Lidia Thorpe doesn’t hide who she is or what she wants. Photo: Lidia Thorpe Facebook.
Unless you happen to be a paid-up member of the Lidia Thorpe Fan Club, it’s hard not to blanch at the most recent antics of the recently independent senator from Victoria.
As every NRL player (and their lawyer) knows – nothing good happens at 3 am, outside a strip club.
Of course, this is just her latest episode.
About a month ago she was confronting a women’s rights activist on the lawns of Parliament House to stand up for trans rights. A month earlier she was disrupting Mardi Gras which supports, er, trans rights (confusing, isn’t it?). She’s a tough one to get behind.
Too radical for the Greens, if she were a Liberal she would have been cancelled on multiple occasions, not least in December 2021 when she was forced to apologise to Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes after making offensive inferences about Hughes’ son, who has autism, during a debate about people living with disabilities.
Thorpe is unsullied by reason but driven by the emotions of an attention-seeking three-year-old in need of a timeout and less sugar.
No wonder the chorus grows stronger for her to hand in her resignation.
Those calls are as unlikely as they are absurd.
For a start, Thorpe has never had it so good – as she lets us know.
Lidia Thorpe enjoying hospitality in the Chairman’s Lounge in May 2021. Image: Twitter.
Before entering Parliament – not the Senate, mind; remember, she was a member of the Victorian Parliament before she switched it up – she was an activist. There’s not much coin in that unless you’re a BLM founder, so she’s not about to surrender a job with a base salary north of $200,000 a year, lots of travel, the occasional entry into the Chairman’s Lounge and a handy bonus for each Senate committee in which to build a soapbox. Lidia is many things (insert list here … we can wait), but stupid isn’t one of them.
And here’s the kicker. For all her appallingness, it’s the reason she must remain a senator for as long as democracy demands.
Thorpe represents the angriest of angry Blak Australia who now have an unfiltered representative in Parliament. Right or wrong, she is bringing to the fore the id – the anger – of many sections of Blak Australia. And that’s important.
Take her stance on the Voice.
For her and her supporters, the Voice is not the end (because nothing is the end – the revolution can’t be ended), the Voice is just the beginning of her demands. That’s why she left the Greens.
“Now I will be able to speak freely on all issues from a sovereign perspective without being constrained by portfolios and agreed party positions,” she said on quitting the Greens on 6 February.
“Greens MPs, members and supporters have told me they want to support the Voice. This is at odds with the community of activists who are saying treaty before Voice.”
Thorpe is also why the Senate needs her analogue, Pauline Hanson.
For all their sins, both are truly representative of the voiceless (with or without the capital V). And isn’t that the point? Democracy is more than burned sausages and stale bread, it’s about voice. Swearing, dropped Gs and all.
Those two women represent the angry and the forgotten. You may not like it, but this is a good thing.
For years we have been told that Parliament should ‘look like the community it represents’.
It may not be pretty, but as activists have shouted at many a protest, this is what democracy looks like. It’s not always coherent. It’s not always pretty. But not much is at 3 am.
Loading ...
