"You are not our King", so who is?

Who the bloody hell are we?

Thorpe’s words were strong and resonant, and had already echoed past the unsettled ceremonial pomp inside the Great Hall of Parliament House, out the doors, and into the global news cycle. (Source: Twitter/X @TonyLomas)

“You are not our king,” Lidia Thorpe bellowed out before UK monarch, King Charles III, who sat bewildered next to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us”. As Thorpe was escorted out of the room, the King and The PM looked almost slightly amused, exchanging what seemed to be some light hearted reactions to the clearly tense moment. A quartet tried to quieten it down with an awkwardly fitting rendition of Handel’s “Lascia ch'io pianga” maybe in an attempt to reset the mood, but Thorpe’s words were strong and resonant, and had already echoed past the unsettled ceremonial pomp inside the Great Hall of Parliament House, out the doors, and into the global news cycle.  

In other parts of the world, people found it less strange that an elected indigenous Senator could deliver such a protest to an unelected foreign monarch, but the domestic press back home in Australia started furiously scrawling to their overplayed, grimy and worn out “Lidia Thorpe is outrageous songbook”. But they missed the forest from the trees like they usually did, choosing to attack Thorpe but disregard her message.

Apart from the spectacle being astounding to witness in itself, Thorpe had claimed she was attempting to hand the king a "notice of complicity in Aboriginal Genocide" that cited the Statute of the International Criminal Court 1998. This uncomfortable moment comes at a time where the unpopular visiting monarch, whose country is involved with us in a disastrous AUKUS agreement, was joining the other partner to order us to help them support a rolling genocide being carried out by their ally in Gaza, to allow a worsening conflict in Lebanon, and a potential World War III scenario with Iran. Orders our government have so far carried out to a tee.

In the wake of a poorly delineated, communicated, and administratively fraught and failed Voice Referendum in 2023, just after our sovereign abrogation by the under-vetted codification of a now malfunctioning AUKUS program, and as the bipartisan apparatus pledged their support for the prolonged attack on the first nation people of Gaza by Israel only weeks before the vote was cast in November 2023, Thorpe’s protest has dragged the much maligned topic of Australian identity back before the sleepy people of Terra Nullius, revealing the historically alarming debonded cohesion between the population and the political class in Canberra. Mid-genocide and post-failed referendum, a few budgets of offering no generational taxation reform, housing, or meaningful cost of living solutions, and a bunch of coal and gas mines later, the Albanese government has futilely attempted to skip into its small potato neoliberal TV dinner policies without a valuable contribution or a definitive idea about what our nation needs to service its own interest.

People are deflated that there are no grand national visions from our leaders. People are upset about the closed door NACC, disappointed that here will be no once in a generation housing program, confused that there will never be a Murdoch Royal Commission, or a super-profits tax. Run-of-the mill neoliberal policy offerings like cheaper childcare for struggling parents to feed the metrics of the productivity commission, or a reheated version of Scomo’s tax cuts, don’t offer enough. Not with half a trillion dollars of nuclear submarine money that is not getting us nuclear submarines anymore, not when Australians see year-on-year record profits for tax dodging foreign owned multi nationals with one-in-six children living in poverty, and certainly not when they see our weapons components, trade envoys and diplomats prolonging and obfuscating on behalf of those who commit a horrible and avoidable genocide in Gaza.

As a consequence of the deadening of our national identity at the hands of bereft ideological miscreants in Canberra, who have abrogated their remit to represent the Australian people who reluctantly elect them into office, we somehow manage to send off 80% of our Natural resources to tax-dodging foreign owned multinationals despite tripling production over the last fifteen years and opening new mines willy nilly. Bereft of sovereign imagination, our leaders forgo the honest work of implementing bold ideas like a sovereign wealth fund, a national public housing program, an independent minded defence strategy in the national interest, or even just a moral, sane, reasonable and proportionate diplomatic response to condemning a genocide. And without a definitive national compass or a meaningful connection to the electorate, an isolated political bubble in Canberra hides away and outsources our sovereign and economic future to the self-interested predatory actuators of a rapidly changing world.

Just when we need pragmatic and sound-minded national thinkers in leadership, a succession of bipartisan governments, weak on foreign policy, continue to outsource our strategic agency, resulting in default decision-making outside the national interest. Over twenty years of aimlessness in the conflicts that dotted the Global war on terror have coincided with a new generation of major party politicians that have become accustomed to delegating their sovereign responsibilities to Washington in favour of more time to conduct small minded political gamesmanship, handing away our nation’s ability to act rationally in our own interest, so they can act selfishly in the interests of their own.

A culture of vapid leadership pervades our society in this ideologically stale country, where their force-fed status-quo reeks of atrophy, and trickle down change resistance is enforced to keep us semi-conscious in an encroaching nightmare. We are held in situ by a hypervigilant corporate media and oligarchical warlords who writhe in rage at instances like Thorpe’s powerful statement, while they obfuscate and dither around the selective threads of a year-long blanket genocide, afraid of people who make statements that break that matrix of influence they hold, and prepared to destroy anyone that dare challenge the country they hollow out at our expense with a cohort of politicians engineered to protect them.

A hollow feeling rings out in the mortgage holder, the whistle blower, the gig-employee, the humanitarian, the “new Australian”, the elderly and the youth – an aimlessness perpetuated by a political experiment carried out by an alliance of corporate, media and political operators. Without a national direction, we suffer from a national anomie. Reduced into the lowest common denominator, and knowing that our elected leaders openly work counter to our interest, an epigenetic despair grips us all, and we can see it in each other eyes wherever we go. Thorpe’s accusation of theft speaks of a more resounding feeling within the Australian people, and gives us a chance to reflect on the things that have been stolen from Australia in the name of foreign empires, to retrospectively acknowledge the harmfulness of underlying external influences that have defined our modern history, and ponder what else could be.

After the outburst, Albanese is touring corporate owned ‘build to rent’ projects with King Charles and NSW Premier Chris Minns, all three of them pretending that things are normal and ok the way that they are. But with AUKUS revealed to be a submarine-free half a trillion dollar cluster-fuck and a sovereign pitfall, with our economy rigged to favour foreign owned profit-riddled corporate giants, and with our entire major party political apparatus bending our nation around support for a foreign sponsored genocide, many of us are now asking about who we are, what we have become, and what we need to be.

The lack of identity and purpose sees us trapped between the ideologies of cold hard superpowers, in lieu of the continuity of organic Australian ideas. We are stuck in a dominion mindset forged by our colonial dependency, while sensorily abused by a hostile media, and without honest leaders that lack the wisdom, ability and tradecraft to devise Australia’s independent framework, we fail to form a cohesive identity together as a multicultural island continent nation at the bottom of the earth with untapped and unique potential. With no one in politics bold enough to dream in the national interest, and everyone in the business and military industry lobby groups that hover around them bold enough to do everything it takes to stop from becoming so, the best our leaders can do is conjure the ghosts of former greats and the nostalgia of a time that no one can remember anymore, and the best we can do is feel the rising anomie in our collective hearts, and all the despair and hopelessness and self-destruction that brings. Senator Thorpe’s protest has offered us a chance to open a new national conversation to find out who we really are, and to ask ourselves who our king really is.