Crown in Danger

Heavens. Poor John Howard hasn't even had time to pack and Rudd The Dud, as our friend Mr. Welton calls him, is already planning on leading Fair Australia to rack and ruin. After making noises during the campaign that he wouldn't hold another referendum on the monarchy, the last one being in 1999, he has gone back on his word and is now suggesting one will be held and soon. While there are many members of the Labor Party who are monarchists they are, it must be admitted, few and far between. The pre-1960s Left, in Australia and much of the English speaking world, was more concerned with helping the poor and marginalized - though not always by the best means - rather than re-engineering society along the lines of some a priori theory of life and man. Now we have word that John Howard's replacement as leader of the Liberal Party part, and thus the Liberal-National coalition, will not be Peter Costello but Malcolm Turnbull, a leading Republican. Clowns to the Left of me, jokers to the Right, as the old song went.

My fellow Canadian monarchists may view these events with relatively little apprehension. The position of the monarch is almost constitutionally impregnable in this country, one of the advantages of living in a country where constitutional deadlock is not so much a fact but a way of life for some of us. If the monarch faces direct assault in Australia the danger in the elder Dominion is in some ways more insidious, indifference. A purely legal monarchy, without popular support, even if there is no danger of abolition, would be a bloodless thing. A living monarchy is a symbol of unity and tradition. Our modern day Canadian Jacobins wish to to fade the Crown into irrelevance, a campaign that has been waged since at least the days of Lester Pearson. Their Australian counterparts are less subtle. They wish to storm the Bastille of their imagining - for the monarchy they speak of has never really existed - and liberate the benighted people of Oz from what exactly? Their glorious past as one of the most successful free nations on earth? Their wealth? Their sense of justice and fair play? The rule of law and tolerance of debate and opinion?

We've come a long way since the days of the Great Robert Menzies who, on addressing Her Majesty, famously quoted the poet Thomas Ford: "I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die." I wonder if Kevin Rudd feels that strongly about anything.

Cross posted at The Gods of the Copybook Headings