As the the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh’s latest tour of Australia has passed its halfway mark and nears its end, it is worth reflecting on the state of the monarchy, the activity of the republican movement and what is required from our side to secure the monarchy’s future.
The first feature of this visit is
the evergreen popularity of the Queen. I think the crowds are bigger and warmer than any I have seen for her than at any other time in the last 20 years. During walkabouts, there have been frequent spontaneous renditions by the crowds of God Save the Queen – an anthem not played in this country in an official capacity away from her presence for over twenty years - wherever she goes.
Crowds have been 20 and 30 people deep. The media management has been masterful, too - royal tour coverage dominates rolling news channels during the day and the Queen and Duke landed in Canberra at the start of the 6pm news bulletins in Sydney and Melbourne. Flawless timing.
So, where does this leave the republicans?
The politics of republicanism in Australia are now clear –
there is nowhere near enough support to carry the necessary referendum to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic. Australia’s baby-boomer elite have begun to realise that they will die as subjects of the Queen or her successors.
This article, by Australia’s pre-eminent political commentator, the Australian’s Paul Kelly, shows how raw this is for them. Kelly (the former husband of a Labor minister from the 1980s) accepts the battle is lost but can’t bear to face the monarchy in its triumph. He is by no means alone.
So what is to be done?
I think the monarchy (preferably the Queen before the end of her reign) needs to reach out to them and bring them into the tent. In no other realm is the “disconnect” between the monarch and local elites so pronounced. While it’s not a tactical problem for the Crown because it will always win an insiders-vs-outsiders referendum, the strategic problem remains. I don’t just want the bomb’s fuse to be extinguished, I want to dismantle the bomb.
For non-political elites, I think the answer is easy and lies in restoring an older part of the Australian honours system. If all Companions of the Order of Australia were offered to be upgraded to a knight or dame to join the few living AKs left (similar to
New Zealand’s move last year), then the nub of republican support would instantly be given “buy-in” with the monarchy and so the two would be reconciled. I suspect we would see similar take-up rates to NZ, and public life would be enhanced (as would the Crown’s cause). In my view, this scenario can only realistically occur with Tony Abbott becoming prime minister, and would be made easier by investitures personally conducted by the Queen. Plausible, but by no means certain.
The real challenge is to negotiate some sort of truce between the monarchy and Labor. Labor has deep Irish-inspired republican roots, resents the existence of vice-regal reserve constitutional powers (and has spectacularly suffered from them twice), and values republicanism’s utility as a low-cost symbolic issue that connects its two core constituencies – blue collar workers from a non-English speaking background, and urban social progressives. This is all in addition to the frequent suspicion that social democrats and others on the Left have for inherited privilege and the hereditary principle. Asking Labor to accept the monarchy is like asking Labor to deny its success since embracing cultural nationalism and moving beyond being a purely class-based party (which meant endless electoral defeat). This is THE challenge for our cause in my country but I have not found a long-term solution yet - I am hopeful the Palace will. If the Palace and its Australian friends and advisers can come up with a solution to this, then its long term future is assured. Until then, though, vigilance remains needed.
