ROD McGUIRK
Sun, October 27, 2024
Australian Senator Lidia Thorpe, center, disrupts proceedings as Britain's King Charles III and Queen Camilla attend a Parliamentary reception hosted by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and partner Jodie Jaydon at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (Lukas Coch/Pool Photo via AP)
In this image made from video, Australian Indigenous Senator Lidia Thorpe speaks in a television interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in Melbourne, Australia, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024.
(Australian Broadcasting Corporation via AP)
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — A woman appeared in an Australian court on Monday charged with a May assault on the Indigenous senator who shouted at King Charles III during a royal reception last week.
The assault allegedly occurred on May 25, when independent Sen. Lidia Thorpe attended an Australian Rules Football match in her hometown of Melbourne.
Ebony Bell, 28, appeared by a video link in Melbourne Magistrates’ Court. She has been charged with two counts of recklessly causing injury and three counts of unlawful assault at a stadium.
A police statement described the 51-year-old senator’s injuries from the alleged assault as “minor.”
But she said in a statement to the AP on Monday she had “sustained serious nerve and spinal injuries in my neck, which required spinal surgery and a plate to be inserted.”
The assault was reported to police the next day and Bell was arrested on July 25. The women knew each other, but the motive for the alleged attack was not explained in court.
Bell’s lawyer Manny Nicolosi told Magistrate Belinda Franjic the prosecution case had “real deficiencies.” He said the prosecution had on Friday made an “offer,” an apparent reference to a plea deal.
“I haven’t had enough time to really consider it,” Nicolosi told the court.
Nicolosi explained that his Indigenous client hadn’t appeared in court in person because of “recent threats.” The lawyer did not elaborate on those threats.
Bell remains free on bail until she appears in court next on Nov. 22. The magistrate agreed to allow her to appear again by video.
Thorpe made her first public statement about the alleged assault after she launched an expletive-laden rant at Charles during a reception in Australian Parliament House in Canberra last week.
“You are not our king. You are not sovereign,” Thorpe yelled at Charles as she was led by security guards from the reception.
“You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us: our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people,” she added.
The main opposition party has called for Thorpe to resign from the Senate due to her attitude toward Charles, who is Australia’s head of state, and have requested legal advice.
Thorpe is renowned for high-profile protest action. When she was affirmed as a senator in 2022, she wasn’t allowed to describe the then-monarch as “the colonizing Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.” She briefly blocked a police float in Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Madri Gras last year by lying on the street in front of it. Last year, she was also banned for life from a Melbourne strip club after video emerged of her shouting abuse at male patrons.
She revealed her injuries after The Australian newspaper reported she had missed 16 of the Senate's 44 sitting days this year.
“I was ordered by the doctor not to travel and could not attend parliament after I sustained the injury and during recovery from surgery. My doctor told me to take time off work,” her statement said.
“I would have preferred to keep this matter private and I will not be commenting on it further at this stage,” she added.
Thorpe was widely criticized for being disrespectful to the monarch during her outburst last week.
She faces a further backlash next week when senators sit for the first time since the royal visit.
Her office said Monday she has not decided whether she plans to attend senate committee meetings in person or remotely.
She also raised questions about the validity of her appointment to the Senate when she recently said she had deliberately affirmed her allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and her “hairs,” rather than “heirs,” during her affirmation ceremony in 2022 to exclude Charles. Thorpe later walked back that statement, saying the mispronunciation was accidental.
Lawyers agree that a mispronunciation did not invalidate an affirmation and that Thorpe also signed a written version of the affirmation of allegiance with the correct wording.
Sydney University constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey said the Senate's ability to discipline Thorpe was limited because her outburst occurred outside the chamber in Parliament's Great Hall.
‘Not my King’ protest row highlights Australian divisions
Hannah Ritchie - BBC News, Sydney
Sat, October 26, 2024
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — A woman appeared in an Australian court on Monday charged with a May assault on the Indigenous senator who shouted at King Charles III during a royal reception last week.
The assault allegedly occurred on May 25, when independent Sen. Lidia Thorpe attended an Australian Rules Football match in her hometown of Melbourne.
