Australian senator Lidia Thorpe has defended her heckling of King Charles during his address at Parliament House, accusing him of genocide and asserting that ‘he’s not of this land.’

“I wanted to send a clear message to the King of England that he is not the king of this country. He is not my king,” she told BBC after the protest.

Thorpe, an Aboriginal Australian, interrupted the ceremony in Canberra, shouting for approximately a minute before being removed by security.

Thorpe from Victoria has been a vocal advocate for a treaty between the Australian government and its Indigenous peoples.

Unlike New Zealand and other former British colonies, Australia has never established such a treaty. Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people assert that they never surrendered their sovereignty or land to the Crown.

“He [King Charles] is not sovereign. We are sovereign. To be sovereign, you have to be off the land. He is not of this land. We have been demanding a treaty for decades and decades.”

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She called on the King to instruct the Parliament to discuss a peace treaty with the First Peoples.

“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.”

In contrast, Aboriginal elder Aunty Violet Sheridan, who welcomed the King and Queen earlier in the event, criticised Thorpe’s actions as “disrespectful,” stating, “She does not speak for me.”