By: Baarika Suresh

Note: This is the third article in a series that looks at ethics.

Australia’s Senator Thorpe’s pledge scandal has shocked the world as she claims to have sworn to the “queen’s hairs” not the queen’s heirs after her confrontation with King Charles The Third. She claimed this after she allegedly broke the pledge into parliament as a Senator by shouting out “You are not our king” to King Charles The Third. Senator Lydia Thorpe, the former Greens Senator for the state of Victoria, made the pledge when Queen Elizabeth was still alive and reigning.

The Parliamentary Oath of Allegiance is as follows; “I (full name) do swear that I will be faithful and bear full allegiance to Her majesty Queen Elizabeth The Second, Her heirs and successors according to law. So help me god.” Senator Thorpe took two tries to say her pledge. The first try she said, “I bear true allegiance to – the colonizing – her majesty Queen Elizabeth The Second” before the senate president made her start again. In her second attempt she did seem to say “hairs” and was sarcastically laughing. She also had an outburst at the King and Queen on their visit to Australia.

“Give us back what you stole from us: our bones, our skulls, our people. You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want a treaty in this country,” she said. She continued with, “You are not my King. You are not our King… F*** the colony, F*** the colony, F*** the colony.”

These outbursts have resulted in many people in parliament calling for her to resign, including the opposition minister Peter Dutton. He claims that someone who doesn’t believe in the system should “rest in principle.”

I think that this whole situation is very interesting in the eyes of the law. Senator Thorpe is an aboriginal person whose people have faced many hardships due to the colonization of the British empire and Thorpe is obviously very angry about this. That is understandable as aboriginal people had their rights taken away and were treated extremely bad. Thorpe wants a treaty Republic of Australia and says that King Charles is not the king of the First Nations people of Australia.