Posted on 01/25/2016 9:41:26 PM PST by Olog-hai
The Australian government came under mounting pressure on Australia's national day on Tuesday to appoint an Australian head of state to replace the British monarch.
Every Australia Day, an eminent Australian citizen is made Australian of the Year in recognition of his or her contribution to Australian society.
The 2016 Australian of the Year, former Chief of Army David Morrison, said in his acceptance speech on Monday night that he intended to use his new public profile to campaign for Australia severing its constitutional ties to Britain. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
Misleading title. Nobody is arguing for Australia to cut political, diplomatic, military, trade, etc. ties to the UK - they just don’t want to have a monarch. Seems reasonable to me.
It’s definitely cutting ties. Red China’s slowly taking over.
Very reasonable and very desired by a great number of Australians. Was discussing it with an Aussie friend just a couple of weeks ago. He said he hoped he lived long enough to see Australia free from England.
In what way does the British monarchy have any impact on Australia?
If some prince in the past had actually been the bastard son of the queen's paramour, then the current line is invalid.
The correct line of succession leads to a middleclass family man living in ... you guessed it ... Australia.
UK should get rid of the royals.
Why? So they can be like France?
What is your take on this?
Australia is ditching the UK thanks to stronger security ties with The US.
I am sure that when Charles and Camilla become King and Queen there will be a resurgence of support for the Monarchy.
This has come back into the media over the last few days, but it comes around every couple of years, and there's really nothing new in the recent revival.
I doubt there is going to be any change in the near future. It requires a referendum to change the Australian constitution - and we have compulsory voting here, and to pass a constitutional amendment, you need to get a majority of voters overall to approve the change and a majority of voters in a majority of states. There was a referendum held on this issue in 1999 and despite intensive lobbying by republicans, they failed to get either an overall majority or a majority in even a single state (they came close in one state). It's unlikely they'd succeed now.
The issue is that they really need to come up with a single model that the people would approve - they could probably get a majority vote on the issue of whether we should become a republic, but getting a majority vote on the particular model is much much harder - a large part of the reason the 1999 referendum failed for republicans is that a lot of republicans voted against the model (where a President would be elected by Parliament) because they wanted a directly elected President. If somebody put up a directly elected President model, it would probably fail because there are many republicans who regard that as dangerous (the Governor General has immense power in theory - it's limited by conventions that an elected president might not feel bound by, and by the fact that the Governor General is apolitical - a political president with the same powers could be a nightmare).
The bottom line for many Australians - even many republicans - is the fact that we have a stable government now. It works. Changing it and risking that stability is not something to be done lightly.
Actually, in quite a few ways - although it is the Australian Monarchy within Australia (it's a technical distinction, because the British Monarch and the Australian Monarch are physically the same person - but legally and constitutionally they are separate and that distinction is constitutionally important).
The powers of the Crown are still very real in Australia. The Queen (normally through her appointed representative resident in Australia, the Governor General (currently General Sir Peter Cosgrove - former Chief of the Australian Defence Force)) has the power to dismiss from office a Prime Minister, or an entire government that seeks to act illegally or unconstitutionally - and this isn't just some theoretical power. It happened in 1975, getting rid of the most socialist Prime Minister we've ever had before he could cause very serious damage (he was not dismissed because of his politics - but because of massive financial mismanagement that included unlawful activities by members of the Cabinet and a refusal to accept that he could no longer govern effectively and refusal to call an election in those circumstances). Members of the Defence Forces and the Police Forces take their oaths to the Queen as symbolic of the fact that there is a power above Parliament and in the event of a government acting outside the law and constitution, this means they have a duty to oppose that government. None of this is trivial.
And a significant part of the republican movement in Australia comes from socialists who don't like the idea that they can be restrained from acting outside the law and constitution. Not all republicans are motivated by that - but a significant number are.
The left do not like the idea of being forced to accept that they have to govern within the law and constitution
Sounds like the current regime and leftists in general here.
A middle class family man who was the 14th Earl of Loudoun (he died in 2012, and his son is now the 15th Earl).
The argument is that if Edward IV was illegitimate (which is quite possible - there are questions as to whether his 'father' Richard, Duke of York, was anywhere near his mother at the time of conception). If that was true, George, 1st Duke of Clarence should have become King instead of Edward IV, and the Earls of Loudoun are the senior surviving heirs of the George of Clarence.
None but leftists and Irish-Australians get their knickers twisted about it
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