Senator Lidia Thorpe’s behaviour recently is completely unacceptable and, in my opinion, should result in her being removed from Parliament. This is because Senator Thorpe has intentionally and repeatedly betrayed the formal oath she – clearly reluctantly – made at her swearing-in. According to news.com:

Controversial Senator Lidia Thorpe has unloaded on King Charles in a shocking interruption after the monarch’s address to the Great Hall, as she tried to serve him a ‘notice of complicity in Aboriginal genocide’.

Senator Thorpe screamed out ‘f**k the colony’ and ‘you are not my King’ just moments after the monarch had delivered his address praising Australia.

She also yelled out a demand for ‘treaty’ and said ‘you stole our land’ and ‘you are not our King’.

‘Give us our land back that you f**king stole from us,’ she screamed.

This is not only rude, but such a defiant act of contumacy that the Senate has every right to expel Senator Thorpe as a Member of Parliament. One cannot decry the evils of colonialism whilst also accepting $250,000 per year from the Australian taxpayer.

Compare the repeated actions of Senator Thorpe to the oath which is supposed to be made by all senators before they take their seat and participate in the business of Parliament:

The Constitution provides that every Member of the House of Representatives, before taking his or her seat, must make and subscribe an oath or affirmation of allegiance before the Governor-General or some person authorised by the Governor-General. [58] The oath or affirmation takes the following form:

OATH

I, A.B., do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her heirs and successors according to law. SO HELP ME GOD!

AFFIRMATION

I, A.B., do solemnly and sincerely affirm and declare that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her heirs and successors according to law.

Significantly, Senator Thorpe failed to sincerely make the oath of allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen when she was initially required to. Instead of reading the oath, Senator Thorpe said, ‘I sovereign, Lidia Thorpe, do solemnly and sincerely swear that I will be faithful and I bear true allegiance to the colonising her majesty Queen Elizabeth II.’

While Senator Thorpe did finally comply after being reprimanded by the Chair, it was clear that it was under duress and was not genuine. What’s more, another senator was heard to say, ‘None of us like it.’ The Senate should really have had the political courage not to proceed with her installation as a senator back then.

Senator Thorpe has continued to stir controversy by posting on social media a decapitated picture of King Charles. However, she has since deleted the post and claimed the image was reposted by a staffer and that she never gave permission for it to be published.

Andrew Hastie, the Shadow Defence Minister, said in a recent social media post:

We witness once again the emotional incontinence of the activist left. Senator Lidia Thorpe disgraced herself and embarrassed us all by essentially abusing the King and the Queen just after he finished his address. She was promptly thrown out, but still it was the one downside of the day. Still it is a reminder that if we care about our institutions, we’ve got to fight for them because the activist left are always going to be coming for them.

Victor Davis Hanson likewise makes the important point in his book The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalisation Are Destroying the Idea of America (Basic Books, 2021):

Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating custom and tradition as by breaking laws.

In practical terms, the US Constitution guarantees citizens security under a republic whose officials they alone choose and that assures them liberties. What exactly are these privileges? Everything from free speech, due process, and habeas corpus to the right to own and bear arms, to stand trial before a jury of one’s peers, and to vote without restrictions as to race, religion, and sex. America, then, is only as good as the citizens of any era who choose to preserve and to nourish it for one more generation. Republics are so often lost not over centuries but within a single decade.

Hanson is absolutely right, ‘Sometimes citizens can do just as much harm to their commonwealth by violating custom and tradition as by breaking laws.’ Indeed, it is incomparably more destructive when done by an elected official. One who has promised to uphold the sovereignty of the very institution she has repeatedly said she is seeking to destroy.

It is crucial for the Australian Senate to uphold its customs and traditions lest our culture be irreparably corroded from within. This is not a political issue, but a moral one. Senator Thorpe has clearly rejected the oath she has hypocritically sworn to do and as such the Senate should vote to dismiss her from office.