I have been emailed the following:
Republicans are once again grumbling. (Indeed one wonders when they are not?)
This time over the invitation to Prince William to speak at the early Australia Day function hosted by the Governor and Premier of Victoria in Melbourne on 21 January 2010.
Even though William will, in time, be King of Australia, republicans say they resent him being asked to speak on “our national day” referring to him as a British or foreign born prince. What would, I wonder, they say if the speech was being made by US President Barrack Obama?
Will they also grumble when the Welsh born Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, the American born Premier of New South Wales, Kristina Keneally, the Scottish born Senator Doug Cameron (who says Canada is a republic) and the Sri Lankan born Governor of Victoria, David de Kretser, speak on Australia Day?
Anti-monarchism was never really a very live cause in Australia, and is now a dead one. The removal of Malcolm Turnbull marked its end once and for all. No wonder that its remaining proponents are so fed up. Diddums.
More neo-imperialist rantings. You look over the old British Empire salivating and grunting "Terre Nostrum!"
ReplyDelete"Une gente, una regina, une impero!"
The Mussolini of the provinces indeed.
Isn't bitterness hilarious?
ReplyDeleteMussolini abolished the Italian monarchy you fuckwit BDJ.
ReplyDeletePlease do not swear on my blog.
ReplyDeleteBut of course you are quite right. Apartheid South Africa also abolished the monarchy (having lowered the voting age for the purpose - think on), and Ian Smith's Rhodesia also purported to do so.
The referendum to abolish the monarchy only failed because the alternative was a presidential system structured in a way that was very unpopular. Polls at the moment show a majority are republican. As a monarchist I find this unfortunate but it is foolish to deny that monarchism isn't particularly strong over there.
ReplyDeleteReally? Your first argument is, I'm afraid, tired and desperate stuff. Turnbull has been removed as Liberal Leader, Rudd sends warm greetings to monarchist conferences, and so on. It's a dead cause.
ReplyDeleteIf they were going to do it, then they would have done it by now. And as ever, the ageing Sixties-cum-Eighties generation is reduced to impotent incandescence at their juniors' view of the double revolution (social and then economic, with all the constitutional implications of both) as now dated, irrelevant and just plain silly.
"Mussolini abolished the Italian monarchy"? Only in his (or rather the Nazi-controlled) Salo Republic of 1943-45. Before that, Il Duce mightn't have liked the Italian House of Savoy (indeed he didn't) but he didn't dare to move against it. Rather, in 1943, it moved against him.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't be all that optimistic about the chances of Australian monarchism, however much we might wish it to continue.
ReplyDeleteA brief survey of monarchists of my acquaintance in Australia suggests that the notion of Prince Charles is a bone in their throat which they cannot swallow. It isn't so much his private life; it's his "Defender of Faiths" palaver, which seems to them to be giving the green light to Islam.
And if the Spanish solution were to be adopted of skipping a generation and having William V on the present sovereign's demise, then the monarchy is going to be, even more than it is now, a puppet of secularists in government. (Just as the Spanish monarchy is.) Gordon Brown, "Call Me Dave" Cameron, Kevin Rudd: each of these would scrap the monarchy tomorrow if they could.
Arnold, a very good argument for monarchy, of course.
ReplyDeleteJeffrey Walters, Cameron would, anyway. "King and People" against the Whig magnates is a great recurring theme. And his party is now solely the party of the Whig magnates.
But Brown and Rudd? I doubt it, actually. In many way (not enough, but many), they repesent shifts back from the Blair and Keating years.