Politician shouts ‘not my King’ at Charles during Australian Parliament visit

'You committed genocide against our people'

Independent senator Lidia Thorpe started shouting at the monarch after he finished an address to the house on the second day of his state visit to the country, where he is head of state.

King Charles had just walked away from a lectern when Thorpe approached him and shouted: "You are not our King. You are not sovereign."

Thorpe accused Charles and the royal family of committing "genocide against our people" before demanding: "Give us our land back."

She continued: "Give us what you stole from us - our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want a treaty in this country. You are a genocidalist. This is not your land. This is not your land. You are not my king. You are not my king.

"F**k the colony. F**k the colony. F**k the colony."

Thorpe is an independent senator from Victoria and an Aboriginal Australian woman, and has long advocated for a treaty between Australia’s government and its first inhabitants.

Australia is the only ex-British colony without such a treaty, and many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people emphasise that they never ceded their sovereignty or land to the Crown.

Speaking to the BBC after her protest, Thorpe said she wanted to send a "clear message" to the king.

She said: "To be sovereign you have to be of the land. He is not of this land.

"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."

Buckingham Palace has not commented on the protest.