Word: australian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...result was a triumph of electoral timidity, worsened by fake populism. By a queer flip-flop of logic, a majority of Australian voters (55% to 45%) decided that to have an Australian President appointed by a democratically elected government was elitist and unsafe, whereas to have an immensely rich hereditary monarch as their 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...
...monarchists won the referendum, not because Australians were devoted to the Queen and her successors but because feuding republicans couldn't agree on which model of republic to uphold. Should the new-style head of state, an Australian President, be appointed by Parliament? Or elected in a national campaign, in the American manner? The A.R.M. wanted the former, but Australians hated the idea of an American-style republic--or American-style anything--in their public life. This split the republican vote, to the boundless relief of the monarchists, who could never have carried the issue on their own. (Pollsters thought...
...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, Peter Costello, is a republican. The Australian Labor Party is republican through and through. It is only a matter of time before the less reactionary and nostalgic Liberal politicians can come out of the closet, and then Australian monarchy will be finished...
Another reason why some Australians want to keep the monarchy is unease about mixture. The Queen evokes the loyalty and gratitude of the "pure" Anglo-Australian because she personifies "pure" Britain. This worked fine a half-century ago, when more than 90% of Australians were still of British descent and could feel themselves to be, as Prime Minister Robert Menzies would later put it, "British to the bootheels." But today the picture of exclusionary Australia, the continent-size British island just below Asia, has almost faded away. The White Australia Policy, that disgraceful provision whereby no one of Asian...
Compared with their older selves, Australians--especially the younger ones--are a tolerant people. Few of the extreme emotions set off in the U.S. by the idea of multiculturalism have been awakened by its Australian version. We are, in fact, one of the world's most successful multicultural democracies, and this is an ethical triumph of no small consequence. Australians on the whole realize that multiculturalism, that forbiddingly bureaucratic polysyllable responsible for so much hot air, really means learning to read other people's image banks, not a forced renunciation of one's own. They realize, quite naturally and instinctively...