Word: australia
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According to the Australian constitution--a document written for us by the English at the turn of the century--it is ultimately the English monarch who rules Australia through an unelected viceroy, the Governor-General. This official may be Australian or may not. He may, on behalf of the Queen, cancel any law enacted by the Australian government or even throw out the government and call for new elections. Or he may not. In practice he almost never does. The last and only time he did was in 1975, when the G-G, Sir John Kerr, fired the Labor government...
...growth of republican feeling in Australia coincided with, and was strongly encouraged by, the prime ministership (1991-96) of Paul Keating, a brilliant and abrasive Laborite much feared for his insults ("pansies" and "unrepresentative swill" were among the milder epithets he launched at his foes in parliamentary debate) and greatly misunderstood for his tastes: given his passions for antique French clocks and Georgian furniture, Keating was the most cultivated Australian ever to serve as Prime Minister. The movement's chief unelected backer was a formidable young merchant banker named Malcolm Turnbull. (Full disclosure obliges me to say that Turnbull...
...head of state was somehow democratic and good. To understand how this weird inversion could occur, one must be aware that Australians are even more skeptical about the character of their "pollies" than Americans are, though they have little reason to be: the level of serious political graft in Australia is extremely...
Soon after the referendum, Elizabeth II and her cold fish of a consort, Prince Phillip, toured Australia. The crowds were small and more curious than enthusiastic; the media, polite but indifferent. The romantic, near mystical Queen worship that had surrounded her tour in 1954 was gone forever. Being smarter than the monarchists, Elizabeth II could easily read the signs. She openly acknowledged (and was scrupulously careful not to attack) the possibility of a stable republic in Australia. The current Prime Minister, John Howard, is an obdurate monarchist. But the next in line as head of Howard's conservative Liberal Party...
...have the Queen, whom can we look up to?" was one of the most frequent complaints at referendum time. The thought that in a democracy you don't look up to your superiors, but sideways at your fellow citizens, wasn't much aired in monarchist circles. And Australia has always been short not only of convincing shared ceremonies of national identity but also of shared folk heroes. You can count them on less than two hands. Two are alive--the great cricketer Donald Bradman, now 91, and the swimming champion Dawn Fraser. The veterans of Gallipoli, a few of whom...