Ebony Bell, 28, appeared by a video link in Melbourne Magistrates’ Court. She has been charged with two counts of recklessly causing injury and three counts of unlawful assault at a stadium.
A police statement described the 51-year-old senator’s injuries from the alleged assault as “minor.”
But she said in a statement to the AP on Monday she had “sustained serious nerve and spinal injuries in my neck, which required spinal surgery and a plate to be inserted.”
The assault was reported to police the next day and Bell was arrested on July 25. The women knew each other, but the motive for the alleged attack was not explained in court.
Bell’s lawyer Manny Nicolosi told Magistrate Belinda Franjic the prosecution case had “real deficiencies.” He said the prosecution had on Friday made an “offer,” an apparent reference to a plea deal.
“I haven’t had enough time to really consider it,” Nicolosi told the court.
Nicolosi explained that his Indigenous client hadn’t appeared in court in person because of “recent threats.” The lawyer did not elaborate on those threats.
Bell remains free on bail until she appears in court next on Nov. 22. The magistrate agreed to allow her to appear again by video.
Thorpe made her first public statement about the alleged assault after she launched an expletive-laden rant at Charles during a reception in Australian Parliament House in Canberra last week.
“You are not our king. You are not sovereign,” Thorpe yelled at Charles as she was led by security guards from the reception.
“You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us: our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people,” she added.
The main opposition party has called for Thorpe to resign from the Senate due to her attitude toward Charles, who is Australia’s head of state, and have requested legal advice.
Thorpe is renowned for high-profile protest action. When she was affirmed as a senator in 2022, she wasn’t allowed to describe the then-monarch as “the colonizing Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.” She briefly blocked a police float in Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Madri Gras last year by lying on the street in front of it. Last year, she was also banned for life from a Melbourne strip club after video emerged of her shouting abuse at male patrons.
She revealed her injuries after The Australian newspaper reported she had missed 16 of the Senate's 44 sitting days this year.
“I was ordered by the doctor not to travel and could not attend parliament after I sustained the injury and during recovery from surgery. My doctor told me to take time off work,” her statement said.
“I would have preferred to keep this matter private and I will not be commenting on it further at this stage,” she added.
Thorpe was widely criticized for being disrespectful to the monarch during her outburst last week.
She faces a further backlash next week when senators sit for the first time since the royal visit.
Her office said Monday she has not decided whether she plans to attend senate committee meetings in person or remotely.
She also raised questions about the validity of her appointment to the Senate when she recently said she had deliberately affirmed her allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and her “hairs,” rather than “heirs,” during her affirmation ceremony in 2022 to exclude Charles. Thorpe later walked back that statement, saying the mispronunciation was accidental.
Lawyers agree that a mispronunciation did not invalidate an affirmation and that Thorpe also signed a written version of the affirmation of allegiance with the correct wording.
Sydney University constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey said the Senate's ability to discipline Thorpe was limited because her outburst occurred outside the chamber in Parliament's Great Hall.
‘Not my King’ protest row highlights Australian divisions
Hannah Ritchie - BBC News, Sydney
Sat, October 26, 2024
When an Aboriginal Australian senator heckled King Charles moments after he delivered a speech in the nation’s Parliament House, it caught the world’s attention.
Lidia Thorpe’s cries of “not my King” and “this is not your land” shone a light on a country that is still grappling with its colonial past.
But in the debate that followed on the “appropriateness” of the protest, something else became clear: a split within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community itself.
In the wake of an unsuccessful referendum on their constitutional recognition - which left many feeling silenced - the question Australia’s first inhabitants are now grappling with is how to achieve the self-determination they have fought so long for.
Indigenous Australians are classed as the oldest living culture on earth, and have inhabited the continent for at least 65,000 years.
For more than 200 years though - since the 1770 arrival of Captain James Cook and subsequent British settlement - they have endured long chapters of colonial violence, including the theft of their lands, livelihoods, and even children.
As a result, today, they still face acute disadvantages in terms of health, wealth, education, and life expectancy compared to non-Indigenous Australians.
But, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up less than 4% of the national population, their struggles rarely translate into national voting issues, experts say.
Last year’s Voice to Parliament referendum - which asked whether Australia should recognise its first inhabitants in the constitution and allow them a body to advise the parliament - was a key exception.
The result was a resounding ‘No’, with one major analysis of the data suggesting many voters found the proposal divisive and ineffective.
The Voice to Parliament proposal was decisively rejected in a referendum last year [EPA]
And while the figures indicate a majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people voted 'Yes', support wasn’t unanimous. Thorpe herself was a leading ‘No’ campaigner, having criticised the measure as tokenistic and “an easy way to fake progress”.
But Larissa Baldwin-Roberts, a Widjabul Wia-bal woman and activist, says the ‘No’ outcome left most Indigenous Australians with “a sense of humiliation and rejection”. She adds that the debate itself - which saw countless examples of misinformation and disinformation - unleashed a wave of “racist rhetoric” that their communities are still recovering from.
The big-picture impact of the Voice, Ms Baldwin-Roberts argues, has been a growing sentiment that traditional reconciliation efforts are “dead”. Those approaches have long tried to bridge the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians through polite dialogue and education.
It was against this backdrop that Thorpe made her protest in parliament.
“You can’t reconcile with a country that doesn’t see you,” Ms Baldwin-Roberts tells the BBC. “You can’t reconcile with a country that doesn’t think that you deserve justice.”
Ms Baldwin-Roberts says “new strategies” are needed to disrupt the status quo. She sees Thorpe’s action as “incredibly brave” and reflective of conversations many First Nations people are having.
“There are Indigenous communities around the country talking about our stolen children, our stolen histories - but she had access to that room. As an Australian senator she knows she’s going to get media, and it’s important to make this a talking point.”
Australia Day - held on the anniversary of Britain's First Fleet arriving at Sydney Cove - has become an annual target of protests [EPA]
Daniel Williams, who is of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, agrees.
“After the [referendum] last year, what do Indigenous people have left? How can we find [an] audience with the monarch to effect change?” he asked a political panel on the ABC.
“We're talking about 200 years of pain that is continuing to be unanswered and unresolved.”
Others see it differently though: there is a long history of Indigenous leaders petitioning the Royal Family to recognise their peoples’ struggle, but the independent’s senator’s act - for some - went too far.
Nova Peris, a former senator who was the first Aboriginal woman in parliament, described it as an “embarrassing” move which didn’t “reflect the manners, or approach to reconciliation, of Aboriginal Australians at large”.
Both sides of parliament dismissed it as disrespectful and a failed attempt at grandstanding.
Prof Tom Calma, a Kungarakan and Iwaidja man who was in the room, said it risked alienating “the other 96%” of Australia’s population who may not “see or understand the enduring impacts of colonisation”.
“I don’t think the protest - the way that Senator Thorpe went about it - brings people along with us. And in the spirit of reconciliation, we need allies.”
Mr Calma also felt that Thorpe’s demand that King Charles “give [Indigenous people] a treaty” was misplaced, given that those negotiations would be handled by Australia’s government, not the Crown.
As it stands, Australia is one of the only Commonwealth countries to have never signed a treaty, or treaties, with its first inhabitants, or to have recognised them in its founding document.
And with a general election expected before mid-next year, both sides of politics have sought to move on swiftly from the Voice debate, leaving much uncertainty over future policy.
For Ms Baldwin-Roberts, this week’s juxtaposition between the crowds of royal supporters decked out in regalia, and those engaging in protest nearby, reflects “a large separation and social reality between Australia’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations” that exists today.
And in order to bridge that gap, she believes “there has to be some level of reckoning”.
Lidia Thorpe’s cries of “not my King” and “this is not your land” shone a light on a country that is still grappling with its colonial past.
But in the debate that followed on the “appropriateness” of the protest, something else became clear: a split within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community itself.
In the wake of an unsuccessful referendum on their constitutional recognition - which left many feeling silenced - the question Australia’s first inhabitants are now grappling with is how to achieve the self-determination they have fought so long for.
