WHERE’S OUR QUEEN?

I hope you enjoyed this Australia Day. And a salute to the Australian of the Year scientist, and global warming expert Tim Flannery. Good choice.

But I have a question today January 26, 2007. The Australia Day Council has been running expensive radio and television commercials telling you that there are one thousand things to do on Australia Day.

And that got me thinking. What is the Queen of Australia doing today? I mean we’ve had speeches from everybody from Prime Minister Howard to Kevin Rudd and mayors and award winners. But what about ‘our’ Queen? And Phil the Greek?

Did she call the PM at Kirribilli House and say ‘Happy Birthday Australia?’ Will she be watching the one-day cricket between England and Australia and barracking for us? I doubt it. People are complaining that our all-conquering cricketers who whitewashed the Poms 5-nil to regain the Ashes have been snubbed, insulted, jilted in the annual honours.

Well, why didn’t her Maj given them all honorary gongs. After all, she handed out awards like lollies to the English team when they beat us to win the Ashes the last time.

I mention it, and make no excuse for the sarcasm, because while everybody else is going on about what Australia Day means to them – I’ll tell you what it means to me.

It means another year passes and we still have a foreign head of state. We’ll all sing today about a land that is ‘young and free’. But we are NOT free as long as the Queen of England is our reigning monarch. We still live in a democracy where we still curtsy to an old lady who only got the job because her father got the job because his brother would rather marry a raunchy American divorcee named Wallis Simpson -- who may have been a concubine in the far East – than be King.

And Australia’s next king will be Charles whose main dream in life he confessed was to come back in the next life as one of Camilla’s tampons.

Sure we had a manipulated referendum in which the choices were so limited that even the monarchists emulated Basil Fawlty. Instead of ‘don’t mention the war’ it was ‘don’t mention the Queen’. Instead they put the fear of God into people by urging them not to vote for ‘the politicians’ Republic’. It was one of John Howard’s cleverest political scams.

Even the Duke of Edinburgh was quoted as saying when the news came through that the Republicans had lost: ‘What’s wrong with these people’.

It’s a sobering thought on Australia Day 2007 that ‘our Queen’ will never set foot on these shores again. And maybe we are getting a republic by stealth. At least it was the elected Prime Minister who presented the award to the Australian of the Year. And not the increasingly invisible Governor General… ol’ what’s his name.

Friday, January 26, 2007

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2007