Last week’s NAIDOC theme, “Keep the fire burning! Blak, loud & proud”, can easily describe Lidia Thorpe, the firebrand independent senator who last year quit the Greens to lead the Blak Sovereign Movement.
But while that theme was celebrated in morning teas across the country, Thorpe’s brand of loud Blak pride continues to generate disapproval across the media and political class.
Thorpe, a Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung mother, grandmother and activist, is quick to highlight the double standard.
“You can be Blak, loud and proud, but how dare you question the government? How dare you question a genocide?” she says when we spoke over the phone this week. “You have to be a certain Blak, loud and proud to be acceptable to those that are reading the papers and looking at the TV. They like to see an angry Blak woman in me. And that’s all that they show.”
Thorpe is angry — proudly so. “I have a lot to be angry about when we’re dealing with the rates of death amongst my people and just the blatant dismissal of our rights.”
Anger is often what drives her “disorderly conduct” in Parliament, leading to headlines like “Lidia Thorpe ordered to take a seat in a fiery Question Time” and “Lidia Thorpe forces Senate to close early in heated row.”
Some Indigenous leaders have accused Thorpe of aggressive behaviour, including Victorian First Peoples’ Assembly co-chair Geraldine Atkinson, who in 2021 sought medical assistance after being berated by her; others question her cultural authority.
But there’s no doubt it’s her unruliness that so upsets the white establishment.
Thorpe isn’t the only current senator to find that women of colour are allowed to be outspoken in certain ways and not others. Though the circumstances differ, Thorpe sees parallels between herself and Senator Fatima Payman, who recently quit Labor to speak out against the genocide occurring in Gaza.
She compares the way she was “white-anted within the Greens” — a reference to the bullying allegations she raised in the weeks following her departure, which she initially put down to her opposition to the Voice to Parliament — with what happened to Payman.
“It just gets to the point where you’ve got to stand by your values and draw the line and, yeah, and leave,” says Thorpe. “I feel like I broke those chains and I’m free to speak. And I know Senator Payman feels the same way.”
The 50-year-old senator cried watching Payman’s defection announcement, in which the 29-year-old raised both deaths in custody and child removal — issues on which Thorpe is getting little traction from the Albanese government.
“It’s a big step to take to leave these parties. And you know, I’m an older woman compared to Senator Payman, and I’ve been around the block a few times. And I know it was very hard for me and the backlash I got from that. But to see a younger woman do that was just so inspiring. And it was very, very brave for her to do that.”
Some argue Payman and Thorpe should return their seats to the parties they were elected representing. As Bernard Keane notes, progressives are often selective in applying this logic, happy for those they agree with to quit their party but stay on as independents.
Many senators, usually white ones, have done exactly that over the years. It’s no doubt frustrating for their parties, but it’s hard to argue Thorpe and Payman must resign when few do.
Thorpe has her own justification for why she shouldn’t have to.
“In terms of giving it back to the party, well, from my perspective, pay the rent, Greens. You talk about Blak issues. Well, you can pay the rent and watch me for the next four years be a senator.”
Thorpe’s priorities remain Treaty, which she sees as the only way to “end the war that was declared on us in 1788”, and Truth, the telling of which is required to “mature as a nation”, along with the overdue recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the Bringing Them Home report.
She supports the Greens’ proposed truth and justice commission and will be taking part in the inquiry, although she claims their new First Nations spokesperson, Dorinda Cox, won’t work with her, despite “a lot of healing” between her and the party since her very vocal departure.
“There’s been some mending of some relationships,” says Thorpe. “But, yeah, not with the one that I probably need to have a relationship with most of all, unfortunately.”
Thorpe and Cox once had offices about 20 metres apart, but late last year Cox requested that her office be relocated after initially raising concerns about Thorpe’s behaviour with the Senate president and the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service in June.
Cox, a West Australian Greens senator, told The Sydney Morning Herald she’d moved offices “to ensure the safety and wellbeing of myself and my staff,” adding she had felt singled out by Thorpe. “The confrontations [with Thorpe] have happened when I have been walking to a division, going about my business with my staff,” Cox said. At the time, Thorpe said she was unaware that Senator Cox had raised workplace safety issues and wasn’t aware of her office move.
Despite the unresolved tension with Cox and the challenges that come with not having a party machine behind her, Thorpe has relished being an independent these past 16 months.
“It’s been incredible. I don’t have to go to partyroom. I don’t have to deal with the internal politics of the party. And now I’m briefed on all legislation. So I know what goes on, and I’m able to have a say from a Blak woman’s perspective on all of the legislation that’s coming forward… I am free to self-determine what is best for our people.”
Thorpe attends regular meetings with crossbenchers from both houses, in which they share ideas and ask for support. This was how she gained support from an array of independents for recent calls for Labor to act on deaths in custody and child removals.
And though Thorpe says she won’t try to stay in the Senate beyond her term, she doesn’t want her seat to go back to the Greens. She wants to leave it with a young independent, revealing that she is planning to set up a Blak school of politics to mentor candidates, with the advice and backing of sovereign movement elders.
“I’m really excited about that. And when I’ve talked to Blak sovereigns around the country about the idea, they just want to sign up immediately… I’m saying two years before I leave, I want it established so that they have enough time to be ready for the election.”
Thorpe is enthusiastic about the potential of progressive independents, saying Payman’s defection from Labor has given her newfound optimism.
“I feel that it’s sent a shockwave through this country. And the feedback that I’m getting from people and major groups out there is that they want to support more independents.”
“I want to see more young people. I want to see more women. I want to see more people of colour. I want to see people with more lived experience of what it’s like to do it hard in this country… That’s where I’m going to be putting my efforts over the next four years of my remaining time in the Senate.”
