The King and Why?

Yasmin Poole, the ARM National Youth Convenor, writes an opinion piece for The Saturday Paper. Linking the loss of The Voice referendum and the Head of State’s visit, she discusses the irony of The Voice as a healing process while 12 months later, we are meant to laud a symbol of power that inflicted the hurt in the first place: “One year on, Australia is rolling out the red carpet for a man whose family is responsible for the same colonisation The Voice aimed to address”. She says that young people, who were heavily involved in the YES campaign, are ready to have a conversation about our colonial history including our national identity that “drilled right down to our constitutional core”. She describes how imperial symbols are infused into our daily lives and institutions, our observance of them is unthinking but that they are not real power, more relics of a world that no longer exists. She identifies that the monarchy represents an institutional and ideological hurdle that prevents us from becoming the egalitarian and multicultural nation that our politicians claim we are and concludes by saying that young people will not be following the royal visit on their newsfeeds. While this is a fine academic analysis of the lasting impacts of the British monarchy on Australia’s progress and identity and presents its arguments from the point of view of young Australians, it does not identify how the campaign could be conducted to achieve the desired outcome or how to engage the majority of young people in the cause. [“The King and Why? by Yasmin Poole, The Saturday Paper, 19-25 October 2024]