During a visit to Australia’s Parliament House for the second official day of his engagements in the country, King Charles was faced with shouts of “you are not my King” from independent senator, Lidia Thorpe. The senator, who interrupted the ceremony in the capital city of Canberra, shouted for about a minute before she was escorted away by security. Thorpe made claims of genocide against “our people” and yelled, “This is not your land, you are not my King.”
After the incident, which was never referred to during the conclusion of the ceremony, the royal couple met with members of the public who had waited outside the building to greet them. Australia is a Commonwealth country where the King serves as the head of state.
Thorpe, an independent senator from Victoria and an Aboriginal Australian woman, has advocated for a treaty between Australia’s government and its first inhabitants but Australia is the only ex-British colony without one, and many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people emphasise that they never ceded their sovereignty or land to the Crown. In a statement to the BBC, Thorpe expressed that she wanted to send a “clear message” to the King that instruction needed to be given to the Parliament to discuss a peace treaty with the first peoples. “We can lead that, we can do that, we can be a better country – but we cannot bow to the coloniser, whose ancestors he spoke about in there are responsible for mass murder and mass genocide,” she added.
Despite some dissenters gathered on the lawn in front of the Parliament House building, many others were excited about the royal couple’s visit, with people queueing outside all morning in the punishing Canberra sun, waving Australian flags. The royal visit to Canberra was always going to touch upon Australia’s history with its Indigenous peoples, but Thorpe’s intervention meant the King and Queen faced it more directly than initially planned.
For decades, Australia has debated whether to break from the monarchy and become a republic. However, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government has ruled out holding a second vote on the issue anytime soon. This visit is King Charles’s first since succeeding his mother Queen Elizabeth II. The royal couple’s tour is shorter than previous royal visits due to the King’s ongoing cancer treatment
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