The Acting Prime Minister, John Anderson, was right to suggest that Australians should welcome the Queen and give her the respect of office. His prediction that the 45 per cent of people who voted for a republic would not use the visit from March 17 to April 2 as a focus for protest, however, was so obvious as to not be worth making.
Mr Anderson would be wrong to imagine that the welcome will be ecstatic, enthusiastic or especially warm. It will not excite the Australian population in the same way that the 1954 visit did.
The 45 per cent who voted for a republic, if affected at all by the visit, will look upon it much as a visit by any other head of state or head of government from another country. And many who voted No in the referendum will do likewise because they voted No to the republic on offer, but would otherwise have voted for a republic.
The Queen gets addition interest and respect for the fact that she is head of the Commonwealth of Nations of which Australia is part and she is head of state of the nation with whom Australia has very close ties of heritage, family and trade.
But those ties are becoming more diluted over time. Just after World War II the Anglo-Celtic share of the population was 90 per cent. By 1988 it had fallen to 74.5 per cent and in 1999 to 70 per cent, according to a study of ethic make-up of Australia by Charles Price published by Monash University last week.
By 2035 it would fall to 62.2 per cent.
For most people of descent from outside the British Isles, the monarchy — based in Britain — is an inappropriate part of our polity. And many from the British Isles think that, too.
It may well be that the Queen’s visit will be treated with an embarrassing indifference. But no doubt she will carry the occasion with aplomb.
Mr Anderson was stating the obvious when he said, “”I don’t believe personalities ought to come into this. I think the Queen is very widely respected for the stable and very solid and ongoing leadership she has provided over a very long period of time. I don’t think that people would want to take an issue which relates to our constitutional arrangements up in the form of protests with the Queen. I think she’s widely respected and I think that will be reflected in the way that Australians respond when she comes here.”
Republicans do not take issue with the Queen. They take issue with those people who put up scare tactics during the referendum campaign and with Prime Minister John Howard for not allaying those fears in a responsible and neutral way. They also take issue with direct-elect republicans who voted to retain the monarchy.
The Queen was hardly mentioned in the referendum. To imagine republicans would want to organise a protest is preposterous.
Mr Anderson got the point when he said he did not think people would want to take an issue which relates to (ital) our (ital) constitutional arrangements with the Queen. And then — as someone who continues to be a supporter of a person who live sin a foreign country remaining out monarch — completely misses the point that the Queen should be irrelevant to (ital) our (ital) constitutional arrangements in modern Australia.
In the meantime, the Queen will be greeted with cordial respect. Alas, she might have been greeted with greater enthusiasm if the referendum had passed. There would have been none of the awkwardness of having a guest who is welcome personally, but rejected constitutionally by at least 45 per cent of the people, and more likely by a lot more.