Prime Minister Turnbull\u00a0announces the end of\u00a0dames and knights. He said that Cabinet recently reconsidered the Order of Australia\u00a0and\u00a0concluded these awards\u00a0do not belong\u00a0in a modern Australian honours system. Nor, WfaAR says,\u00a0do awards\u00a0copying\u00a0Britain’s\u00a0hierarchical class system sit easily in our equality-based society that\u00a0lacks\u00a0a common history\u00a0with Britain\u00a0where knighthoods go back to medieval English\u00a0honours personally\u00a0bestowed by the sovereign. The Government is to\u00a0recommend to the Queen that she amend the Letters Patent,\u00a0that establish the Order of Australia, so\u00a0that dameships and knighthoods\u00a0are abolished. The four Australian\u00a0appointees since March 2014 – Quentin Bryce, Marie Bashir, Peter Cosgrove and Angus Houston –\u00a0will retain their titles (Dame\/Sir)\u00a0unless they renounce them, as will Prince Philip, the Queen’s husband, the sole\u00a0foreign recipient.\u00a0This last, widely ridiculed,\u00a0award\u00a0was the stunning catalyst\u00a0for intense\u00a0pressure on Tony Abbott’s tenure as Prime Minster\u00a0from January 2015. He faced a leadership challenge from his own party\u00a0within a fortnight of its announcement. WfaAR\u00a0also notes that some of the latest dames and knights are diffident about using\u00a0their titles\u00a0– funny about that –\u00a0and that the media frequently refers to them by just their name unadorned. The move to abolish knighthoods received wide coverage in the international media particularly in Asia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Prime Minister Turnbull\u00a0announces the end of\u00a0dames and knights. He said that Cabinet recently reconsidered the Order of Australia\u00a0and\u00a0concluded these awards\u00a0do not belong\u00a0in a modern Australian honours system. Nor, WfaAR says,\u00a0do awards\u00a0copying\u00a0Britain’s\u00a0hierarchical class system sit easily in our equality-based society that\u00a0lacks\u00a0a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-17","wpcat-17-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1375,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374\/revisions\/1375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}