Lidia Thorpe says she does not want to be a “thorn in the side” of the Albanese government as it pursues a referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament, but argues First Nations people should not be asked to set aside decades-long struggles in pursuit of an advisory body.
Speaking to Guardian Australia last month, the Djab Wurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara woman would not say whether she would vote yes on the referendum, based on the proposed draft wording of the question.
The sticking point is, as it always has been in Thorpe’s long opposition to the idea of an Indigenous voice to parliament, the question of sovereignty.
And like most of Thorpe’s politics, it both predates and has been unchanged by her time in state and federal parliament. It has been shouted at the frontlines of protests and on police barricades for decades: stop black deaths in custody, stop removing Aboriginal children from their families, land rights, treaty.
That constancy is, depending on whom you talk to, either Thorpe’s greatest strength or weakness. She is either stubborn or staunch; obstinate or uncompromising.
The referendum campaign has sharpened focus on the Victorian senator, who is the First Nations spokesperson for the Australian Greens. But anyone waiting for Thorpe to fall into line is bound to be disappointed.
‘Tinkering around the edges’
Thorpe was one of seven delegates who walked out of the Uluru convention in 2017, the forum that resulted in the drafting of the Uluru statement from the heart, over the issue of sovereignty. They held that forming a voice to parliament under the Australian constitution would be seen as ceding sovereignty – a thing that, all 250 delegates agreed, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had never done.
At the time, Thorpe was the cochair of the Victorian Naidoc committee. She has been involved in Aboriginal politics since birth: her grandmother, Alma Thorpe, helped found the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service in Fitzroy in 1973. Her mother, Marjorie Thorpe, was a commissioner of the stolen generations inquiry that produced the Bringing Them Home report. Her first job was working for her uncle Robbie Thorpe, who ran the Koori Information Centre in Fitzroy.
Sovereignty is not, for First Nations peoples, a trivial point. And the draft referendum question, outlined by the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, at the Garma festival, which states that parliament shall have power over the voice, has brought it to the fore.
“The parliament is supreme over an Indigenous voice,” Thorpe says. “And I think that’s the crux of it right there. We want a treaty so that we can have real power.”
Labor has, in order to reverse some of the damage done by the previous government’s bad faith reading of the Uluru statement, repeatedly stressed that the voice will be an advisory body only and one whose structure is under the parliament’s control. Those guarantees may have appeased non-Indigenous voters – and it is non-Indigenous voters who will decide the referendum – but it has not been met well by some First Nations voters.
“What I’m hearing from Aboriginal people across the country is that they want more power; they’re sick of being an advisory body,” Thorpe says. “We’ve had hundreds of advisory bodies to government and they’ve not really done much at all … So if we’re talking about having power and influence in this country, we need to be talking about treaty.”
The Uluru statement called for a treaty and a truth-telling process to occur alongside the referendum on the voice. Thorpe argues that those elements have been left behind, when they should be the main focus.
“Treaty can give us so much more than a constitutionally enshrined voice that has parliamentary supremacy over it,” she says.
“There is unfinished business in this country that needs to be reconciled and tinkering around the edges like an advisory body that the parliament chooses to take advice from or not – I don’t think that that goes far enough in terms of justice for our people in this country.”
Thorpe’s criticism of the voice was known before she was preselected by the Greens for the Victorian state seat of Northcote in 2017 and again to fill the Senate vacancy left by Richard Di Natale in 2020. Just last month, she referred to the referendum as a “complete waste” of money.
She softened some of her criticisms of the referendum this week after describing as “false and misleading” a report in the Australian that suggested she had met with Warren Mundine about their joint opposition to the voice. She has made a complaint about the report to the Press Council. (The Australian did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment about the story.)
On Wednesday, the South Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said: “My colleagues are going to be supporting the yes campaign.”
However, Thorpe’s critics are not confident that her negotiations with the government on the referendum will be genuine.
