Albo's recent meeting with Charles Windsor and avid declaration that Australia would not become a fully independent nation had interesting echoes to the past, writes IA founder Dave Donovan.
PRIME MINISTER ALBANESE'S recent meeting with King Charles in one of the Australian head of state’s many palaces in Great Britain, as well as his fervent rejection of an Australian republic while he had any-bloody-thing to do with it (paraphrased), harks back to 1963, during another similar meeting of monarch and colonial toady.
That was when another Australian PM, “Pig Iron” Robert Menzies, publicly swooned to the mother of the current monarch, Elizabeth Windsor, with a paean he pathetically plagiarised:
‘I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die.’
~ Thomas Ford, actually
Of course, the concept of Anglophiles subverting Australian attempts to gain full constitutional independence and restore our continental dignity after the almost unspeakable iniquities of colonialism is much older than Adolf Hitler enthusiast and ardent monarchist Bob Menzies.
An Australian republic was touted almost as soon as the first red-coats arrived in their putrid slave ships in 1788, bringing convicts to this ancient, peaceful and long-settled land. This editorial does not intend to detail all that long history, because we have done that comprehensively already.
Liberal Party PM "Pig Iron" Bob ruled Australia during the late 1930s and early 1940s. And again during the late 1940s, 1950s and most of the 1960s. During this epoch, nothing much changed — and most certainly not our nationally slavish and cringing subservience to a foreign crown. Eventually, in 1970, in the last gasps of 21 years of single-party rule, an unbecoming pipsqueak called Billy McMahon inherited the born-to-rule Liberal Party Australian prime ministership.
McMahon's campaign manager when he was steamrolled by Gough Whitlam in the 1972 Federal Election was John Howard. Everyone knows about Gough. His belief in an independent Australia, how he won two elections but had his tenure Kerr-tailed by the regional representative of Australia’s constitutional ruler, British sovereign Queen Elizabeth (AKA Menzies' hot crush).
From 1975 to 1983, Malcolm Fraser, with the bumbling assistance of his nearly innumerate treasurer, John Howard (same one), more or less overturned everything Whitlam did to make Australia more independent, such as reintroducing knights and dames, previously replaced with the Order of Australia by Whitlam.
Fraser tried to revert Australia to the exact catatonic state it was in before Whitlam's brief stint in power. But being a large, louche, long-faced and intensely idle sheep farmer from lushly pastoral Western Victoria, he never really got around to it and was eventually voted out.
Fraser was replaced as PM by universally adulated, adorably affable, assiduously adulterous, acclaimed alcoholic Bob Hawke. During his years as PM, “Hawkie”, a darling of the camera and the droll, drawled soundbite, left most of the heavy lifting, except for pint glasses, to his prickly Treasurer, Paul Keating.
Keating, a fiercely intelligent man in the Whitlam mould, set about removing the critical economic sclerosis caused by more than three decades of almost uninterrupted Liberal Party torpor. And which indeed he did.
To be fair, Hawke was a socially progressive man and former lion of the union movement and did, in 1986, pass, in conjunction with Westminster, the Australia Act. This important piece of dual-national legislation removed most of the remaining substantive links to Great Britain, such as the ability for Australians to appeal the decisions of our highest court to the UK Privy Council.
Keating took over from Hawke in 1991 and set about doing the other half of the job, reforming the non-economic aspects of Australia — social reforms. Such as championing multiculturalism and, especially, reconciliation with Australia’s First Peoples, also begun by Whitlam.
Australia’s first inhabitants, ancient custodians of this land, were especially dispossessed by the British crown, whose law declared them not even to have been here: terra nullius. Keating bravely attempted to win over the Australian people, initially hostile to these moves, and succeeded.
Re-elected in 1993, Keating then set about trying to turn Australia into a fully and truly independent nation, by removing its last colonial link — the undeniable constitutional fact that Australia’s head of state is not an Australian, but the inheritor of an archaic British institution definitively determined by anti-democratic notions of primogeniture and, indeed, religious prejudice.
We were quite close to becoming a republic, but Australia being Australia, in late 1996, Keating was voted out to be replaced by McMahon’s protégé and fellow pipsqueak, John Howard. Many people call the Liberal Party conservative, but most often, they are actively regressive.
And so Howard, like Fraser before him (in his case, casually), set about repealing the progressive changes implemented by Labor. Again. And thus did Howard set about making Australia “relaxed and comfortable”, by overturning our newfound acceptance of immigrants and first halting steps towards restoring the rights and reconciling with the ancient owners of this land.
But most particularly, Howard set about subverting Australia’s best yet attempt to become a republic in 1999. He did so effectively by brilliantly sabotaging the constitutional convention, with the unwitting help of haughty, patrician future Liberal PM Malcom Turnbull – whose cocksure arrogance and confounded naivete played straight into Howard’s hands – by fragmenting the republican side between direct and indirect presidential republicans.
