Australia sees sense on its plan to ditch the monarchy

Australia’s government has been determined to ‘do a Barbados’ and ditch the British monarchy for an Australian republic with an Australian president. But now, it seems, prime minister Anthony Albanese has lost his nerve.

In the week that the first Australian coins of Charles III’s reign entered general circulation, and it was confirmed the King and Queen will visit Australia later this year, Albanese and his government scuttled away from his party’s proclaimed republican intentions with a speed that makes even Rishi Sunak look decisive and in control.

After campaigning for office with a commitment to put the future of the monarchy to a constitutional referendum in Labor’s second term of government, and having insulted the late Queen, the beloved Elizabeth II, in creating a ministry for the republic in her Platinum Jubilee week in 2022, Albanese has ditched not the monarchy, but his plan to do so.

In the depths of Australia’s summer holiday silly season, assistant minister for the Republic, Matt Thistlethwaite (not Albanese who, like T.S. Eliot’s Macavity the Mystery Cat, is never there when things go wrong), told the Australian, a newspaper as staunchly republican as its founder, Rupert Murdoch, that the push for a republic was now ‘a lot harder’ as result of October’s disastrous referendum on an Aboriginal ‘Voice’ to parliament, in which all Australian states, as well as 60 per cent of voters, voted No. He then confirmed the referendum was formally off the agenda to the equally republican Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

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‘At the moment, our priority is cost-of-living pressure for Australians, and all of our policies have been directed at assisting Australians to get through that difficult period’.

Lamely, he added, ‘Having said that, longer term, it’s part of the Labor platform that we believe that we should have an Australian as our head of state. I’m not going to put a timeline on it’.

Thistlethwaite looked and sounded pathetic and defeated, but his admission accepted political reality. The chief reason that Australians opposed the Voice referendum last year was not because they were unsympathetic to the serious and chronic social and economic challenges faced by
so many Aborigines. Rather, the outcome reflected wide and deep resentment of the government’s near-total obsession with its constitutional frolic to appease Labor’s progressive elites and their social consciences. This is intolerable at a time when, just as in Britain, Australians are struggling with inflation, affording a home of the own, seemingly endlessly-rising interest rates, petrol and energy prices, and general cost-of-living pressures. The Voice’s thrashing, and Labor’s slump in opinion polls ever since, reflect people’s anger and frustration with a government that failed to deliver on its extravagant election promises to fix everything. An exhausting republic referendum campaign merely would be more of the same.

In editorialising its disapproval over the government’s putting the republic on ice, the Australian claimed Labor ‘must show it is able to walk and chew gum across a range of issues’, presuming the decision was disregarding the will of the people. But that’s not what opinion polls are saying. Since the death of the late Queen and Charles’s accession in September 2022, polls indicate the monarchy is safe if put to the vote: a November 2023 YouGov poll found about a third of voters each were for and against an Australian republic, with the remaining third either don’t know, didn’t care, or thought only after the King dies. That is hardly the level of support needed for a constitutional referendum to be carried: that requires not only a majority of voters but a majority of states.

That many Aussies are evidently relaxed or indifferent about the monarchy reflects the fact they are comfortable with themselves and their country’s place in the world. Who is their head of state doesn’t bother them: how to keep ahead of their mortgage and many bills, and keep the petrol-driven car on the road, is what they’re truly concerned about. The sanctimonious progressive elites who insist on telling those mainstream Australians what they must think all but guarantee they will think – and vote – just the opposite.

Perhaps that’s a lesson from Australia that Keir Starmer’s Labour, which often looks to Australia as a policy model, could take to heart.

When it comes to the monarchy’s future in Australia, in 1994 the then Prince Charles told Australian journalist Paul Kelly, ‘Who knows what’ll happen in 30 years’ time. I don’t know’. Well, that 30 years’ time is 2024 and, thanks to the Albanese government’s acceptance that the monarchy’s not going anywhere, now he knows.

But at least the Australian republican movement, whose war cry is ‘an Australian for head of state’, have had an unexpected consolation prize. This weekend, an Australian indeed will become consort of a head of state: that’s Tasmanian Mary Donaldson, about to be Mary, Queen of Denmark. Lucky them!