Word: queen
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...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...
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...
...hard to say why, apart from habit, there should be any nostalgia for royal forms among Australians, especially when we are so fond of our national antielitism. But people, including Australians, want figures to admire. "If we don't 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...
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...
...Tuesday, Spain's national court fined the magazine's publishers 3,000 euros for "insulting the monarchy.") The couple were already having a tough year: A few months earlier, Letizia's sister had committed suicide. This fall, groups of Catalan nationalists publicly burned photos of the king and queen, and last week, Morocco's monarch temporarily recalled his ambassador from Madrid to protest the Spanish monarch's visit to the contested cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Through it all, Juan Carlos and his wife Sofia have maintained their habitual calm, confident, no doubt, of both of their high approval ratings...