AN Australian senator has been forced to retake her oath after pledging allegiance to the “colonialist Queen” during a swearing-in ceremony.
Lidia Thorpe, who is an indigenous member of Australia’s Upper House, raised a clenched fist while reciting the altered oath.
Reading aloud from a printed card, she 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 the Queen.”
The move, which saw Thorpe add the word “colonising” to the original phrasing, ruffled feathers among her colleagues, some of whom were quick to call on the Green Party senator to rectify her error.
One told her: “You can’t be a senator if you don’t do it properly.”
Thorpe responded by re-reading the oath correctly, removing the reference to colonisation.
Later, the senator tweeted a photo showing her fist raised in the air, accompanied by the caption “Sovereignty never ceded.”
Sovereignty never ceded. https://t.co/OowLrlUApy
— Senator Lidia Thorpe (@SenatorThorpe) August 1, 2022
Thorpe’s actions were supported by the leader of the Green Party, Adam Bandt, who said the Queen “always was, always will be,” a coloniser.
It is compulsory for parliamentarians to swear allegiance to the monarch under the Australian constitution.
The Green Party is not the only Australian party showing contempt towards the monarchy.
Just last week, Matt Thistlethwaite for the republic from the incumbent Labor party said swearing allegiance to the Queen was “archaic and ridiculous.”
It comes after the Labor MP’s exclusive interview with The National, in which he said that Australia would move through the process of removing the monarchy “slowly, progressively, and methodically”, but made clear a vote on the monarchy would not occur in this three-year parliamentary term.
Speaking on the issue of the monarchy in Australia, Thistlethwaite said: "Many of them don’t know that the Queen is our head of state,” he said.
“She is on our money, but this issue hasn’t really been on the agenda in Australia for close to thirty years. There’s a whole generation of Australians who don’t understand our constitution.”
