. Surely, I can do that,” she told ABC TV on Tuesday.
Building on her pledge to be the voice of the Black sovereignty movement in the federal parliament, Thorpe called for a meeting with the working group of senior Indigenous leaders advising the government on the Voice. It comes after months of criticising the Voice in the lead-up to her split from the Greens, with Thorpe and the party able to reconcile their differences on the issue.
“I also question the government and the prime minister as to why [Opposition Leader] Peter Dutton was invited to meet with the working groups and not the grassroots Black sovereign movement,” she said.
“We’ve never been invited. Well, I’ve never been invited.”
She foreshadowed she would be making further announcements in the coming weeks about her plans for the sovereignty movement.
Hours after Thorpe’s defection on Monday, the Greens swiftly resolved to emphatically support the Yes campaign for the Voice, citing among their reasons that they had been reassured by information provided by the government guaranteeing that First Nations Sovereignty will not be ceded.
Explaining how she had personally reached a decision to support the Voice, WA Greens senator Dorinda Cox, the party’s sole remaining Indigenous MP, said she and Thorpe were “very different politicians” and she was confident sovereignty would not be affected.
“A lot of First Nations people within Western Australia in my electorate have told me that they back the Voice and I’ve nuanced that with all of the information around sovereignty around truth-telling,” Cox said.
ACT senator David Pocock, left, embraces Victorian senator Lidia Thorpe as she spent her first day in the Senate as an independent.Credit:Rhett Wyman
But Thorpe challenged Labor to include the guarantee as part of the Voice proposal.
“If Labor is saying it doesn’t cede it, then put it into the Constitution, put it into the legislation – that First Peoples are the sovereign people of these lands. If it’s no problem, then it’s no problem,” she said.
By joining the other independents on the crossbench, Thorpe potentially has a powerful bargaining position, with the government now forced to seek two crossbench votes instead of one, as well as the support of the Greens, when it does not have the Coalition’s support for its legislation.
Independent ACT Senator David Pocock, who has been a key crossbench vote courted by the government, welcomed Thorpe’s addition to the independent bloc, saying the new dynamics would strengthen their negotiation power.
“I believe that the change to the makeup of the Senate increases all of our capacity to push the government for more ambition and better outcomes on contested legislation,” Pocock said.
Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie is poised to become more powerful if the government cannot negotiate with Thorpe but wouldn’t weigh into the shift in power, saying only that she and her colleague Tammy Tyrrell were “heads down, bums up” and continuing as usual.
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