Elizabethan holiday
Much of Australia will enjoy a national holiday today in honour of the Queen's official birthday. To some Australian monarchists, it's occasion to raise a glass to a much-loved head of state. To many more, it's the happy chance to take a quick winter break, hopefully avoiding the inflated "double demerit" speeding fines and points penalties which come into effect on three-day holiday weekends.
Next week at Parliament House in Sydney, the Australia-Britain Society will hold a luncheon at which members will sing God Save the Queen, Australia's Royal anthem and take part in a loyal toast. At the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Collingwood will take on Melbourne in the traditional Queen's Day birthday AFL face-off. But the day is marked with little, if any, pomp and circumstance. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I can't find any evidence of gun salutes, parades or fireworks - and nor can the monarchists I've been speaking to.
How much longer Australia will continue to officially celebrate the Queen's birthday is one of the most intriguing questions facing Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and, ultimately of course, the Australian people.
Rudd, of course, is an unabashed Republican. Since 1991, a monarch-less Australia has also been official Labor Party policy. At the 2020 summit in Canberra, 29 members of the governance panel voted in favour of a Republic, with one abstention - although monarchists claim that the panel was stacked in order to rubber-stamp the government's Republican agenda.
Given the widespread feeling that Brendan Nelson will not lead the Liberal Party into the next federal election, it is also a distinct possibility that the shadow Treasurer Malcolm Turnbull will soon head the opposition. Mr Turnbull, of course, was the figurehead of Republican movement in 1999, when the Australian people voted to retain a constitutional monarchy.
The Liberal Party is still the home to many staunch Royalists - the shadow minister Tony Abbott proudly exhibits a portrait of Queen Elizabeth in his parliamentary office. But might it soon be the case that Australia's two leading political parties are led by fervent Republicans?
Yet just at the very moment when the stars seemed to be coming into alignment for the Republican movement, a new poll came as a bolt from the blue. In May, the Roy Morgan International polling organisation found that only 45% of respondents wanted a Republic - down 6% from three years ago. 42% wanted to retain the monarchy, and 13% were undecided.
For the record, in the 1999 referendum roughly 55% said "no" when asked whether the Queen and Governor-General should be replaced by a president appointed by a two-thirds majority of the members of the Commonwealth Parliament. Republicans will tell you, of course, that the Australian people were presented with a false choice, and that the prospect of a popularly-elected president would have been much more tantalising.
The Republican movement cannot afford a second defeat, which is why its strategists favour a slow-burn campaign. They want time to build a broad-based campaign, which can reach beyond the inner-urban areas, where support for a Republic was most strongly concentrated in 1999. The Republican argument was less well received in the suburbs and rural Australia.
Neither is Kevin Rudd in any great hurry, although he does want to "accelerate" the debate. He's refused to be drawn on a firm timetable for a new referendum. Most think it would come in a Rudd second term, if the voters allow him to have one.
When it comes, perhaps the most intriguing group will be what might be called the "Elizabethans" - Australians who aren't exactly enthused by the idea of Prince Charles becoming their head of state, but who think that it would be disrespectful and ungracious to ditch Queen Elizabeth while she occupies the throne.
The post-war Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies, an arch Anglophile who wanted to call the Australian dollar "the royal", broke down and cried when he announced to parliament the death of George VI, the present Queen's father.
Will Kevin Rudd one day get to deliver a very different proclamation: announcing not the death of a British monarch, but the end of the constitutional arrangement by which he or she remains Australia's head of state?
I'm 
Comments
or to comment.