Let’s Talk – Politics with Lidia Thorpe
It’s been a huge week in Australian politics. In case you missed it, last week the staunch Djabwurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara Senator Lidia Thorpe announced that she was leaving the Greens to sit as an independent senator on the cross bench.
Senator Thorpe was the first Aboriginal woman elected to Victorian parliament when she won the seat of Northcote in 2017, and she has represented Victoria in the federal senate since 2020. Thorpe is part of a long tradition of Black sovereign organising in Victoria.
Both within and beyond her parliamentary work, she has been involved in grassroots movements for land rights and climate justice, working to get kids out of prison, standing in solidarity with people imprisoned in prisons and detention centers, and pushing for the now 30 year old recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody to be fully implemented.
Stepping away from the Greens to sit on the cross-bench, Senator Thorpe has committed to using the rest of her term as a senator to represent the grassroots black sovereign movement in parliament, pushing for meaningful conversations on treaty, self-determination, and justice. We are so excited to be joined by Senator Lidia Thorpe to talk about her life and work so far, and all the work that’s yet to come.