King Charles Heckled by Senator During Royal Engagement Overseas
King Charles III was met with a sharp response during his most recent appearance.
Shortly after the British royal addressed Australia's Parliament House in a ceremony held at the capital of Canberra, a senator from Victoria interrupted the meeting's proceedings to protest the king.
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As seen in a video first published by the BBC on Monday, Oct. 21, the Australian independent senator, later identified as Lidia Thorpe, began heckling and shouting for about a minute before she was escorted away by security.
"This is not your land," Thorpe exclaimed. "You are not my King!"
After being escorted out, Thorpe told the outlet that she had wanted to send a "clear message" to the monarch. King George arrived with his wife, Queen Camilla, and was greeted with a traditional welcome leading up to the events of the day, which included a brief discussion of Australia's history.
"To be sovereign you have to be of the land," she added. "He is not of this land."
Thorpe continued, speaking of how other former British colonies were able to strike a peace treaty with its Indigenous populations, but Australia was not one of them.
"We can lead that, we can do that, we can be a better country - but we cannot bow to the coloniser, whose ancestors he spoke about in there are responsible for mass murder and mass genocide," she told BBC reporters.
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Buckingham Palace has made no official comment on Thorpe's protest just yet, but the royals have expressed gratitude for all those who showed up to support the king and queen during their latest outing.
As Parade previously reported, the 75-year-old monarch paused his cancer treatment to make royal stops in Australia and Samoa for scheduled visits in Sydney and Canberra before heading to the South Pacific. There, he will attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), set to kick off today with events running through the end of the week and wrapping up on Saturday, Oct. 26.
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