Essays in Idleness

I notice that pretty much the whole class of Australian politicians will have to be hanged, drawn, &c, for conspiring against Her Majesty, to the end of declaring a Republic. I fear, however, that this won’t happen; that the treason will simply be performed. I am not “up” on the Antipodean situation, and have scanned only a few websites reporting the latest unpleasant news. The usual sleazy rhetoric is employed, to propose the overturning of their constitutional order. The nation must “come of age,” &c, which implies she has failed to do so as a Commonwealth since 1901, and only now may be ready for responsible government. The politicians have decided they must fix this. She must obtain the “independence” that will make her indistinguishable from every other sordid post-modern national amusement park.

The intention is plain, as in all third-world movements. The political class wants a local strongman, or failing that one of their own, to play the Queen in public ceremonies. As I know from our partly parallel Canadian history, pride and envy are their guides. The profane State wants an absolute monopoly of power and prestige, to appropriate both the profane and the sacred. A royal house, especially one not permanently resident and thus directly under their thumbs, is an affront to the politicians’ self importance, with its vestigial suggestion that anything could be above their station. To the faithless, Dieu et mon droit is beyond intellectual reach.

No, “the power of the people” must be absolute, and seen to be absolute, in the person of a politician. And the model of a Republic, designed for the government of small cities, is applied by the politicians to states on the scale of large historic empires, and inflated to accommodate their lusts.

As a Canadian I realize that Australian developments will only encourage the spoilt Trudeau child, and members of his proud and contemptible Party, to try the same stunt here. For them it is only a question of timing: of what they can get away with, and how soon. For decades they worked assiduously to strip monarchical symbols from our public life, and now they claim these are “out of date.” Being politicians, and thus very nearly the lowest of the low, they have sponsored instead a cheap and jingo nationalism to empower their class, even when the individual members inspire little but disgust in the voters.

The Australian constitution, as I understand it, was modelled on Westminster, plus Canadian federalism, and a few details borrowed from USA and Switzerland. One of these last was the public referendum. When last consulted in one, Australian voters defeated a republican proposal by a decisive margin (6 November 1999). But this, to a hungry wolf, is only a temporary setback. He looks for an alternative way to get at the flesh he so craves.

It does not follow that such a proposal will be defeated again. These days, with the pillars of our civilization cracked, “public opinion” can be changed very quickly. In 1999, for instance, the Canadian Parliament not only defeated a private member’s bill (from an irritating backbench homosexual) to introduce “same-sex marriage,” but shot it off with a resolution defining marriage in perpetuity as “the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others,” which passed by an overwhelming margin. The then-governing Liberals were at pains to show they wanted nothing to do with a measure that enjoyed hardly any public support. Those who doubted this (moi, par example) were accused of paranoia.

By 2003, the necessary jackboot was tied on: a provincial court ruled retroactively that “same-sex marriage” could not be denied; and in 2005, Parliament rubber-stamped on behalf of the whole country. By then, public opinion had come round. Anyone opposed could now face “hate laws,” freshly written into the Criminal Code alongside the last season’s “genocide” provisions.

There is no chest, no head, no heart, as empty as “public opinion.”

I daresay the Australians will fold the same way, in the face of relentless republican propaganda, and the systematic sabotage of their noble traditions. For while they may be a little less flexible than the average rubber-duck Canadians, it can’t be by much.

While it was, for the most part, only a conceit, the idea that the politician is “Her Majesty’s servant” was a subtle but continuous check on the politician’s vanity. The idea of waiting for Royal Assent — the remote possibility that it might not be granted — provided a modestly civilizing restraint on him. He was obliged at least to dress the part of a loyal domestic, and take his place in an ancient and honourable procession. Even in the decline of kingly power, monarchy remained an impediment to his Adamic barbarity. He must know his place. Remove that Throne — undermine the constitutional order that it upholds — and only the wolf remains.

The American Republic was established with a clear notion that it governed “One nation under God,” further limited by traditionally British, and legally defensible rights, belonging not to the state, but to the free citizen. Their constitution has been effectively overthrown, by the gradual inversion of the meaning of its terms, and the obviation of civil life beyond intrusive government regulation. The “democratic” American politicians, as all others in once free countries, are impeded by nothing as they invade every tiny corner of humane family as well as civic life, while erecting their incomprehensibly large, bureaucratic and autocratic Nanny State.

In our post-modern context, the idea that his Creator has claims above man, and therefore above every human tyranny, is taken for a nonsense. In the descent of practice from the French Revolution, Atheism is now the default position of every public authority. And monarchy becomes ridiculous for its implicit acknowledgement of the immortal Fact of our dependency.

For there is an implicitly priestly order, in which the Crown represents a people before God, and God before a people. Replace that, with some foetid “social contract,” and the possibility of “Crown in Parliament” slides also down the chute. Now it is only “The People,” with arrogated Capitals, who are everywhere in the great majority entirely ignorant of how government works, and who, in the absence of this competence, or any sound foundation, can be manipulated to “support” anything at all — including so many things known to all previous generations as morally abhorrent.

Poor Australia. There will be nothing left of her, after amendment by feckless politics and massive immigration. Her children will grow up as puddings.