Summary
Australian senators censured Senator Lidia Thorpe for her outburst against King Charles III during his visit, calling him a colonizer and demanding land and reparations. Thorpe defended her actions, stating she would repeat them if Charles returned.
Last I checked Australia is independent, and last I checked I also said that Australia has to account for a lot of failures when it comes to addressing indigenous concerns.
Nothing of which has anything to do with Charles who has literally zero power over the situation. I’m pretty much as republican as people can possibly be but let’s not blame on powerless monarchs what’s actually the fault of elected representatives. Gets into the way of holding them accountable.
They are not independent. They are under the rule of the crown. 4-5 years ago the governor of Australia, who reports to the crown, dissolved parliament.
No one said he had any power.
That doesn’t mean he’s deserving of the title of king over the people who’s land was taken from them. I’m not sure why you are insisting he is.
I’m not saying he deserves anything I’m saying he has no choice but to be the king, best he could do is abdicate but that only would put his son in the same position. It’s up to Australia to abolish the monarchy, not House Windsor.
He could simply not go play king in Australia. If you don’t want to be king of a country your ancestors forcibly colonized, you can just not. None of this is an obligation.
No blame on Westminster, at all? Like, we’re ignoring that the UK was a (flawed, but still) democracy for most of Australia’s colonial period?
And how would him abdicating help the situation in Australia?
He’s taken up a duty, and he’s fulfilling it. That includes being a symbol, and as such getting attacked for the past and present wrongs of Britain, Australia, etc. Still doesn’t make him responsible, though, in precisely the same way that Bugs Bunny is not responsible for the acts of the board of Warner Brothers.
That other villains exist in the story of the British empire doesn’t matter to whether he has to play king in Australia. It’s not a duty and he’s not a put upon civil servant. If he actually agreed that his position was illegitimate he could simply say so and stop performing it, with no meaningful loss to the world. But he’s a rich douche who’s happy to ride on his inherited privilege and claim to bestow his special personage to people across the world. People calling him illegitimate is the right and proper response to him pretending he has some special place in Australian society.
And yet he’s still not their king.