Brian May, lead guitarist of rock band Queen, receives knighthood from King Charles III

Legendary rock guitarist Brian May has received a knighthood from Britain’s King Charles III.

May, who was a founding member of the band Queen, will now be known as Sir Brian, following the investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday.

The star received the title of Knight Bachelor for his services to music and to charity. He attended the ceremony alongside his wife, Anita Dobson, a former star of long-running British TV soap “EastEnders.”

Congratulating him online, a tweet from Queen’s official account said: “Arise Sir Brian May

“Brian’s investiture as a Knight of The Realm took place today at Buckingham Palace. The knighthood was presented to Brian by His Royal Highness, King Charles.

There was also a post on the royal family’s official Twitter account about the event, picturing May alongside British saxophonist YolanDa Brown, who was also honored.

May, 75, was one of more than 1,000 people honored on King Charles III’s first New Year’s honors list, announced in December 2022.

In addition to performing with Queen since the 1970s, May is also an astrophysicist. He received his PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College London in 2007 after taking a break from his studies in the 1970s to focus on the band.

He is also a vocal supporter of animal rights and critic of hunting. In 2010, he formed an organization called the Save Me Trust, to campaign against fox hunting and badger culling in the UK.

May isn’t the only member of Queen to have received a royal title. Drummer Roger Taylor was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2020. May previously received the title of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2005.

The current Labor government wants to have a referendum on the idea, but not in its current term (it's having a referendum into something called the 'Indigenous Voice to Parliament' this term - a mechanism by which indigenous Australians will have some special way of making their collective views known).

Whether they will actually do it, next term, (assuming they are re-elected) - I'd say it's likely, but far from certain, that they will. Will it pass? That's a very different question.

Changing Australia's constitution can only happen under strict conditions laid down in the constitution. And getting rid of the monarchy would require a change to the constitution.

We actually had a referendum on this issue back in 1999.

Now, for a referendum to pass, it needs to pass two thresholds.

(1) It must achieve a majority across the entire country.

(2) It must also achieve a majority in a majority of states.

Australia has six states, so a referendum to pass, it needs the national majority, and a majority in at least four of the six states - the idea behind this second criteria is that when Australia federated as a single nation in 1901, New South Wales and Victoria were much more populous than the other four states (they still are, really) and the less populous states feared they'd be almost irrelevant if NSW and Victoria wanted to change the constitution.

The 1999 'Republican Referendum' (referred to that way because of the idea that Australia would become a Republic if the referendum passed) failed to meet either criteria.

The vote across the entire country was close to 55-45 against the idea. (54.87 - 45.13, in fact).

And it also failed to pass in even one state.

The closest it came was in Victoria, which is generally regarded as Australia's most left-wing state, where the vote was 50.16 - 49.84 against. The furthest away was Queensland where the vote was 62.56 - 37.44.

This was all despite the republican movement believing for most of the decade beforehand, that they would easily win.

Why did it fail? First of all... opinion polls and similar nearly always seem to overstate the 'progressive' point of view (and in Australia, republicanism is more of a progressive idea, than a conservative one).

Secondly, it's often been argued that a lot of people who support the principle of Australia becoming a republic did not like the model that was going to be adopted in 1999 (basically we would have had a President elected by Parliament, and most republicans seem to have wanted some form of direct election by the people).

Anyway... that's the history.

What will happen now?

As I say, I think there is a good chance that if Labor is reelected, they will hold a republican referendum in their next term. It's not certain, but there's a decent chance.

But will it pass?

It's true that King Charles III isn't as popular as his mother, Queen Elizabeth II was. But I actually do think he's more popular and respected than the republicans realise. And there's also a lot of people who understand this really shouldn't be about the popularity of an individual monarch, but the stability of the system.

Our current system has given us one of the most stable governments on earth for well over a century now and that's not something will lightly throw away - even if they dislike the system in a theoretical sense.

A lot will come down to the model that is presented to the people - if any. I think Labor would like to try and avoid having a model if they can (that is what they are trying to do with their 'Voice to Parliament'). Basically arguing that they want people to vote for the principle, and sort out the details later. I don't know if they'll be able to get away with that approach, but if they do, they might get a majority vote - but then we could end up with a mess like that seen in the UK recently over Brexit - where people voted for the principle and hardly anybody seems to like what actually emerged at the end of the process.

If Labor comes up with a model that has widespread support, I think there's a decent chance it will pass.

But even then - we run into the fact that Australians, historically, rarely vote for constitutional change. 44 'Questions' have been put to the people since 1901, 44 attempts to change the constitution. 8 have passed. 34 have failed. Of the ones that have passed, most have had overwhelming public support (at least 70% of people voting for the change) and most have also come just after a serious national crisis that made the case for change obvious. Even though, I would say it's likely the idea of change has majority support in Australia, I'm not convinced it has the type of majority that is needed to actually change - it's that 'majority in a majority of states' thing. We've had another five referendums where the national majority was achieved (from 50.30 to 62.22) but which failed because fewer than four states voted for it.

I think we could very easily end up with a situation where a new republican referendum would get the national majority, it would definitely get a majority in Victoria, and probably in New South Wales. But the other four states... the republicans would have to win two of those, and it's honestly difficult to see which two they could be reasonably sure of. It's not impossible, by any means. But if I was a betting man... I'd say the odds are currently against it.

Also bear in mind that in Australia, voting in referendums is compulsory - so a lot of people who generally don't express their views are forced to do so... and historically this silent group has tended to vote against change without a very good reason. Why fix what isn't broken? They'd have to be convinced any change is worth risking a stable system. Even when they are not a big fan of that system.

Honestly, no, I don’t think so.

Some overly woke people might, and Australia has its share of those, but most people wouldn’t care at all one way or the other.

I’m inclined to think it’s some republicans making things up to try and make it sound like they have more influence than they do.

If I had to guess, I’d say about 10% of Australians are hardcore republicans right now. About 10% (and I’d include myself in this) are hardcore monarchists.

The other 80% really don’t care all that much one way or the other. Many don’t care at all - but even those who do, don’t care all that much compared to all sorts of other issues.

Most of the hardcore republicans are socialists. More of the hardcore monarchists are conservatives.

Since the rejection of a republic in 1999, republicans basically decided that they wouldn’t make another push until the Queen died. Now that has happened, they’re gearing up for another attempt. And that’s not unreasonable - after a quarter of a century, it’s perfectly reasonable to revisit the question.

But, at the moment, at least, I don’t think they have as much momentum as they’d like.

They’ll win some battles - they have succeeded in ensuring the King will not replace his mother on our five dollar note.

But at the moment, he’s still going to be on every single new coin by the end of this year.

Most of the republicans aren’t stupid. They know the worst thing they could do is push too fast too soon, especially with the current government (which, for the most part is pro-republic), more or less ruling out any sort of referendum, until 2026 at the earliest.

After ‘The Voice’ referendum, likely to be later this year - then, depending on what happens there are the reaction to it, we might start to see some sort of genuine push.

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