In that September conversation, Thorpe told Guardian Australia that she could make compromises out of pragmatism – then named the 2018 treaty advancement legislation in Victoria as “an example of how I can compromise even though it’s not that great”.
“It came down to the Greens to pass that legislation,” she says, “and we had 500 eagles poisoned on my country the night before that decision was made. That was a sign from my ancestors to say: don’t. Don’t pass it. Don’t pass it. It’s not good enough … and then the next day, I went in and supported it and felt like shit. Knowing that I supported something that is half-baked.”
Asked if that was the lesson that was in her head as she thought about the referendum process, Thorpe says: “Possibly, yes.”
Thorpe’s criticism of the Victorian treaty process has led to significant divisions with a number of highly respected members of the state’s Aboriginal community. That culminated last June in a dispute with the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria co-chair Geraldine Atkinson, which resulted in the latter making a formal complaint to the Greens leader, Adam Bandt. Thorpe’s former chief of staff reportedly sent an email to Atkinson apologising for the senator’s “appalling conduct”.
Bandt’s office says he wrote to Atkinson last month, acknowledging that he should have replied to the letter she wrote to him in June 2021 and that “he took the actions that she had requested of him at the time”. He said it would be inappropriate to comment further.
Thorpe tells Guardian Australia that “robust conversations and negotiations” were a feature of politics.
“I’m not sure why that person felt aggrieved but that happens all the time in parliament,” she says.
An Aboriginal Victorian, one of a number of critics of Thorpe who declined to speak on the record, said that since the incident with Atkinson, First Nations people were reluctant to publicly criticise the senator for fear of a backlash from within their own community.
Thorpe says she is not concerned that other First Nations people may be wary of criticising her.
“I’ve been given the mandate by my people to do what I do and say what I say,” she says.
Atkinson was approached for comment.
It is not the only damaging misstep of the past 12 months. In December, Thorpe publicly apologised to Liberal Hollie Hughes after she was accused of saying “at least I keep my legs shut” during a Senate debate. She later wrote an open letter to Greens supporters to apologise to them for the remark, saying: “I must be part of the solution in the fight to change the culture in Parliament House.”
Unmitigated blackness
Aboriginal activist and Victoria University history professor Gary Foley says that criticism from conservative commentators is an indication that Thorpe is doing a good job.
“I think she’s brilliant,” he says. “I think she’s doing all the things that her constituency – and when I say her constituency, I’m not talking about the Greens, I’m talking about the Aboriginal people of Victoria – she’s doing what they want her to do.”
Prof Chelsea Watego says Thorpe represents a kind of “unmitigated blackness” not often seen in Australian institutions.
“Oftentimes in order to get entry into these particular places, these positions of power, one has to present as palatable, as conservative, as non-threatening, as moderate,” Watego says. “And she hasn’t done that, yet she is there.”
Watego, a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman, is a professor of Indigenous health at the Queensland University of Technology. She is part of Thorpe’s second constituency: not a Victorian but a First Nations person who has not felt represented in parliament before.
“She may be a member of a political party but it’s clear whose side she is on when it comes to issues facing our mob,” Watego says.
Watego says this uncompromising presentation has made Thorpe a source of strength for her and other First Nations people, particularly First Nations women.
Strength has also been drawn from moments that have been heavily criticised by sections of the mainstream media, to the point of calling Thorpe not fit to be in parliament, but widely circulated and celebrated on social media.
Moments like referring to Queen Elizabeth II as a coloniser when making her oath of office in August; arguing that the federal government’s $20m copyright acquisition of the Aboriginal flag meant the symbol had been “colonised by the Australian government”; and calling for a republic following the Queen’s death.
But it would not matter, says Watego, if Thorpe changed her manner and stopped protesting.
“Even if she was to be moderate, even if she was to adapt and change, she would still be despised by settlers,” Watego says. “There would still be people indignant that she dare occupy that space as a black woman.”
