Social services Minister Tanya Plibersek has condemned comments made by Lidia Thorpe at a pro-Palestine protest over the weekend, but has said the matter should be ignored so as not to give the Victorian senator more “air time”.
“What Lidia Thorpe has said is absolutely irresponsible. We just don’t want to give it extra air time. I mean, what we know for sure is that Australians want to see peace in the Middle East. We’re holding our breaths. We hope the hostages will return tonight, as they’re supposed to be,” Plibersek told Seven’s Sunrise this morning.
“We want to see aid back into Gaza and the rebuilding of Gaza, and we want to see peace in the Middle East. We certainly don’t want to import that hostility and conflict here to Australia, and we don’t want to give people like Lidia Thorpe any air time at all,” she said.
Speaking to a pro-Palestine protest on Sunday, independent senator Lidia Thorpe said, “if I have to burn down Parliament House to make a point” on the rights of Indigenous and Palestinian people she would, and that “I am not there to make friends. I’m there to get justice for our people”.
Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Opposition foreign affairs spokesperson Michaelia Cash released a statement calling Thorpe’s statements “disgraceful and shocking but unfortunately unsurprising”.
Cash said the opposition would “consider options available within the Senate to hold Senator Thorpe accountable”.
Plibersek said a censure motion or similar repercussions for Thorpe were “a matter to be decided down the track”.
“The last thing I want to be doing is promoting her or giving her the attention she so desperately craves. We need to focus on what we can do here in Australia. That’s support a two-state solution, that’s support whatever we can do to bring an assure peace in the Middle East,” she said.
“People have a right to peaceful protest. Of course they do. We are a democracy, but it has to be peaceful and it has to be lawful. And when people make suggestions like this that would encourage violence we need to say that’s not on here. It’s not acceptable, but let’s not promote them. Let’s not give them more attention than they deserve,” Plibersek said.
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