Who is doing who the favour?
Republicanism becomes an intense if as yet unspecified issue with the return after a nine year interval of a Labour federal government. Palace courtiers seeking to avert it and tempted to send out members of the Royal family on flag waving tours should hesitate.
The reason is that Australia needs the Royal family much more than the Royal family needs Australia.
Australia is often considered the most over-governed of any nation anywhere
Without the monarchy Australia would have added to its already richly layered in-place constituted governance a fifth layer and which like the other existing four layers would become elective.
There is the central federal government in Canberra. It has two houses, an upper and lower.
Then there are the state governments which similarly have an upper house and a lower house.
It is the monarchy which by occupying the top of this heap means that to these four layers there cannot be added a fifth political layer in the form of a presidential layer.
Would for example an Australia minus the monarchy adopt the French system with an elected president?
Australia has yet another layer of governance, an additional layer often overlooked internationally.
It is that each state in addition to having a prime minister (known as “premier” to distinguish them from the federal prime minister) also has a state governor.
In a republic how would state governors become state governors? Would they be elected as they are for example in the United States?
If you add a presidential layer to all this Australia would have a total of six layers of constituted elective government and still not counting local government.
Australia’s new Labour-led government is an activist one dedicated to symbolic change and progress.
This is exactly the kind of coalition of the privileged that has one single towering target which is another coalition of the privileged this time one based on bloodline…..the monarchy
Buckingham Palace courtiers will be tempted to palliate this renewed and reforming fervour by sending members of the royal family to Australia to draw the sting.
If they do they will merely present the reformers with their dream target which is the royal family in the flesh.
It is uncertain that the courtiers have got the message that what worked so successfully in the 1950s-70s era now has quite the opposite effect of the desired result.
The ill-advised open Land Rover parading of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in Jamaica (pictured) is a warning.
Prince Charles meanwhile around the same time found himself in Canada cornered by activists loudly seeking public apologies and acknowledgments for long ago internal measures that most Canadians themselves were unaware of.
Another example of clumsy Palace bureaucracy was the decision to position Prince William as a soccer aficionado. In the UK the soccer version of football is a working class pastime.
William doggedly in the stands spectating was loudly and embarrassingly booed at one of England’s big games.
The lesson is that even in England the ideal way of keeping the Royals in touch with the collective mood is to kick them out of touch.
It was the former federal prime minister Scott Morrison of the Liberal (ie conservative) Coalition and his decision to step back from cultural wars that dismayed his traditional loyalists and paved the way for vote splitting fringe parties to usher in the Labour government.
Australia’s extraordinary civil and economic progress since its federation in 1901 has often been credited to a population largely indifferent to politics and reserving their partisan zeal instead for sport.
No longer. Australia now manifests itself as the United States once did. Which is as a new nation put into the world to do good.
Australia’s ever more frequently recurring progressive paroxysms mean shaking off much of the impedimenta accumulated before and after 1901.
This clutter of yesteryear is personified by the monarchy which paradoxically until just a few decades ago in the Antipodes was similarly viewed as a universal force for good.
A royal visit in the current mood will be interpreted simply as a promotional stunt for the monarchy.
This will be the progressive point of view regardless of the countervailing and now seemingly mandatory crack of doom planetary proclamations uttered by the heirs apparent during the course of such tours.
Benign royal absenteeism will allow to be placed in perspective in the Australia-Monarchy transaction the question of who exactly is doing who the favour?
Choreographed cover up meant Allies sourced power supplies from their enemy
Robert Ludlum the thriller writer was asked how he discovered his rich amalgam of world threatening conspiracy, mystery and corporate greed. “I was leafing through a picture book portraying Germany between the wars,” he explained.
“The population was poverty stricken, hopeless. Then a few pages later this same population became transformed into a picture of purposeful prosperity.
“What had happened?
“Hitler had taken over. Hitler had to have external assistance, powerful international helpers. Who and what were they and how did they transform Germany so quickly?”
Thus fired and inspired by this dark mystery as he saw it, Robert Ludlum launched his 27-book dominance of the thriller business in the closing decades of the 20th century.
“Who paid for all those shovels, uniforms, autobahns?”
Robert Ludlum a genial, unpretentious New Yorker who died in 2001 aired in a matter-of-fact manner his lightbulb moment in the course of an Australasian promotional tour.
There are no indications that he ever offered this explanation before or since.
Mr Ludlum filled this informational vacuum with an unmatched series of fantastical conjectures in book and movie form. If he was still writing now Mr Ludlum might consider the following……
Why a defence pact in this case Nato organised to defend its members against a known enemy Russia deliberately puts its head into the mouth of this same threat by depending on it for its strategic fuel supplies.
Who implemented this self-contradictory arrangement? Who or what caused the treaty member governments to embark on this self-defeating strategy? Were there subsidies declared or undeclared? Were there other undisclosed inducements official or semi official?
So who or what suppressed the fact that these same member countries one after another were entering into covenants, contracts, with Russia for anything up to half their fuel requirements?
