What we’re discussing here, mate, is treason, not appeasement or collaboration.

Marshall Petain was a Republican.

I don’t think it the Monarchists’ fault. I think it’s the fault of the dumbarse’d lazy fucking Australian shitheads who’re too boneheaded to understand that a Westminster system President would not be an American president.

You have stated it somewhat more succinctly than I, but yes that’s my belief too. And they’d probably also think it was really cool if Princess Mary of Denmark-Tasmania could be Queen of Australia. And probably think she can be.

As you say, it’s not the fault of the Monarchists that the Republicans have this problem. It’s the fault of the Republicans themselves who also exult in the title “President”.

They could by-pass all this by just reforming the role of Governor General. But do you know something (as Kevin Rudd would say)? I think they’re too dumb to realize it themselves.

Five years old by the looks of it.

I’m in quite a good temper actually, I just think you are a twit.

I know you are, but what am I?

The way things are shaping up it seems likely that one by-product of the Monarchists’ defensive tenacity will be to render the price of a Republic a popularly-elected President. I think that would represent a seriously-flubbed transition

I don’t think it the Monarchists’ fault. I think it’s the fault of the dumbarse’d lazy fucking Australian shitheads who’re too boneheaded to understand that a Westminster system President would not be an American president. It’s also the fault of our egotistical elitist wanker class (constantly rushing the Republic to earn ‘emselves a bigger article in the History Books) who love the idea of being Prez so much they won’t pick a less grand sounding title, like Chancellor.
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There’s a fundamental legal question: how to provide the safeguards of the present system after shifting to ’self-rule’.
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Considering that since 1986 we already have self-rule the Republic is a symbolic gesture. It could however be an opportunity to improve the system if we spent more time thinking of the nitty-gritty banal details of, like, having a country what runs good instead of getting caught up in the ticker-tape fanfare of Celtic restiment inspired ‘Straya, ‘Straya, ‘Straya Oi fuckin’ oi!
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How ’bout we change the flag first? I like the Aboriginal flag but in red, white and blue. Blue sky, red Earth, white (hot) sun. A symbol of integration acknowledging the Originals and the legacy of European democracy. And also a comment on the weather.

The great cohering element in the current arrangement IMHO derives from its dynamic dispersal of power. Even as a permanently-latent ‘un-tension’ there is immense political stability and harmony to be got from a system which applies executive power that is delivered by universal democratic franchise, yet which demands be confined within some (self-imposed and benign) meta-realm of Absolute Authority, whose legitimising source is in turn situated beyond the reach of all three instruments. Properly structured - typically by trial-and-error, over centuries - this kind of wilfully-negating interlocking of power strands is more sustainable and more creative, for most of the time, for most of the people, than the sum of all and especially any one transiently dominant constituent part. There’s a whole range of ways you can bodge such dynamioc stability together, but in essence it has three parts held in fertile tension: represented (the peeble); representers (their leaders); representee (in essence a symbolic mirror, to and of both).

Whether the third bit wells up out of God or Kant’s moral law within us all or in other eras, Landed Gentryhood or Platonic Citizenship, or in ours, Hereditary Birth or a secular-sacred Constitutional Bill of Rights, or whatever…enshrining, at the core of the practical mechanism by which laws are passed and administered, what is essentially an expression of human humility helps limit the extent to which democratic mandates based on (mere) policy/personality vote-pulling oomph can become, in the minds of the (continually) elected, an annointing with an absolutely (ie rational, earth-bound, humanist) Absolute Power. If you look closely at every explicitly ‘Absolutist’ power hierarchy with historical legs, they are all in fact subtlely yet unimpeachably tempered with/by this sort of voluntary surrender of power, in one human form or another; by some or other self-embraced ‘tyranny of the man-made abstract’: Popes under God, Kings beholden to the rules of issue, military leaders with their codes of honour and chivalry, the tenured academic with her scholarly rules, her peer review, the golfer who self-polices in the hidden folds and bunkers, the ruthless levelling subjectivity of the lbw law…all the best and most stable sets of rules are those which have, at their core, an element of the unspoken, the unwritten, a central ‘absence of prescription’. It’s like that maddening moment when your mum and dad tell you that they’re not going to punish you or tell you what to do; rather, they’re going to rely on you to ‘do what you think is right’. For every one selfish prick who’ll cheerfully exploit that kind of freedom/human optimism to get ahead unfairly - sack the GG, say - ther’s a thousand others who recognise the ‘game theory’ benefit of ‘doing the right thing’, and do so. That to me is where the genius of a (superficially) anachronistic and unfair mechanism like hereditary lineage (say) lies: like all imposed, non-negotiable rules, at its heart it’s actually very clear and fair, to everyone, once everyone’s got the hang of it. (Anyone who envies the individual Royals and their Royal Lot has rocks for brains, btw…)