Howard then further destroyed any chance by making the question posed to voters about whether or not they wanted a republic a complicated semantic puzzle. The 1999 Referendum was a purely Liberal affair, really, with two Oxford dons, Rhodes scholars and future Liberal prime ministers – Turnbull and then-director of the Australian Monarchists Tony Abbott – debating each other over the airwaves. Oddly, plummy Turnbull sounded more like the duke and Abbott, a British native, more like the Aussie battler. Predictably, it was a disaster and the referendum was defeated in every state.
Turnbull got emotional and called Howard "the prime minister who broke Australia’s heart". Less than four years later, he was serving as a cabinet minister in a Liberal Howard Government — the same John Howard who effectively drove the republic into a vanishing chasm. He then served as a cabinet minister under Tony Abbott, almost tearfully denouncing Abbott when he displaced him as Liberal Party Opposition Leader.
Howard lost in 2007 to Labor’s Kevin Rudd. In 2008, incidentally, Howard was touted to receive some kinky award from our imperial overlords called "the royal garter", but even they didn't have the audacity to pose John Howard in leggy lingerie.
Kevin Rudd, meanwhile, didn’t have a lot of time during his abbreviated time in office to pursue a Republic due to being too busy saving Australia from the Global Financial Crisis, fighting off the fanatically entitled mining lobby, a phone-tappingly frenetic Murdoch media and even his loyally deputed deputy.
That deputy, Julia Gillard, deposed Kevin in 2010 and, as first and possibly last ever female Australian PM, governed in the most tenuous minority government imaginable. Yet still Julia managed to pass legislation, overhaul education and establish Australia's first-ever national disability insurance scheme (NDIS). Like her predecessor, Rudd, this rather remarkable person had few idle hours to plan anything as nation-defining as a republic.
The Liberals were back in control of the Treasury benches again in 2013 under the previously archetypal arch-Anglophile Tony Abbott, who lost his prime ministership after two excruciating years. This culminated in him bringing back imperial honours and comically knighting Menzie’s erotic fantasy, Queen Elizabeth's consort, Philip, who was already a Prince. Was it to be Prince Sir Philip, or rather Sir Prince Philip?
And then Malcolm Turnbull took over. Now, you might think this seemingly ardent republican would make moves to progress Australia towards becoming a republic? But no, when this flagrant opportunist took over and then met the Queen at another fairytale castle in Britain, he said he had no plans to make Australia a republic until the Queen died, declaring himself an “Elizabethan”. Not only morbidly inappropriate, regressive by centuries, but most importantly for people with consistent principles, vomitous in the extreme.
Speaking of nauseating, then there was Scott Morrison. Enough said.
But back to consistent principles. Independent Australia was established in 2010 by this author, then media director and vice chair of the Australian Republican Movement, in part to publicise and propel true independence for Australia. Obviously, not enough was done during that time because we are still not a republic.
Independent Australia is firmly committed to democracy and independent thought — which, in some ways, summarises what a truly democratic republic is all about. Well, it does to us, anyway. Most of all, we believe in progress, moving forward towards a fairer, better and more equal future. We are non-partisan, but unabashedly progressive.
The Labor Party was – we thought – the party that believed in the rights of the common man, as espoused in trade unionism. As fought for in fair working hours and conditions, and with a host of other policies. Indeed, it even has socialism written into its charter, although that socialist detail these days is almost always ignored or overlooked. Nonetheless, it is regarded as being a broadly progressive political party.
The Liberal Party is not. It is a conservative party. Sometimes, even a regressive one, as we have shown, in recent history with leaders such as Howard and Abbott. Generally, the country stays much the same under the conservatives. Sometimes, such as under Menzies, for decades. Under Labor, historically, it moves forward at a much greater rate, and under some PMs, such as Whitlam and Keating, at a startling rate.
Albanese has been in power for close to five years and while the economy has improved, in terms of progressing social justice, there has been scant change.
The PM's reticence to move decisively to progress the nation suggests he may have more of the hallmarks of a conservative than a progressive.
In terms of true independence for Australia, the Labor PM created a specific ministerial role, then abolished it last year. When stripped of his Assistant Minister for the Republic role, Matt Thistlethwaite nonetheless claimed excising the monarchy was still on the Government's agenda.
But when Albanese tugged the forelock to King Charles and shitcanned an Australian Republic, he confirmed his conservative leanings. Not in favour of a republic while he is PM? What sort of Labor PM would dare voice such a conservative mantra? He may as well have said he was a "Charlesian". Or that he "did but see Charles passing by".
If you are a Labor PM and you don’t believe in an Australian republic, then what do you believe in?
IA founder David Donovan is the former vice chair, national committee member and Queensland state convenor of the Australian Republican Movement.
Follow Dave Donovan on X/Twitter @davrosz and Bluesky @davrosz.bsky.social, and Independent Australia on Bluesky @independentaus.bsky.social, X/Twitter @independentaus and Facebook HERE.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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