Royal news live: Australian senator Lidia Thorpe explains furious outburst after King Charles’s speech

King Charles and Queen Camilla visited the Australian National Botanic Gardens on Monday after being confronted during their reception at the country’s parliament.

On the second day of their royal visit to Australia, the couple met members of the public as they also visited the National Bushfire Behaviour Research Laboratory on their visit to Canberra.

Lidia Thorpe’s colleagues have responded to her confrontation of King Charles during his visit to the country’s parliament.

Senator Ralph Babet took to social media to condemn Ms Thorpe’s comments, in which she told Charles “you are not my King,” and accused him of committing “genocide against our people”.

He wrote on X: “I condemn in the strongest possible terms the actions of Senator Lidia Thorpe today at Parliament House where she hurled verbal abuse at our King.

To show such utter disrespect to King Charles, who has traveled to Australia, despite ongoing cancer treatment, is disgusting. Senator Thorpe has disgraced not only herself and the Australian Parliament, but every Australian man, woman and child.

“Senator Thorpe demanded an apology from King Charles, I’d say it’s King Charles and the Australian people that should be demanding an apology from Senator Thorpe.”

The King and Queen after continuing their tour of Australia after they were confronted by an Indigenous MP during their parliamentary adress.

It is understood the King was unruffled and did not let the outburst overshadow what the royal party viewed as a wonderful day in the Australian capital, which had seen them greet hundreds of well-wishers at the national war memorial – including a sneezing alpaca.

Earlier, hundreds of people had gathered outside Australia’s parliament house for a chance to meet the royal couple.

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In his speech to the Australian parliament on Monday, Charles spoke affectionately about his relationship with Australia, a country he first visited as a teenager, saying he arrived as an “adolescent” and left more “chiselled” after his experience studying in the Outback.

He also highlighted the debt he owed to Australia’s Indigenous people.

Charles said: “In my many visits to Australia, I have witnessed the courage and hope that have guided the nation’s long and sometimes difficult journey towards reconciliation.

“Throughout my life, Australia’s First Nations peoples have done me the great honour of sharing, so generously, their stories and cultures. I can only say how much my own experience has been shaped and strengthened by such traditional wisdom.”

During his parliamentary address on Monday, Australian senator Lidia Thorpe confronted King Charles, telling him  “You are not my King”.

She is an Indigenous independent politician and became the first Aboriginal senator for the state of Victoria in 2020.

Born into family of prominent Aboriginal activists, Thorpe regularly speaks out about the monarchy’s impact on Indigenous people.

She was sworn into parliament wearing a traditional possum-skin cloak in 2020, carrying an Aboriginal message stick with 441 marks, representing each Indigenous person who had died at the time since the 1991 royal commission into deaths in custody.

In 2022, she was forced to re-do her oath into parliament after she referred to the late Queen Elizabeth as “the colonising Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II”.

The Prince of Wales has shared the simple parenting motto he and the Princess of Wales use to keep their young children happy at an engagement.

William, 42, made the revelation while attending a game hosted by the NFL Foundation UK in London on Tuesday, where he was gifted a football for Prince George, 11, Princess Charlotte, nine, and Prince Louis, six.

Expressing his appreciation for the gift at the Kennington Park hockey pitch, he said: “Oh, that’s very kind. Never go home empty handed! That’s a crucial motto of being a parent.

The senator who confronted King Charles has said she wanted to send a “clear message” to the King during his visit on Monday.

Lidia Thorpe shouted at the King after he finished his speech during his reception in Australia’s parliament. She told the BBC afterwards: “To be sovereign you have to be of the land. He is not of this land.”

She added that the King needed to instruct Parliament to discuss a peace treaty

She said the King needed 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,” she told the broadcaster.

This is the moment senator Lidia Thorpe heckles King Charles during a reception in Australia’s parliament.

The monarch had just finished addressing lawmakers in Canberra on Monday when Ms Thorpe shouted “This is not your land. You are not my King.”

She continued raising her voice in protest, saying “Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us! Our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people.

“You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty!”

Security stopped Ms Thorpe from getting close and ushered her out of the chamber as the King turned to talk to prime minister Anthony Albanese.

King Charles‘s landmark address to Australia’s Parliament House on Monday was disrupted by a protesting Indigenous senator shouting “you are not my king” and accusing him of “committ[ing] genocide against our people”.

The King and Queen Camilla are on a five-day tour of Australia and Charles addressed the Great Hall of Parliament House on Monday in one of the most important engagements of his first visit to the country as monarch.

As he finished his speech, senator Lidia Thorpe approached the stage and shouted for around 30 seconds, saying “this is not your country”.

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The Princess Royal attended a performance in London by the world’s oldest riding academy.

Eight riders and up to 26 horses from the Spanish Riding School carried out perfectly synchronised routines set to classical Viennese music on Friday evening.

The Vienna-based academy has been practising classical horsemanship for more than 450 years, and performed tonight to a horse-enthusiast and former Olympic rider in Princess Anne.

She joined model Lady Victoria Hervey, influencer Chuggs Wallis and thousands of fans to view the spectacle at the OVO Arena Wembley.

Radio and TV presenter Nicki Chapman, who hosted the show, said: “Hosting the opening night of the prestigious Spanish Riding School tour, with The Princess Royal in attendance, was an absolute honour.

“It’s been eight years since the Lipizzaner horses and their incredibly talented riders last visited the UK, and sharing the magic with both the Princess Royal and the British public made the evening all the more unforgettable.”