New Greens senator Lidia Thorpe says Indigenous Australians need guaranteed seats in Parliament, not a tokenistic Voice, but a treaty must come first.

“It’s not an easy thing to do as a sovereign black woman to then swear allegiance to the Crown and the very people who caused great harm to this land and the people who belong to it,” Senator Thorpe told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
“It’s not something that my community’s excited about the same way as the rest of the community.
“I’m swearing allegiance to the coloniser, so I think the first speech (to the Senate) will be what people will be more excited about.”
She has previously described herself as more conservative than some of her family, which includes her grandmother Alma Thorpe, one of the founders of the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service, her mother Indigenous activist Marjorie Thorpe and uncle Robbie Thorpe, a key figure in Melbourne’s 1970s Black Power movement. Nevertheless, she has been called one of the most radical political figures to enter Parliament.
Senator Thorpe names a treaty with Indigenous people as her top priority; she sees it as far more important than the Voice for Indigenous Australians and constitutional recognition the government is pursuing.
“Not a Voice to Parliament but seats in Parliament is very important. We need a seat at the table, a real seat, not a tokenistic one,” she said.
“We’ve never benefited from colonisation, we’ve only seen the destruction of our land and water and of our people.”
A treaty should encompass economic empowerment, self-determination and shared sovereignty of the land. Senator Thorpe, who has been part of the Pay The Rent campaign that asks white Australians to give cash to Indigenous organisations as arrears for “stolen land”, said reparations should be in the mix but it wasn’t up to her to determine.
While Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory have started treaty negotiations, Senator Thorpe says the main game is in Canberra and the Commonwealth has to step up.
She’s also concerned the negotiations in Victoria have excluded swathes of the Aboriginal community, which has turned people off.
Senator Thorpe takes on the justice and sport portfolios for the Greens, vowing to fight for families seeking justice over deaths in custody and to have all the recommendations of the royal commission implemented, to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 years to 14, and lower Indigenous incarceration rates.
Senator Thorpe wants Indigenous Australians to have seats in Parliament.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer
But she insists she isn’t single-minded in her pursuit of change.
“People might say that I only care about Aboriginal people, but the things that are solutions for us are solutions for everybody,” she said.
Katina Curtis is a political reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based at Parliament House in Canberra.