Posted on 06/27/2016 7:34:17 PM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
Australia's republican movement says membership has surged in the wake of the Brexit vote, as Australians question the benefits of remaining part of “little Britain”.
An “AusExit” campaign, including calls to remove the Union Jack from the flag and remove the British monarch as head of state, has gained momentum since Friday, when Britain voted to leave the European Union.
Peter FitzSimons, the chairman of Australia’s republican movement, said Australia had belonged to the British empire but the historic ties between the nations had become less relevant because “Great Britain barely exists anymore”.
“It’s one thing for the monarchists to say ‘we should be staying so very closely aligned to Great Britain’ … but how do you feel about staying so closely aligned to little Britain?” he told ABC Radio.
"From the moment that Brexit came through, social media came alive, with people saying 'this is ridiculous, let us be our own people, let us get away from this'.”
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
My uninformed impression, as well. No idea what the connection entails or if it is just in name. Always puzzled me as Australia had it's start as a penal colony with those not wanted left there. Why have any ties to Britain after that?
GMTA!..........
Sounds like somebody’s still mad about the governor general dismissing Gough Whitlam.
The churnalist provides no evidence of a “boost” — he merely quotes an enthusiast who is an activist for the cause. The state of journalism is contemptible.
Do Australia and the UK share a free trade policy of no duties or tariffs or VAT preferences in either direction ?
“Eventually there will just be England........”
London will secede.
How would that work? If it works then we could vet DC to secede!......
Basically, yes - we remain a Commonwealth Realm with the Queen of Australia as our Head of State - while the Queen of Australia is physically the same person as the Queen of the United Kingdom, legally and constitutionally the Monarchies are separate.
Exactly dating Australian independence is complicated (cases can be made for dates of 1901, 1931, 1941 (my personal choice), and 1986) but the United Kingdom no longer has any power here. The Queen does - as Queen of Australia - but that is separate to her role as Queen of the United Kingdom.
When the United Kingdom joined the EU, it was forced to abandon a lot of the trade practices that had previously existed in the Commonwealth and to start treating citizens of other Commonwealth countries different from before. Some of us are hoping that now we can reforge a lot of those old relationships anew.
Is this FitzSimmons guy a leftist?
Little Switzerland and little Norway, by comparison, are rather prosperous.
Australia shares a Head of State with the United Kingdom (and with Canada, New Zealand, and about a dozen other countries) - Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of Australia and Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth is the same person as Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. Legally and constitutionally, the Monarchies are distinct from each other, but both acknowledge the other.
She is represented in Australia by a Governor-General (currently the former head of the Australian Army - it's often an ex-Military or ex-Judge) His Excellency General The Honourable Sir Peter Cosgrove who she appoints 'on the advice of the Australian Prime Minister' (functionally the PM chooses the GG and the Queen approves the choice).
Australia is basically fully independent - but that's been a gradual process and talking about the changes might help make it clear what that means.
Until very recently - 1986 - the British government still retained the official power to make laws concerning Australia, even though it hadn't used those powers in over fifty years. The simultaneous passage of the Australia Act in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and the Parliament of Australia removed that right. It also removed the right of Australian court decisions to be appealed under certain circumstances to the British Privy Council. That represented the last time the UK had any actual say even theoretically over Australia.
Until 1941, Australia had no independent foreign policy or independent defence policy (although it had had the right to have these since 1931) - Australia only opened its first embassy (in Washington DC) in 1942, up until then, Britain still controlled our foreign policy.
In 1939, Australia declared war on its own behalf - whereas in 1914, Australia automatically went to was when the United Kingdom did.
And in 1936, Australia (and the other Dominions) had as much say over the future of King Edward VIII as the United Kingdom did.
In 1931, the Australian Prime Minister chose the Australian Governor-General for the first time (prior to that he was chosen by the British Prime Minister).
Those previous four changes all happened because in 1931, Britain passed a law - the Statute of Westminster - that began the process of changing the British Empire into the Commonwealth. The Dominions (at the time, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland (separate from Canada at that time), Ireland, and South Africa) all became officially equal to the United Kingdom in law, rather than dependencies with limited self government as they had had before. Britain was still dominant but it went from being the 'Father of Children' to the 'Eldest Brother').
