Australia –
Sanction for the senator who questioned King Charles III
The Australian Senate voted this Monday for a symbolic sanction against a senator who had questioned King Charles III.
AFP
Posted today at 3:59 a.m. Updated 14 minutes ago
Aboriginal Senator Lidia Thorpe addresses King Charles III and Queen Camilla during their visit to the Australian Parliament in Canberra on October 21, 2024.
AFP
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Aboriginal senator Lidia Thorpe received a symbolic sanction on Monday for having strongly questioned King Charles III on colonization during the monarch’s visit to the Australian Parliament at the end of October.
Senators voted 46 to 12 in favor of a motion of censure against Lidia Thorpe, deeming her behavior “infamous”, “disruptive and disrespectful”.
Censorship is a purely symbolic sanction aimed at expressing the dissatisfaction of elected officials regarding the actions of one of their own.
“Give us back our land”
During his six-day tour of the Oceanian country of which he is head of state, King Charles visited Parliament for a speech. At the end, Lidia Thorpe shouted: “Give us back our land, give us back what you stole from us!”
During a minute-long diatribe, she also proclaimed: “You are not my king”, denouncing what she called the “genocide” of the Aborigines at the time of European colonization of the Australia.
Lidia Thorpe then turned her back on the monarch and other dignitaries as they stood for the country’s anthem.
Never became a republic
Australia was a British colony for more than a century, during which thousands of Aboriginal Australians were killed and entire communities displaced. It gained de facto independence in 1901, but never became a republic. Charles III remains head of state.
On the national channel ABC, Lidia Thorpe said she was disappointed with her sanction, affirming that she would “do the same thing again if the king returned.
“I will resist colonization in this country. I pledge allegiance to the true rulers of these lands: the First Peoples are the true rulers,” she said, referring to Australia’s first inhabitants.
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