Aboriginal senator Lidia Thorpe stormed the Australian Parliament this Monday at the end of King Charles III’s speech to protest the rights of the country’s indigenous people, who were dispossessed of their lands with the arrival of the British in 1770. “Give us back our “land (…) what you stole from our people,” shouted the independent senator Lidia Thrope, at the end of the speech in the Parliament of Canberra by Charles III, head of State of Australia, which is governed by a monarchical system with parliamentary democracy .
The senator also blurted out: “You are not our king,” and condemned the “genocide” that was committed against the native peoples of Australia, as well as the looting of “bones, skulls” and the theft of indigenous babies, before being forced to leave the room.
Senator Thorpe, dressed in a traditional kangaroo skin, had also previously turned on her back when ‘God save the king’ was chanted in Parliament, in protest at the visit of Charles III and Queen Camilla, who are on a tour through Australia and Samoa between October 18 and 26.
Thorpe’s intervention came shortly after Charles III gave a speech to hundreds of attendees, including the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, in which he highlighted the “long and sometimes difficult path of reconciliation” with the indigenous people.
Australia is the only Commonwealth country that does not have any treaties with its indigenous population, nor does it recognize them in the Constitution in force since 1901, when the former British colony became a federated state.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – who are of Melanesian origin and inhabit an island territory in the northeast of Australia) – are a group that represents 3.8% of Australia’s more than 27 million inhabitants.
They populated what is now known as Australia 65,000 years ago, until the British Crown declared at the end of the 18th century that this territory was uninhabited and relied on the concept of “Terra Nulis” (No Man’s Land) to claim possession.
Since then, these indigenous peoples have been victims of discrimination and reported mistreatment, in addition to having been dispossessed of their lands.
Although there has been some progress in the recognition of customary rights, there are still open wounds, including the ‘Stolen Generation’, which encompasses some 100,000 Aboriginal minors who were separated from their families between 1910 and 1970 and handed over for education to white families or institutions.
Added to this is the failure of a referendum held last year to create a body that would give indigenous people a voice in Parliament, among other problems of social and economic inequality.
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