In 1901, Australia became a single nation - but from then until 1931/1941, it was still under British authority when it came to Defence and Foreign Affairs - and the six Australian colonies had had similar self government before 1901 (they started acquiring it in the 1850s).
Always puzzled me as Australia had it's start as a penal colony with those not wanted left there. Why have any ties to Britain after that?
Because we chose to. But the history is also a little more complicated than that. Australia was originally six British colonies (today they are the six Australian states) and they had different histories. It's true that the oldest colony, New South Wales (established in 1788) was a penal settlement as was Tasmania, but Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland, and Victoria were all established as free settlements, not penal colonies. And each of these had a different history during the 19th century. And Britain had learned an important lesson from the American War of Independence - that you couldn't trample on the rights of British subjects (at least not white ones - it took another hundred years before 'natives' were seen the same way) on the other side of the world and so when Australian colonists started asking for more and more self government, they didn't make the same mistakes as they made in the United States - they gradually gave Australian colonies self rule. They kept us as friends and trading partners. We were free to choose our own destiny and we chose to maintain our close ties - a choice the American colonies were never offered, instead they saw their rights ignored.
We can choose to cut ties with the United Kingdom whenever we want to. So far, we've chosen to maintain a few last ties. I hope we continue to do so. We have a stable government, and that shouldn't be easily thrown away.
well that is a few decades overdue. Canada next.
Part of the reason, the left dislikes the Monarch is because in 1975, the Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed their messianic idol, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam from office after he started to act illegally - again, an example of the monarchy protecting rights and the constitution.
Nice, informative summary NM!
Thanks for the excellent write-up. Australian history was not to be found in any school teaching back when US schools actually did teach history. Or at least was not when I went 50-60 years ago.
And NATO!
A lot of people don’t seem to realize that free settlers outnumbered convicts very early in Australia’s history, by about 1820 from memory. By the end of Transportation they outnumbered convicts around 10x. They didn’t come to Australia as a reaction against anything or to flee something, they didn’t abandon their old identities, they came as Brits to a British colony and subsequently were literally British subjects until 1949. Britain wasn’t an evil foreign power, it was them. There was simply nothing to fight against.
Republican agitators are very often typical anti-Australian leftists. They hate white people and think Australia is an illegally occupied Asian country, they think the Australian flag is racist, they deny an Australian identity, they think that preventing unlimited third-world immigration is fascist, and they claim to want “independence” (from Australia’s own head of state) while wanting to subvert the country’s sovereignty to all manner of corrupt international organizations.
“but the United Kingdom no longer has any power here. The Queen does - as Queen of Australia - but that is separate to her role as Queen of the United Kingdom.”
Doesn’t the Queen still have the power to dissolve Parliament? I remember hearing something about that during a tour of the Australian Parliament years ago, although that is extremely unlikely to ever happen from what I was told as the Queen is generally hands-off when it comes to government affairs.
Yes, the Queen of Australia has the power to dissolve the Australian Parliament, and the Queen of the United Kingdom has the power to dissolve the British Parliament - in her separate constitutional role in each country.
It is very unlikely such a power would be used except on the advice of the Prime Minister but it is theoretically possible and it could be done in an emergency, for example, if a Prime Minister started to act outside of the constitution.
Within Australia, it's more likely such a decision would be taken by the Governor-General rather than the Queen (unless the Queen happened to be in the country) and it has come close to happening once - on November 11th, 1975. On that occasion, rather than dissolving the Parliament on his own behalf, the then Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, instead sacked the Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and commissioned the Leader of the Opposition Malcolm Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister on the express understanding that as soon as possible, Fraser would ask him to dissolve Parliament (which he did later that day), but it really was the Governor-General's call (and constitutionally the right one - the Prime Minister had been unable to get a budget passed and was on the verge of the government running out of money and his proposed solution was to illegally order the state owned Commonwealth Bank to loan the government money to continue - it wasn't quite unconstitutional but it would have been totally unlawful).
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