Aboriginal senator Lidia Thorpe stormed the Australian Parliament this Monday at the end of King Charles III’s speech to protest against the rights of the country’s indigenous people, dispossessed of their lands with the arrival of the British in 1770. “Give back -we our” land. (…) what you have stolen from our people”, shouted independent senator Lidia Thrope, at the end of the speech in Parliament in Canberra by Charles III, head of state of Australia, governed by a monarchical system with a parliamentary majority.
The senator also said: “You are not our king”, and condemned the “genocide” committed against the indigenous peoples of Australia, as well as the pillaging of “bones, skulls” and the theft of indigenous babies, before to be forced to leave the room.
Senator Thorpe, dressed in a traditional kangaroo skin, had also already turned onto his back when “God save the king” was chanted in Parliament, in protest against the visit of Charles III and Queen Camilla , touring across Australia and Samoa. between October 18 and 26.
Thorpe’s intervention came shortly after Charles III gave a speech to hundreds of attendees, including Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, in which he highlighted the “long and sometimes difficult road to reconciliation” with the indigenous peoples.
Australia is the only Commonwealth country that has no treaty 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.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (who are of Melanesian origin and inhabit an island territory in the northeast of Australia) – constitute a group that represents 3.8% of the more than 27 million inhabitants of the ‘Australia.
They populated what is now Australia 65,000 years ago, until the British Crown declared the territory uninhabited in the late 18th century 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 mistreatment, in addition to having been dispossessed of their land.
Even if progress has been made in the recognition of customary rights, wounds still remain open, in particular the “stolen generation”, which brings together some 100,000 indigenous minors separated from their families between 1910 and 1970 and entrusted to white families to live there. be educated. or establishments.
Added to this is the failure of last year’s referendum to create a body that would give indigenous peoples a voice in Parliament, among other issues of social and economic inequality.
