Lidia Thorpe tells Karl Stefanovic she does not see Indigenous Voice to Parliament getting up later this year

Fiery and outspoken Victorian senator Lidia Thorpe says her combativeness is “misunderstood”, and has backed herself for bringing anger “straight from the soul” that she says Canberra needed.

In a sit-down interview with Karl Stefanovic for 60 Minutes on Sunday, the Greens defector turned independent senator said while she may be considered a “bonafide troublemaker”, she did it for “all the right reasons”.

“I’m not this angry, crazy black woman out there that hates white people. It’s just not who I am,” she said.

“I’ve been called so many things sine I was a child that after a while it’s water off a ducks back.”

She told Stefanovic that because she was a “no bulls**t” type of politician, committed to cutting through the drivel and “calling it for what it is”, she walked around with a bullseye on her.

But that didn’t dissuade her from fighting.

“I don’t fight with my fists anymore, I fight with my mouth,” she said.

During the interview, Senator Thorpe opened up about her upbringing, including how she left school at 14, became pregnant at 17, and became the target of violence.

“I suppose I was used to violence from my first relationships, and it’s happened so many times that I just kept getting back up,” she said.

She also said of her decision to declare bankruptcy in 2013, as a single mother of three after leaving a toxic marriage, the “best decision” she ever made.

Four years later she made history as the first Aboriginal woman in the Victorian parliament, and when she lost her seat at the 2018 election looked to Canberra and was sworn in in 2020 as a Greens senator for the state.

She told Stefanovic she doesn’t intend to run again when she’s next up for election, because the parliament need “new people, younger people coming in with fresh ideas”.

Her time in Canberra has been mired in controversy and scandal, notably a brawl outside a Melbourne strip club, her links to former Revels bikie boss, and her activity at various protests.

On the strip club controversy, Senator Thorpe told Stefanovic she had been verbally abused, and the only thing she did wrong was “reacting to someone else’s bad behaviour, when I probably shouldn’t have”.

She left the Greens earlier this year, telling Stefanovic it had happened for “a number of reasons”.

“As an independent, I can speak on anything that I like and unfortunately as a political party, the Greens are no different to Labor and the Coalition parties where racism does exist … (including) inside the Greens … from places that should know better,” she said.

Now a leader of the progressive no campaign against the upcoming Voice to parliament, Senator Thorpe told Stefanovic she does not see the proposal getting up later this year.

“I’m part of the progressive no, and … we want more,” she said.

She said the progressive no was built on something significantly different to what she called the “racist no”.

“We are not one homogenous group of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We’re allowed to think differently and we are allowed to say no on the grounds that it is not enough,” she said.