Turncoat senator Lidia Thorpe gives emotional speech on Indigenous deaths in custody

Ex-Greens senator Lidia Thorpe has carried a message stick into parliament as she made an emotionally-charged plea to the government to stop Indigenous deaths in prison and police custody.

The Victorian activist delivered the speech about a month after she defected from the left-wing party to sit on the crossbench in order to “speak freely” on issues and lead what she describes as a Blak sovereignty movement.

Speaking in the upper house on Tuesday, Senator Thorpe said the message stick was engraved with the number of Indigenous people who had died in custody since the 1991 royal commission into the issue.

“Here we are 32 years later, more than a generation later, and more and more of our people are dying in custody instead of putting an end to this crisis,” she said.

“When I first walked into this chamber, I carried this message stick engraved with one line for each death in custody since the royal commission.”

Senator Thorpe raised her voice and continued speaking over the top of acting Senate president Helen Polley when she told her: “You know very well that we don’t allow props to be used in the chamber.”

After asking for and being given permission to continue, Senator Thorpe said the number of etchings on the message stick had grown to 540 from 441 when she was given it before entering federal parliament in late 2020.

“We have seen government after government letting us down clearly showing that they don’t care,” she said.

“Every government comes up with new buzzwords on how they are going to deal with Blak people in this country; Closing the Gap; Introducing an advisory body after advisory body, yet there’s no changes on the ground.”

Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle, Labor senators Patrick Dodson and Nita Green and One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts each delivered a speech on the issue following Senator Thorpe.

The 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody made 339 recommendations after finding Indigenous people were no more likely to die in custody than non-Indigenous people but were “overwhelmingly” more likely to be arrested and imprisoned.

Senator Dodson, a former commissioner of the landmark inquiry and now Labor’s reconciliation envoy, has urged the Albanese government to adopt the outstanding recommendations from the royal commission.

“More than 500 Aboriginal people have died in custody since that time. And that is a statistic that I know unsettles us all,” he told the upper house on Tuesday.

“What’s the root cause of this dreadful statistic? Simply too many Aboriginal people are being locked up.

“First Nations people make up only 3.8 per cent of the Australian population, but they represent 32 per cent of the adult prison population. These figures are completely unacceptable.”

However, Senator Dodson rejected Senator Thorpe’s assertion that the government was unwilling to take action, saying: “We are serious about reducing the number of First Nations peoples going to jail”.

Senator Thorpe split from the Greens two years and five months after entering federal parliament as a Greens senator and just seven months into this parliamentary term after she was given the top spot on the party’s Victorian ticket and re-elected.

She is guaranteed her Senate seat until 2028.

She jumped ship after a long-running dispute over the Indigenous Voice to parliament, which she doesn’t support on the grounds that she says a treaty should come before the proposed advisory body.

The Albanese government maintains the enshrining of the Voice in the Constitution was the first step towards reconciliation that Indigenous leaders asked for in the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart.