Lidia Thorpe (Victoria, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I am here for five more years. I don't need anyone's vote, I don't need anyone's white guilt, and that's what this is about. It's appeasing the white guilt in this country by giving the poor little black fellas a powerless advisory body, where those in the parliament—this place, and have a look at it—decide what it is and who it is. It might be one person; a body doesn't mean a group of people. It could be Noel Pearson, it could be one of them fellas up there—poster boy himself. Well, poster boy also followed me around the meeting at Uluru. Oh, it is terrible isn't it, but you won't talk to the black sovereign movement about these issues? You have denied their space at the table to tell you what really happened over those two days at Yulara: the violence, the intimidation, the bullying.

What about the referendum meetings? What happened at those? We had an old man with one arm who lit a fire in protest at Blacktown in Sydney, at the Sydney dialogue. One arm, he had. He lit a fire with his grandkids to protest. What happened to him? Fire brigade came, put his fire out. Remember that? You remember that they put his fire out and they arrested him and they put him in the back of a divvy wagon outside that dialogue. I had the chair of the Referendum Council throw the microphone across the table at me at the Melbourne dialogue. Let's talk about that:100 people in the room, and they all witnessed it. You remember that. That's the bullying and intimidation and threats that have gone on for six years.

For six years they have denied the black sovereign movement. Megan Davis said it already in her speech. We excluded black leaders because they were cynical. They even admitted to not having real black grassroots leaders at the table. They had the numbers sewn up in those dialogues. They had it all sewn up. They had all the land councils and the organisations. They did the numbers. They said: 'Right, Noel, we've got it. It's going to happen.' And what do you know? Here we are today. And, yes, I wore my gammin T-shirt.