Prince Charles will be our king but does anyone really care? The irony was delicious. Remembrance Day 2015 and the 40th anniversary of the sacking of Gough Whitlam.
There in Canberra were our future king, Charles with his wife Camilla, and our chief republican advocate, now Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. All apparently very ‘happy’.
We have mellowed as a nation, haven’t we? Or is it a matter that we just don’t care anymore about our being a ‘colony’? And does this matter?
In truth, like most Australians it would appear, I have not given much thought to the republican debate since Malcolm Turnbull championed it in 1999. And I have always quietly liked Prince Charles. He remained true to the woman he loved and to himself, plus speaks up for what he believes in, even if it’s not the best PR. I think he is an interesting guy.
But this visit, on the back of all the discussion of Australia’s future – given the shock of now having to stand on our own due to the loss of our gold-plated resources economy – has made me start thinking that perhaps we should care.
Perhaps we should care
As a country, as a people, we have to get going. We have to create our future and not just rely on our physical geography.
We need to invest in our self-pride because without self-pride we will let others set the race and we will forever be relegated to the back of the field.
The cornerstone of self-pride is self-identity; who we are and what tribe we belong to. Today in Australia as best as I can guess, our self-identity falls back on a laid-back lifestyle and sport, with pride in our multiculturalism (which a few will debate), a distant third.
These are pretty shallow criteria and not the stuff that our young people would rise up passionately to defend in the event of war.
The flag of course is the traditional rallying symbol for self-identity, best demonstrated by the American flag for sheer emotion, and the Canadian flag for focusing a country on creating a fresh future.
Our current flag had relevance when I was born seven years after the Second World War. The Empire supplied the fighting men and goods that were pivotal in saving civilisation as we knew it. The population of Australia in 1952 was 8. 6 million people, almost exclusively Anglo-Saxon descent.
Today, Australia’s population is 24 million and a totally different story. In Sydney 40 per cent of people were not born in Australia. Just 3.5 per cent were born in the United Kingdom.
In Melbourne 25 per cent were born overseas, in over 180 countries, speaking 233 languages and representing 116 religions.
We need our own leader and our own country in which we can have faith that it will protect us. We need our own self-identity that we can easily point to and emotionally engage with.
Actually, it is time
What self-identity will cement this exotic mixture of people located in a distant corner of the world? It certainly is not King Charles and Camilla 12,000 miles away in gloomy Windsor Castle. This image is the antithesis of our healthy, sunshine-drenched and hopefully optimistic nation.
Charles is supposed to be our leader, and Britain our protective guardian. But they are neither of these.
We need our own leader and our own country in which we can have faith that it will protect us. We need our own self-identity that we can easily point to and emotionally engage with.
And we have demonstrated that we do want to emotionally engage. Look at the national response to Malcolm Turnbull’s upbeat rhetoric on our future as an innovative country.
Turnbull is the leader who can create the stage for our self-identity by moving to a republic. He is not necessarily our future ‘leader’. That will come and that person is likely not to be a politician.
However this week Turnbull hosed down all this early likelihood: “opportunities for constitutional change are somewhat more challenging than the opportunities for stronger economic growth.”
A low priority perhaps. But if we do in fact ‘care’ it must be a priority just the same.
Otherwise Charles will be our King, and we will be servants.