What I’m clumsily trying to get at (on behalf of minimalist Repubs and Monarchists alike, I guess) is…by all means we can and should routinely update, improve, fine-tune, re-invent the way we incorporate this element of conceded human fallibility into our political mechanisms. By all means our constitution’s ‘Necessary Fiction’ - its Perfect Imaginary Friend/Ideal/Apirational Image/Mirror, if you like - has got to be sellable and believable and shankable to modern life and mores. But…I really think it should be there, in some form or other. And in this secular age I worry that electing the Prez and the government is going to leave us in a potential ‘Tyranny of the Vote’ muddle.

So…me? I’d go for a minimalist change, but to a National Tribal Elder, not a Prez at all. I’d get Indigenous Australia to get together over the next decade and determine - elect, ancestrally trace, consensualise, lottery up, whateva - a home-grown king and queenly clan, as best they could after a couple of years of disruption (and a disjointed federation to start with anyway). For better or for worse I’d get the Parliament to enact-consecrate that chosen clan as our own hereditary National Elder line. And I’d formally title the incumbent of the day Mother/Father of the Republic of Australia.

I’m quite, quite serious.

I see no evidence of that whatsoever.

Well, show us the evidence to the contrary, then.

In any case, it hardly makes any difference to the essentials of the debate whether a future King Charles III (or whatever) would be a better person as Head of State than Malcolm Turnbull or other aspirant to the rank of President of Australia.

The point is even a dud King of England can do Australia no harm, and has the additional advantage of living 10,000 miles away (a virtue in itself), because basically we can appoint the Governor General we want, and get rid of them more or less at will.

The Monarch just does what we tell them to do.

I see no evidence of that whatsoever.

George I - the first Hanoverian King - was a direct descendant of James I of England through his mother Sophia, Electress of Hanover. Her mother was James I’s daughter Elizabeth of Bohemia (sister of Charles I, aunt of Charles II and James II ) who married the Elector of the Palatine.

When the Stuart line ended with Queen Anne (her father James II had been evicted in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and none of her children survived), George I was next in line in the Protestant succession.

So George I has an unbroken line of descent from the first Tudor king, Henry VII (James I was Henry Tudor’s great grandson).

Any other genealogical conundrums I can help you with, David

We don’t disagree fundamentally, GH.

Social stability is the independent variable. The Scandanavian monarchies enjoy a high level of social stability, as does republican Germany and republican Ireland.

Constitutional system is a dependent variable.

Even when constitutional systems misfire or don’t behave according to popular expectations, a country with a functional system of core values can ride through the crisis,

eg., Australia in 1975, US in 1973-74, Britain in 1911-14, Israel in 2006-07, Italy serially since WWII.

Nazi collaborator sent to Barbados during WW2 to keep him from fawning over Hitler

Well, we couldn’t having him doing that, Hitler at that time being still an ally of the Soviet Union since August 1939 until July 1941.

And it was Jamaica in the Bahamas , actually, not Barbados.

Most monarchies from 1792-1918 were not constitutional in the manner the British crown was. The Bourbons in France were Absolute Monarchs, and after their restoration were constitutional. When that idiot Charles X tried to reestablish them as Absolute, they were ousted again.
Interestingly, support for a restoration in France is at its highest level since 1878, and support for a restoration in Russia is at around 30% and growing. There are legitimate concerns being raised over the referendum that ended the monarchy in Italy, and it may be revisited in the future. Apparently the King knew it had been rigged but abdicated anyway, as he wanted to spare the people any more instability. There is even talk of a restoration of the Hapsburgs as constitutional monarchs in Austria, though to be honest I have not seen any hard facts about that one.

I mean in terms of current examples, Katz. I think it is interesting that the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands operate successful constitutional monarchies in nations that are frequently offered as social democratic best practice.

Nepal is an exception.

An exception?

The majority of European monarchies fell in the years between 1792 and 1918 for precisely the same underlying reasons as destroyed the Nepalese royal family.

It’s no coincidence that very few republics elect to return to monarchy. In any case, the failed-state republics of the post-WWII world were mostly the product of 19th-century colonial overlords drawing random lines on maps that roped in peoples and groups that had never had anything to do with each other and never wanted anything to do with each other. In any case, few had any tradition of kingship. These nations, including Pakistan, were doomed to failure regardless of constitutional system. Interestingly, India, also a republic that incorporates an enormously diverse population, has managed better than Pakistan.

And thanks David Rubie, but being called a twit by an ignoramus like the Ersatz Earl is no insult.