This weeks special guest on Masterchef is Prince Charles, heir to the Australian throne, thus setting a new low for the popularity of the British monarchy here despite a stint at Timbertop and 16 visits since. Given that Charles’ lack of culinary skills is well known, it can only…
Gary Younge, writing in The UK Guardian, states that “the NHS makes us more proud to be British than the monarchy”. Neither count is near the top of our united feelings and brings the difference between being Australian and being British starkly into focus. The…
Penny Russell, Bicentennial Professor of History at the University of Sydney, reviews Tim Ailwood’s “The Quiet Invasion” and pedantically rejects his research and conclusions. But Ailwood has an important point to make about a future Australian Republic. Identifying the people of the Indigenous nations around Sydney as “the Australians” at the…
The Queen’s Birthday honours list – again – has some striking examples of well-known republicans accepting essentially imperial honours, a contradiction if ever there was one. This year, it is Jenny Kee, a founding member of ARM no less, and author Kate Grenville who…
This year our thoughts turn to the ranking of women in the British royal family, our royal family too. In a recent documentary, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, was described as having become the second most important woman in the United Kingdom…
The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters tables its report into the problems with eligibility to be a member of federal Parliament under s44 of the Constitution and recommends that the Government put amendments to update the law at referendum. Predictably…
Canberra Times correspondent, John Walker of Queanbeyan, has the last and best laugh on the birth of the latest heir to the Australian throne that took place on 23 April. Here’s what he had to say to the Editor: “I am pleased to announce…
The unanimous decision by 53 member countries of the Commonwealth to anoint Prince Charles as the next head of the now defunct British Empire only shows the white Anglo establishment personified by the remaining Dominions ie Canada, Australia and New Zealand for what it is: worthy…
As well as Charles and Camilla on location for the Commonwealth Games and an oddly restricted ramble through North Queensland and the Northern Territory plus a side trip to Vanuatu that featured a very large number of Indigenous people in both countries inexplicably enthused by the royal…
Megan Davis packs multiple punches in her Monthly essay on Rethinking the Republic. Viewing the proposed change nearly 20 years from her own standpoint and that of our First Peoples – as opposed to mainstream republican exponents who today offer the same old stuff as they…
