If Australians want to know what an “Indigenous Voice” to Parliament would look like in practice, they only need to look to Victorian Greens senator Lidia Thorpe.
Her nickname, “Snow Woke”, is well-earned. A veteran trougher, appointed by her party to fill a vacancy, rather than elected, Thorpe has spent her Senate career grandstanding, attention-seeking and bomb-throwing. Despite her distinctly pasty visage, Thorpe never loses an opportunity to tell anyone who doesn’t want to listen how “blak” she is. Her standard deflection is the racist, sexist gambit of dismissing everyone else as “white males” (even when they’re Aboriginal women, like Selena Uibo).
Her current self-promotion campaign is hijacking a Senate inquiry into the Juukan Gorge inquiry. The inquiry is supposed to be looking into the destruction of caves in the gorge in Western Australia, home to 46,000-year-old Aboriginal artefacts.
Instead, Lidia Thorpe is making it all about looking at her.
Coalition and Labor MPs have accused Greens senator Lidia Thorpe of being disrespectful during a hearing into the Juukan Gorge disaster after she publicly claimed she was silenced by committee members during this week’s hearings.
Frankly, I suspect the committee that manages to silence Thorpe would be awarded a medal by the Australian public.
Senator Thorpe claimed the dispute was centred on her role on the committee as a First Nations woman, and said the committee was a ‘boys’ club’.
“Being the only Blak Woman on the Juukan Enquiry, my time is limited due to the boys club. #NotOk,” Senator Thorpe posted on Twitter.
“Questioning Minerals Council and I’m silenced.”
Thorpe also claims to be a “Traditional Owner”: an odd claim, given that the caves are some 4,500 kilometres from Thorpe’s home in Melbourne’s trendy inner suburbs.
Other committee members are nothing if not blunt about Thorpe’s claims.
On Thursday, Liberal MP Warren Entsch, chairman of the Northern Australia committee, told The Herald and The Age that Ms Thorpe’s assessment was “bullshit”.
“[Senator Thorpe’s conduct] has a serious prospect of totally compromising this work,” Mr Entsch said[…]
Mr Entsch said his rebuke was endorsed by fellow committee members and Labor MPs, Senator Patrick Dodson and Warren Snowdon.
The Age
Even more hilarious, Thorpe claims to be “representing her constituents” about “the destruction of country”. Leaving aside the question of whether an unelected senator even has “constituents”, it’s anyone’s guess exactly what “connection to country” people in inner Melbourne have with the remote Pilbara region of WA.
Warren Entsch has Thorpe pretty well sized up:
“One of the problems that we’re having with her all the way through is her activism. She’s making long, ambling statements that have no relevance to the terms of reference,” he said.
“The more outrageous she can be, the more happy she is, because she just shares it on her own social media platforms. She’s playing to her own audience, she’s not interested in finding solutions.”
The Australian
Lidia Thorpe is a strutting, screeching example of just how a racially-separatist “Voice” would operate: a cabal of unelected troughers and Fauxborigines, grandstanding, meddling and playing to their own little Peanut Galleries.
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