
Calling Lidia Thorpe “un-Australian”, as occurred in Canberra on 22 October, is to be reminded that being “Australian” is to grovel to British royalty, to curtsy, genuflect and pay homage and allegiance to an anti-democratic institution, to a man who has wealth, position, entitlement and power due to birth, and birth only.
To be “Australian” is to demonstrate publicly a loyalty to colonial servility, a commitment to the British crown as the bulwark symbol of the peak of socio-political status below which the various ranks of forelock-tuggers find their place.
It is no doubt confusing or simply laughable or quaintly absurd to many people in other places that “Australians” can have so many masters who they pay to please, to imitate, to obey and follow like puppets on multiple strings.
If it’s not being vassals to Washington and saying dinner at the White House is by far “the best date of all”, or calling India’s Narendra Modi “the boss” and doing his bidding, or supporting Hungary’s “illiberal” kleptocrat Viktor Orban or adopting Donald Trump’s brand of politicking, or accepting positions working for US arms manufacturers, being “Australian” is refusing to comply with just about every UN convention and resolution on human rights since 1948, now including the Genocide Convention.
Thank goodness for Lidia Thorpe being “un-Australian”. Thank goodness for the courage of Lidia Thorpe in exposing the whole cabal of Labor-Coalition politicians and the “Australian” hangers-on brigade for who they really are and who they really represent in their forked-tongue rhetoric about “democratic values”, “political transparency” and lies about “holding ourselves to higher standards”.
Thank goodness for Lidia Thorpe for standing up in the midst of a crowd of sycophants whose whole notion of being “Australian” is to rip the joint to pieces, to wreck the rivers, destroy the forests and native animals, and to ensure that the three pillars of the Uluru Statement from the Heart are never implemented.
Thank goodness for Lidia Thorpe standing tall amongst a crowd of spruiked-up midgets, the political heirs of people like nineteenth century NSW politicians and squatters William Charles Wentworth and James Macarthur, whose plan in the 1850s to create a NSW legislative council consisting of an upper house of landed hereditary noble peers was scuttled by Daniel Deniehy labelling them a “bunyip aristocracy”.
For there was something deeply flawed in the prime minister’s extremely fawning speech of welcome to Charles III. “We know the institution is secure in your hands”, said Albanese, just one of many Menzies-like phrases of glittering praise Albanese uttered, much of it downright embarrassing in its excessive unctuousness, while also sending a message that he was certainly no republican.
In a sense the language that Albanese used was a betrayal which would have made Gough Whitlam put him in the same compartment with John Kerr, something which won’t have been lost on those who are coming to regard Albanese as more Tory than the Tories.
So we shall see, in due course, how the issue of Lidia Thorpe’s “un-Australian” behaviour of “breaching” her “allegiance to our sovereign”, as one Liberal politician has suggested, will be handled. We shall see the terms by which she is duly “censured” by the senate, and what resolutions are passed in condemnation by the minions of the British monarch in colonial Australia.
Lidia Thorpe is the second proud and courageous woman who has stood above most of the rest in the federal parliament in the name of basic human rights this year, the other being Fatima Payman. Thorpe and Payman have exposed a refusal by the Labor-Coalition political class to allow dissent from Australia’s rote roles of vassalage to the US and UK.
Aboriginal journalist Celeste Liddle wrote in the Guardian on 23 October that she and many other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were proud of Lidia Thorpe and what she did in shouting the truth to Charles III, but there are also many other people living in Australia from a range of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds who applaud her and admire her as well.
If she is “un-Australian”, then to be “Australian” has no worthy meaning at all.