Indigenous Australians are classed as the oldest living culture on earth, and have inhabited the continent for at least 65,000 years.
For more than 200 years though - since the 1770 arrival of Captain James Cook and subsequent British settlement - they have endured long chapters of colonial violence, including the theft of their lands, livelihoods, and even children.
As a result, today, they still face acute disadvantages in terms of health, wealth, education, and life expectancy compared to non-Indigenous Australians.
But, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up less than 4% of the national population, their struggles rarely translate into national voting issues, experts say.
Last year’s Voice to Parliament referendum - which asked whether Australia should recognise its first inhabitants in the constitution and allow them a body to advise the parliament - was a key exception.
The result was a resounding ‘No’, with one major analysis of the data suggesting many voters found the proposal divisive and ineffective.
The Voice to Parliament proposal was decisively rejected in a referendum last year [EPA]
And while the figures indicate a majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people voted 'Yes', support wasn’t unanimous. Thorpe herself was a leading ‘No’ campaigner, having criticised the measure as tokenistic and “an easy way to fake progress”.
But Larissa Baldwin-Roberts, a Widjabul Wia-bal woman and activist, says the ‘No’ outcome left most Indigenous Australians with “a sense of humiliation and rejection”. She adds that the debate itself - which saw countless examples of misinformation and disinformation - unleashed a wave of “racist rhetoric” that their communities are still recovering from.
The big-picture impact of the Voice, Ms Baldwin-Roberts argues, has been a growing sentiment that traditional reconciliation efforts are “dead”. Those approaches have long tried to bridge the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians through polite dialogue and education.
It was against this backdrop that Thorpe made her protest in parliament.
“You can’t reconcile with a country that doesn’t see you,” Ms Baldwin-Roberts tells the BBC. “You can’t reconcile with a country that doesn’t think that you deserve justice.”
Ms Baldwin-Roberts says “new strategies” are needed to disrupt the status quo. She sees Thorpe’s action as “incredibly brave” and reflective of conversations many First Nations people are having.
“There are Indigenous communities around the country talking about our stolen children, our stolen histories - but she had access to that room. As an Australian senator she knows she’s going to get media, and it’s important to make this a talking point.”
Australia Day - held on the anniversary of Britain's First Fleet arriving at Sydney Cove - has become an annual target of protests [EPA]
Daniel Williams, who is of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, agrees.
“After the [referendum] last year, what do Indigenous people have left? How can we find [an] audience with the monarch to effect change?” he asked a political panel on the ABC.
“We're talking about 200 years of pain that is continuing to be unanswered and unresolved.”
Others see it differently though: there is a long history of Indigenous leaders petitioning the Royal Family to recognise their peoples’ struggle, but the independent’s senator’s act - for some - went too far.
Nova Peris, a former senator who was the first Aboriginal woman in parliament, described it as an “embarrassing” move which didn’t “reflect the manners, or approach to reconciliation, of Aboriginal Australians at large”.
Both sides of parliament dismissed it as disrespectful and a failed attempt at grandstanding.
Prof Tom Calma, a Kungarakan and Iwaidja man who was in the room, said it risked alienating “the other 96%” of Australia’s population who may not “see or understand the enduring impacts of colonisation”.
“I don’t think the protest - the way that Senator Thorpe went about it - brings people along with us. And in the spirit of reconciliation, we need allies.”
Mr Calma also felt that Thorpe’s demand that King Charles “give [Indigenous people] a treaty” was misplaced, given that those negotiations would be handled by Australia’s government, not the Crown.
As it stands, Australia is one of the only Commonwealth countries to have never signed a treaty, or treaties, with its first inhabitants, or to have recognised them in its founding document.
And with a general election expected before mid-next year, both sides of politics have sought to move on swiftly from the Voice debate, leaving much uncertainty over future policy.
For Ms Baldwin-Roberts, this week’s juxtaposition between the crowds of royal supporters decked out in regalia, and those engaging in protest nearby, reflects “a large separation and social reality between Australia’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations” that exists today.
And in order to bridge that gap, she believes “there has to be some level of reckoning”.
