Yesterday, the Australian Senate passed legislation enabling the Voice to Parliament referendum to take place in the next 6 months. Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice) 2023 passed its third reading with 52 votes for and only 19 against. Regrettable, to say the least.

There were several short contributions leading up to that count. Dorinda Cox and Malarndirri McCarthy offered vague, rhetorical platitudes in support of the Voice – nothing worth repeating. Incredibly, Murray Watt ordered those campaigning against the Voice ‘not to make stuff up’ about the referendum. How’s that for a dose of hypocrisy?

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Pauline Hanson stole the show. Whilst Nampijinpa Price, determined and poised, championed the always-appropriate blank cheque argument, Hanson brazenly attacked the Voice as honestly as I have ever witnessed any politician do so in recent history. It was difficult to select an extract for this article, but here’s what I’ve chosen:

‘You have over 3,200 Aboriginal corporations and bodies. You have a department that was set up under the previous government, the NIAA – $4.5 billion a year. You handed out over $1 billion in grants in one year to 1,500. All the other government departments are handing out $11.5 billion in grants. Where has the money gone? That’s the question you need to ask yourselves. Where has the money gone? Who have you put in charge of it? Is the fox in charge of the hen house? And yet you turn around and want to blame everyone else in this nation who is not Aboriginal or Indigenous for the faults when maybe you should look in your own backyard and question yourselves. Why haven’t things changed?’

My Liberal National Party membership aside, I would posit that a great many Australians feel as Hanson does.

But of the whole fiasco, one name – perhaps predictably – stands out: Lidia Alma Thorpe.

After yesterday’s performance, Lidia Thorpe has gone even further than too far. Yes, further than butchering her Oath of Allegiance by referring to the late Queen Elizabeth II as a ‘coloniser’. Further than nearly getting run over by lying down in front of a float to protest police presence at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Further than being tackled to the ground by police and then scurrying on all fours across the grass after aggressively gatecrashing a Canberra rally. Further than declaring ‘You’re marked!’ outside a Melbourne strip club.

It’s hard to believe this is the behaviour of an elected Australian Senator. And still, yesterday, Thorpe went further when she said:

‘The Constitution is an illegal document. It’s illegal. The occupation of this country is illegal. You are following the King – the King! We are all bound by the King … The King’s position is to wipe us out.’

‘The King’s position is to wipe [Aboriginal Australians] out.’

Thorpe has accused His Majesty Charles III, by the Grace of God, King of Australia and His other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, of plotting to ‘wipe out’ a certain demographic of his people. Where is the evidence to back up this claim?

And how exactly is he going to pull that one off? By sending in the RAAF and showering the Northern Territory in chlorine, à la Bashar al-Assad? Holy Moly, give me a break…

For once, I don’t care if you’re a royalist, monarchist, constitutionalist, or republican. Everyone should be able to agree that Thorpe’s words form the most unconscionable sentences uttered in the Senate.

This sort of talk used to be a crime, but today? Nothing. Not so much as crickets.

Where was President Sue Lines? She was happy to reprimand viewers in the public galleries for clapping in support of various Senators – but an egregious allegation against the Sovereign whom she supposedly represents warranted not so much as a frown. Telling.

Even more disappointing is that no Senator, regardless of their political affiliation, offered an interjectory, ‘Point of order, President!’

Recently, this country’s national institutions have made an appalling mockery of Australians’ deep appreciation for the Crown – or, at the very least, the free and successful system of constitutional monarchy it presides over. Lidia Thorpe’s latest false remark serves to highlight how weak Australia’s political infrastructure has grown. Where once the unfounded allegation that the Sovereign was scheming to wipe out his people would have been met with furious uproar, now the Senate sits in stone-cold silence. Is such indicative of republican Labor’s tyrannical hold over the place, or some greater sickness that permeates our country?

This hardly needs to be stated: Charles III, King of Australia, has never, ever sought to erase Aboriginal Australians, or any of his subjects. Nor did Elizabeth II, George IV, Edward VIII, George V, Edward VII, Victoria, William IV, George IV or George III, for that matter. From the moment the Crown arrived to settle this continent, it imposed upon itself strenuous regulations to ensure the humanity of Australia’s native peoples were protected. Any claim to the contrary is totally unsubstantiated and should be dismissed immediately, lest the ludicrous, inflammatory dribble of the Blak Sovereignty movement materialise as disastrously as it potentially could.

The King is King, as prescribed by the Australian Constitution and thus King in the Parliament of Australia. The Crown, as described so aptly by Menzies, is ‘the enduring embodiment of our national unity’. To attack the Crown is to attack Australia’s national unity, and that is exactly what Lidia Thorpe did yesterday. It is also, by extension, exactly what the Voice to Parliament is doing, but that theme I’ll recapitulate in some subsequent article.

Lidia Thorpe, after spluttering all sorts of baseless things, concluded her speech thus:

‘We will never cede our sovereignty and we’ll fight you to the end for a treaty so that we have real power in this country. So look out!’

Whilst some of her exploits are indeed patently ridiculous, the real danger we face is lulling ourselves into the belief that Lidia Thorpe is some kind of political hoax. She is quite the contrary. She is clever and charismatic. Her rise to the Senate has been meteoric, as if the screenplay to some unaired seventh season of House of Cards.

She is a Senator for Victoria for another five, long years.

It befalls us to oppose these ideological forces which embody the very worst qualities of the 20th century and instead to stand up for Australia – its Crown, its Constitution, and its peoples’ inherent freedoms.

Alexander Voltz is a composer. He is a member of the Liberal Party.