The insufferable attention-seeking of Lidia Thorpe

There was a sense of inevitability to the scenes at Australia’s Parliament House on Monday, where a ceremony for King Charles was gatecrashed by firebrand indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe. While the event has made headlines and caused a stir in Australia and the UK, anyone who has followed Australian politics must have suspected that any event placing Charles in the same building as Thorpe was unlikely to end well.

‘You committed genocide against our people’, Thorpe yelled at Charles, who was seated next to prime minister Anthony Albanese in the Great Hall. ‘Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people.’ She also called Charles a ‘genocidalist’ and rounded off her protest with ‘fuck the colony’.

When it comes to publicity-seeking protests, Thorpe has form. Throughout her time in public life the independent senator and unofficial leader of the supposedly radical wing of Australia’s indigenous-rights movement has been something of a walking tabloid headline. She referred to Queen Elizabeth as the ‘colonising’ Queen Elizabeth during her Senate swearing-in. She smears her hands in fake blood at public events, symbolising what she claims is the ongoing genocide of indigenous Australians.

Her antics don’t end there. Last year, she was filmed telling a group of men outside a strip club at 3am that they were ‘racist dogs’ with small penises. She was demoted by the Greens, her former political party, when it emerged she had been in a relationship with a senior member of the Rebels – one of Australia’s most notorious outlaw motorcycle gangs – while she sat on a parliamentary law-enforcement committee. Thorpe once told another female senator that ‘at least I keep my legs shut’ during a debate. She seems to spend half her life apologising to people, clarifying statements and deleting tweets. She is what Australians would call a loose unit.

While Albanese looked more like a tired parent during Thorpe’s outburst, Charles seemed typically unbothered. In fact, if getting abused by Lidia Thorpe is the worst he has to deal with on this trip (something that appears to be becoming a rite of passage in the Australian parliament), Charles might be able to chalk the trip up as a quiet success.

This was far from certain a week ago, when it emerged that Australia’s six state premiers had found their diaries too stacked to attend a reception with the king in Canberra. The Australian Republican Movement also made headlines with its latest marketing ploy, selling ‘Farewell Tour’ t-shirts ahead of the visit.

Thorpe’s outburst aside, what do Australians really think about the monarchy? The answer is not much. According to the latest polls, Charles is still more popular than any current Australian politician. Most Australians are still either indifferent to the monarchy or vaguely supportive of it. Malcolm Turnbull, the former prime minister who led the country’s failed republican referendum in the late-Nineties, has described Australians as ‘Elizabethans’ rather than monarchists. But while few would doubt that Charles lacks the reverence the public felt for his mother, or the star power of William and Kate, the changing of the guard seems to have hardly made a difference, at least for now.

This is not all that surprising. While there are good arguments for leaving monarchy behind, today’s republican movement – either in Australia or Britain – seems incapable of making any of them. Instead, it falls back on tiresome points about cost or, as in Thorpe’s case, a theatrical, attention-seeking grievance politics.

Thorpe and her acolytes deride Australia as an incurably racist backwater. The nation’s ongoing allegiance to the Crown is just one of many things that, in their eyes, prove this. While this might fly in the gentrified inner-north suburbs of Melbourne where Thorpe hails from (think Islington), it leaves everyone else cold. Most people would struggle to see the connection between the House of Windsor and the plight of indigenous Australians.

Charles can probably breathe easier in the knowledge that, if his first trip to Australia as king is anything to go by, his job might not be redundant as quickly as some expected.

Hugo Timms is an intern at spiked.