Australian senator Lidia Thorpe calls the Queen a ‘coloniser’ in mandatory oath of allegiance for parliament

An Australian senator has caused a stir by calling the Queen a “coloniser” as she swore the oath of allegiance in parliament after the country’s recent election.

Lidia Thorpe, who has previously been critical of the monarch, was the first Aboriginal senator elected for the province of Victoria.

At the swearing-in ceremony in the Senate in Canberra, the Greens senator held her right fist in the air in the “black power” salute and said: “I, sovereign Lidia Thorpe, do solemnly and sincerely affirm and declare that I will be faithful and I bear true allegiance to the colonising Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.”

Ms Thorpe, a DjabWurrung and Gunnai-Gunditjmara woman, read the oath again in its conventional form after colleagues warned that she was required to deliver it as printed, with one declaring: “You’re not a senator if you don’t say it.”

In her second delivery, she sarcastically emphasised “sincerely” and pronounced the word heirs as “hairs”, leaving little ambiguity over her view of the ritual.

Afterwards, she tweeted: “Sovereignty never ceded” – a reference to an Aboriginal political assertion that the British Crown asserted sovereignty over Australia without consent and that rights accrue to the Aboriginal people as the true heirs of the land.

All Australian lawmakers are required to swear an oath of allegiance to the monarch, who remains the head of state of the country of 25.6 million people.

Greens senator Lidia Thorpe holds up the Aboriginal flag at the Invasion Day rally in Melbourne in 2021 (Photo: Darrian Traynor/Getty)

Anthony Albanese, the recently elected Labor Prime Minister, is considered to be opposed to the continued constitutional role of the monarchy in Australia and has already appointed a minister for the republic, Matt Thistlethwaite.

“Ironically, under section 44 of the constitution, you cannot run for parliament if you hold allegiance to another country, yet the first thing we do in parliament is promise to serve a foreign monarch,” Mr Thistlethwaite told the Sydney Morning Herald ahead of the swearing-in.

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“It’s archaic and ridiculous. It does not represent the Australia we live in and it’s further evidence of why we need to begin discussing becoming a republic with our own head of state. We are no longer British.”

In its last referendum on monarchy in 1999, Australians voted by 55 per cent to 45 per cent to reject a republic with a president appointed by parliament.

Lidia Thorpe speaking on the steps of parliament last year (Photo: Getty)

Successive governments, including Julia Gillard’s Labor administration and Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal government, have been led by politicians who are republicans by conviction.

However the idea that the question should not be broached again until after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, who is generally popular, has gained a quiet consensus even among activists.

Mr Turnbull, formerly the head of a republican campaign group, described himself as an “Elizabethan” after meeting the monarch in 2017 and said that any change would come after her departure.

Recent polls have generally shown a plurality in favour of a republic, but with 25 per cent or more of respondents “undecided”.

Ms Thorpe has campaigned strongly on indigenous and postcolonial issues, including criticism of non-Aboriginal Australians. She is an advocate of Australians as a whole making reparations to Aboriginal peoples.