Lidia Thorpe has torn up a censure motion passed against her after the rogue senator interrupted King Charles‘ visit to Australia with a headline-grabbing protest.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong moved a censure motion against Ms Thorpe in the Senate on Monday morning, claiming her outburst during the King’s visit last month sought to ‘incite outrage and grievance’.
Ms Thorpe was not in the chamber to hear the censure motion, which passed by 46 votes to 12, prompting her to rip it up while on live TV on Sky News.
‘The censure motion is like that to me,’ she said as she pulled apart the paper.
‘I don’t give a damn about censure motion. In fact, I’m going to use it for kindling later on in the week.’
Mr Thorpe described the censure motion as a ‘piece of paper’ and a ‘vote’.
‘That’s what is wrong with the colony,’ she said.
‘There are rules that were made by a bunch of white fellas in 1901 that still stand today and that’s how politicians have got away with bad behaviour.’
The motion ‘censures Senator Thorpe for the disruptive and disrespectful conduct at the Parliamentary Reception, for her disrespect of democratic institutions, including our parliament of which she is a member’.
Dressed in a native fur coat, Ms Thorpe, 51, shouted that the monarch had ‘committed genocide against our people’ and added ‘f*** the colony’ during King Charles and Camilla’s visit Down Under in October.
Ms Thorpe yelled ‘shame on you!’ repeatedly at her fellow parliamentarians as she entered the chambers after the censure motion had been passed.
‘Order! Order! Order!’ responded the speaker Sue Lines.
‘Senator Thorpe, you are out of order! Senator Thorpe, come to order!’
But Ms Thorpe, who was wearing a necklace with the words ‘Not My King’ written on it, continued her tirade.
‘Shame on you all!’, she screamed.
She added: ‘I’ll do it again, and I’ll do it every time!’
A censure motion has no direct legal or constitutional consequences and is just a way of parliament expressing extreme disapproval.
Before her outburst in the chamber, Senator Thorpe wrote on X that the ‘censure motion shows where the major parties priorities lie’.
‘They don’t stand with First Peoples in this country. They stand against justice for our people, preferring instead to defend a foreign king, rather than listen to the truth,’ she wrote.
Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi criticised the motion and called on politicians to listen to the concerns of Indigenous Australians.
‘The bubble of white privilege that encapsulates this parliament is a systemic issue,’ she said.
‘That’s why we are here today, debating a Black senator being censured for telling the truth of the British crown’s genocide on First Nations people and telling it the way she wants to.’
Speaking to reporters after the motion was passed, Ms Thorpe said that all Labor and the Coalition achieved was to ‘give me more media, more exposure’.
‘If the colonising king were to come to my country again, our country, then I’ll do it again,’ she said.
‘And I will keep doing it. I will resist colonisation in this country.
‘I swear my allegiance to the real sovereigns of these lands, First Peoples are the real sovereigns.’
A censure motion was also brought against Senator Ralph Babet, who shared a list of appalling slurs on social media last week – daring ‘woke ass clowns’ to criticise him.
The Victorian Senator, who was elected in 2022 as part of billionaire Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party (UAP), shared a broadcast by misogynist influencer Andrew Tate a week agao.
‘My ni****r nailed this one,’ Mr Babet wrote on social media platform X. ‘One hundred percent.’
The Senator, an unmarried former real estate agent who was born in Mauritius and now earns a base salary of $233,000 after being the only UAP Senator to be elected, doubled down, daring anyone to criticise him.
‘In my house we say ph****t, re***d and ni***r. We are sick of you woke ass clowns,’ he wrote.
‘Cry more. Write an article. Tweet about me. No one cares what you think.’
Senator Wong said the government moved the censure motions ‘reluctantly’.
‘We all know both senators are engaging in these behaviors precisely in order to get attention, engaging in actions and stunts designed to create storms in social media, but offering nothing of substance to improve anyone’s life,’ she said.
‘These are actions which seek to incite outrage and grievance, actually to boost their own profiles. And this is part of a trend that we do see internationally, but frankly, we do not need here in Australia.’
The motion, which ‘censures Senator Babet for his inflammatory use of hate speech, designed to drive division for his own political benefit’, passed without needing a vote.
Mr Babet was also not in the chamber to hear the motion.
