Word: queens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...colonial mentality when I was born, in 1938. Only vestiges of it survive today. The most important of these relics is, of course, its monarchy. It is a bizarre fact that no Australian can be the head of state of Australia. That role is reserved for the King or Queen of England, by definition a foreigner, and not even an elected foreigner: the office of the Australian head of state remains purely hereditary, open only to a small clan of Anglo-German squillionaires known as the Windsor family. This appreciably narrows the field of talent...
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...
...firing of Whitlam made many Australians sit up with a jerk. It had never occurred to them before that the Queen had the raw constitutional power to do such a thing. It cranked up the long-dormant impulse toward republicanism. Until the 1970s this had been an issue only for intellectuals and a few left-wing workers whose vehemence earned them an undeserved reputation as ratbags (obsessed eccentrics). The problem was democratizing the republican issue while detaching it from the ownership of the Australian left. And it did slowly broaden, though its main political instrument, the Australian Republican Movement (A.R.M...
...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...