‘You are not my king…You are a genocidalist,’ screamed Senator Lidia Thorpe at King Charles III on Monday.

Annabel Crabb, ABC writer, presenter and commentator on Australian politics for nearly 25 years called the rant ‘a masterclass on how to make front-page news in 2024’.

Few would disagree. In a country crowded with left-wing attention-seekers, Thorpe is first among equals. Flaunting a possum-skin cape she even managed to annoy animal activists.

As one shrewd English commentator observed, ‘The fact that this part-indigenous woman had informed journalists in advance that she was going to make this “outburst” proves it was a performative act to achieve publicity. That she was not stopped and denied entrance to the event shows incompetence (or connivance) by Australian authorities. She is just another attention seeker – on the same level as the puerile soup-throwing, so-called climate protesters – the only difference is that when listening to her hysterical ranting, it seems that she is primarily driven by the potential financial gain of “reparations” – the new mantra based on colonial histories’.

Another put it more succinctly. ‘We’re all entitled to our own opinions,’ wrote Englishwoman Helen Elliott continuing, ‘My opinion is that she’s a moron.’

According to Crabb, Thorpe is ‘basically the closest equivalent the Australian parliament has to Prince Harry’. It seems like an odd comparison when, with her fair skin, her obsession with racism, and her lack of respect for the King, Thorpe seems more like Australia’s equivalent of Meghan Markle. For the armchair psychologists, the parallel even extends to their shared dismal relationships with their fathers. Thorpe’s father said bitterly in a television interview last year that Thorpe has become ‘a very racist person’ and has ‘never mentioned anything about her white father’.

Crabb made her sympathies clear by writing that Thorpe had ‘reprimanded’ the King ‘for his personal links to a racist system of colonial oppression’. This is hardly surprising. The standard view of the left is to condemn the British Empire as racist rather than acknowledge that those who founded the Australian colonies were directly involved in the abolition of slavery. Thorpe goes further, not just accusing the King of genocide but writing on her website writing that, ‘Colonialism and the religious dogma that arrived on these shores along with the boats and settlers brought with them queerphobia, transphobia and homophobia’. Nice of Thorpe to stand up for queers but she also stands with Palestine which supports killing homosexuals.

Were Australia’s colonial governments guilty of genocide? If you believe Robert Hughes, art critic, historian, and author of The Fatal Shore, the settlement of Tasmania was the ‘only true genocide in English colonial history’. Yet, as Professor Nigel Biggar points out in this month’s issue of Quadrant magazine, the answer depends on what is meant by genocide. He writes, ‘If “genocide” is to a whole people what “homicide” is to an individual, then it must be deliberate and intentional’ which is the meaning in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which crucially specifies ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such (Article II)’.

Indeed, as Biggar continues, this is recognised not just by former Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle in his groundbreaking work on The Fabrication of Aboriginal History but in the work of left-wing historian Henry Reynolds in his book An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History. The title comes from Sir George Murray, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, who in 1830 wrote, ‘The adoption of any line of conduct, having for its avowed, or for its secret object, the extinction of a Native race, could not fail to leave an indelible stain upon the character of the British Government’. As Biggar concludes upon examining the evidence, the ‘annihilation of the Tasmanian Aboriginals was far more tragedy than atrocity’.

That’s not good enough for Thorpe. And she is not alone. Nathan mudyi Sentance, a Wiradjuri librarian and essayist writes on the website of the Australian Museum that, ‘If you examine Australian history, you can see that the brutality of ongoing invasion and colonisation fits in (the UN) definition of genocide in several ways’. He claims that there were ‘270 state-sanctioned and organised attempts to eradicate First Nations people’ and that ‘state-sanctioned physical violence has not ended as many First Nations people still die at the hands of police or in police custody’.

In addition, he claims that state governments ‘also undertook genocides through their individual Aboriginal protection policies’ by removing First Nations children from their families and putting them in care, with the genocide continuing since ‘the number of First Nations children taken from their families has doubled since the 2008 apology’. Is removing children from homes where they are suffering abuse, or Aboriginal deaths in custody, genocide? According to Sentance, yes. He writes, ‘We need to use the term genocide because it is the truth, it is what happened/is happening in Australia’.

Yet if Thorpe is the master, or mistress, of attention-seeking, she was outdone by American rapper Azealia Banks who shared a clip of Thorpe’s tirade adding, ‘Like literally… what the f-ck are white people in Australia still doing there?’ She explained, ‘I fully support mass deportation back to the UK for all white people in Australia,’ specifying that, ‘they should have all of their property, bank accounts and assets seized and be sent home barefoot’.

Home? While English-born people are still the top source-country for migrants to Australia, there is no guarantee that English migrants are ‘white’ or that ‘white’ migrants are descended from the English. Indeed, although the ABC only reported that Senator Thorpe was a ‘Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung woman’ she is also English and Irish.

Thorpe has been vocal in claiming that she had been ‘oppressed’ all her life but her father is the first to disagree, saying that ‘growing up she was spoilt’ and ‘got everything she wanted’. Indeed, it’s hard to argue that someone who earns a quarter of a million dollars a year is deprived although Ms Markle would no doubt agree.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton said this week that if Senator Thorpe is so opposed to Australia’s political structures she should  ‘resign in principle’. That hardly seems likely to happen.

Thorpe is also a member of Qantas Airways’ Chairman’s Lounge. Indeed she posted a picture of herself in it wearing a t-shirt which reads ‘Stolenwealth’. No one should be suprised. No doubt she considers the lounges unceded Aboriginal land. Indeed it is probably safe to guess that it is only a matter of time before the airline is asked to ‘pay the rent’.