The world meets Lidia Thorpe, republican hopes are dashed, and a big shift in the housing debate

Welcome back to your weekly federal politics update, where political reporter Maani Truu gets you up to speed on the happenings from Parliament House.

Royal tours are typically, to put it mildly, a tightly-managed affair. While there is the occasional surprise, say a tuxedo-wearing alpaca sneezing on the king or a misplaced hand from a prime minister, they’re mostly made up of stale pre-prepared remarks, orchestrated community meet and greets, and stiff photo opportunities. 

This was doubly true this week, given the tight four-day itinerary of King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s visit to Australia. Only 40 minutes were set aside for a parliamentary reception for the royal couple on Monday.

But independent senator and Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung woman Lidia Thorpe only needed one of those minutes to make international headlines.

From the instant she entered Parliament House’s cavernous Great Hall wearing a possum skin cloak, reporters with a bird’s eye view from the gallery picked her out from the Where’s Wally scene of sitting politicians, former prime ministers, Olympic gold medallists and mining magnates.

But it wasn’t until King Charles had finished his address, and the event was about to come to a close, that she made her move. 

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On cue, as if it was meant to be part of the proceedings all along, she stepped out into the aisle that separated the audience in two and marched towards the king. “You committed genocide against our people,” she screamed. “Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us — our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people.” 

The further you were from Parliament House, the bigger the moment seemed. On one hand, it was a powerful image: An elected Indigenous politician accusing the king of genocide to his face in the home of Australian democracy. 

Charles and Camilla, seated in front of a giant Arthur Boyd mural depicting the Australian bush, waited out the outburst impassively while the cameras kept rolling.

International media described it as a “jarring interruption” (New York Times), that reached into “Australia’s complex and challenging history” (the BBC), and “blindsided” the king (The Times). Buckingham Palace said nil.

But for those more closely familiar with Thorpe and her maverick approach to politicking, it was an entirely predictable protest to be added to a long list of controversial displays (like, say, using her swearing-in to call the queen a coloniser and pledging allegiance to her “hairs” rather than her “heirs”).

Many have since labelled the protest “disrespectful”, including former senator Nova Peris, the first Aboriginal woman to be elected to the federal parliament. Coalition MPs have lined up to call variously for her to resign, be censured, or face other as yet undetermined consequences.

It was disrespectful, and that’s exactly the point. Thorpe raged, and swore, and disputed King Charles’s sovereignty, all to raise a bigger argument about Australia’s colonial history and its modern-day consequences.

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Many have also backed her actions, including fellow Indigenous Australians, and Thorpe said she had been overwhelmed with messages of support.

“I have been contacted by Elders … particularly a Ngunnawal Elder who said, ‘I wished you had have told me you were going to do that because I would have walked right beside you and done exactly the same thing’,” she told the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing. 

If she set out to get people across the world talking about Australia’s Indigenous history, well, the slew of British front-page stories and television interviews speak for themselves.

The big republic debate that wasn’t

Reporting on Thorpe’s protest, the New York Times said it “revived a perennial question” about exactly when, if ever, Australia will give the British monarchy the flick. Closer to home, however, that question seemed further away.

A quick refresher: Australians were asked that very question in the 1999 referendum and voted against becoming a republic by 54.8 to 45.2 per cent. By way of comparison, last year’s Voice to Parliament referendum was defeated 60.1 to 39.9 per cent.

But a generation has come of age in the quarter of a decade since we were last asked to decide whether we want our head of state to be someone who sits on a throne on the other side of the world. Perhaps buoyed by this fact, the Australian Republican Movement cheekily described the recent royal visit — Charles’s first as king — as his farewell tour, complete with accompanying merch.

Looking at the crowds of punters that showed up at each stop of the royal schedule, tiny plastic Australian flags in tow, it seemed like that reality might be a far way off yet.

When the royals emerged from the Great Hall moments after Thorpe’s protest, they were met with cheers and claps from members of the public who had crowded into parliament’s marble foyer — one of whom held a framed photo of the king over his head.

Those crowds are a relatively small sample size, especially given the royals only stopped in Sydney and Canberra. But for those who were holding out hope that Queen Elizabeth’s death would spark a passionate desire to ditch the monarchy, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s speech at the royal reception would have felt like a blow.

“We know the institution is secure in your hands … the regard and the respect that we feel for you has been decades in the making,” Albanese said. “What never changes is the truth stamped on every page of that story which is that your majesties are very welcome here.”

An avowed republican, Albanese had already made his feelings about changing the constitution any time soon known when he scrapped the role of assistant minister for the republic earlier this year. It seems one bruising referendum campaign per term is more than enough.

Then Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s speech added insult to injury, applauding the “independence and stoicism of the reigning monarch” for carrying Australia through good times and bad. “We should never take our British inheritance for granted,” he said.

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Betting on the burbs

Speaking of questions of national identity, the Coalition has revealed they’re not ready to abandon the great Australian dream of a quarter-acre block and a white picket fence, even amid a housing supply shortage. And they’re betting that most Australians aren’t either.

Over the weekend the Coalition revealed one of its first major election policies: $5 billion to help speed up delivery of sewerage, water and power infrastructure to new, or “greenfield”, housing developments. The result, they promised, would be the construction of 500,000 new homes, though Labor quickly requested modelling for that claim.

The belied behind the announcement, Coalition strategists told the ABC, is that middle- and outer-suburban voters are more likely to get behind a policy that will help them secure their very own parcel of land, even if it’s a longer drive to work, rather than the federal government’s plans for more social and higher-density housing in the city. You can read the full story by chief digital political correspondent Jacob Greber here.

The housing crisis is shaping up to be one of the defining issues of the upcoming election, which is due by May next year, and all sides of politics agree the key to solving it is building more of them. Where they differ is exactly what kinds of homes we want, and where we want them.

But as my colleague Tom Crowley wrote this week, the fact that we’re entering into this debate at all shows just how far the thinking has shifted since the last election — even if it feels we’re as stuck as ever.