Why is the Nato defence pact funding to the tune of around $1 billion per day its own opponent?
What happened to the whistle blowers, the individuals and the institutions entrusted with raising the alarm?
There is the matter of the mainstream media. Who or what cowed it into submission as Nato members over so many years one after the other arranged to finance exactly the foe that Nato was designed to protect them from?
What were the factors deflecting them from sounding the alarm when the security of their own countries became so obviously threatened?
Were their allegiances in fact devoted to entities that did not include their own readers, listeners, and viewers? If so what or who were and still are the focus of these undisclosed loyalties and allegiances?
Today’s Robert Ludlum equivalent pondering their own The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Osterman Weekend, The Rhinemann Exchange, The Holcroft Covenant and Bourne conspiracies now have a rich new motherlode.
This includes how the world’s most watched commodities, the energy ones, as a result of this are exploding in cost greatly to the profit of the exporting nations such as Russia.
Someone knows the answer. Who or what are they and more significantly, where are they?
A working Robert Ludlum-style three word title for a thriller based on all this?
The Deceiving Climate
Turn of the tide but Premier was blind to gathering storm and deaf to hinge of fate
In his book The Churchill Factor Boris Johnson describes the war leader as being regarded as a “tosser” by both colleagues and the electorate at large. Only when he became prime minister in 1940 did this impression recede insists his biographer.
Politically much the same thing happened to Boris Johnson himself in his even more surprising ascension to war leader after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and in which he too assumed the mantle of the lion giving the roar.
Like his storied predecessor Mr Johnson has tended to make his own rules. Mr Johnson has always believed that like Winston Churchill he too is a creature of providence and of destiny, and to this end also possesses built in shock absorbers.
Which is why he took himself off to Kiev at the earliest opportunity there to be seen striding through the streets with president Zelensky.
In political terms being a “tosser” means being unpredictable, unreliable, out for the main chance, out for yourself instead of for your party.
Winston Churchill changed his party on several occasions, veering from Conservative to Liberal and then back to the Conservatives.
Mr Johnson managed to change his party without actually leaving it.
Australians know this as the Turnbull Effect after their own federal Liberal (ie. Conservative) prime minister Malcolm Turnbull who in full office suddenly began imposing policies ardently held by his parliamentary Opposition, notably anti-nuclear edicts.
Mr Johnson did much the same thing when he dramatically and publicly converted to the same collective cause shrilly threatening Britons with meat free diets and heat pumps in place of their domestic fireplaces.
Mr Johnson resembles his heroic subject in physical conformation being stocky and thickset and like Winston Churchill projecting a gruff no frills roast beef image. Yet here he was suddenly advocating a way of life more California than Yorkshire.
It is now that we can identify a key difference between Boris Johnson and Winston Churchill. Unlike Churchill Mr Johnson did not see the storm clouds gathering over Europe, or if he did he hoped they would go away.
The extent to which his Glasgow global convocation acted as a universal diversion from the gathering storm remains so delicate that it cannot be discussed, let alone subjected to objective evaluation.
This applies for instance to United States special envoy to Glasgow John Kerry. He was United States foreign secretary in 2014 when Crimea was originally seized. He might reasonably have been expected to have picked up at the very least some groundswell intelligence to impart.
Perhaps even a privileged update on the imminent Russia follow-up invasion?
When it came to fuel power nobody wanted to confront the EU’s dependence on Russia. The German dependence is well known. Italy is just as dependent. But nobody is talking about it, in spite of Italy having pioneered geothermal power.
Boris Johnson’s head was in the faddish sand. Perhaps like his European counterparts he put it there to avert the anger of the modish and skittish activist metropolitan privileged single issue bloc.
Winston Churchill in contrast braved the fashionable pro German acquiescence of high society and much of the aristocracy during the 1930s by constantly warning about Germany’s true intentions which duly came to pass.
Mr Johnson’s own appointment with destiny will always be shrouded by his deliberate boosterism of the Glasgow excitability which camouflaged among other things the White House’s electoral policy of securing its own coastal enclave vote by curtailing domestic energy production in favour of also relying on Russia’s.
Still, even if he did see the inevitable outcome of Russia’s drive for the warm water ports which began in 2008 with the invasion of Georgia he refrained from a full voice Churchillian warning to the West about the peril of putting its power supplies in Russian hands.
Winston Churchill stridently predicted German revanchism and kept sounding the warning regardless of the enemies however powerful or fashionable he made in the process.
Was the Brexit campaign the Boris version of this in distancing Britain from the European follies underpinning the Ukraine invasion?
Possibly. But one more sensitive topic. Why was Britain in this invasion lead up also importing so much of its energy from Russia and with no word about the inflammatory contribution inherent in this?
Winston Churchill immune to ideologies would have proclaimed the danger of this, urged the ramping up of internal production.
The spiteful silliness directed at Mr Johnson for his participation in cheering along his staff lock down after-hours drinks will melt into the mists of time. The Glaswegian virtue-a-thon may go the same way.
In the spirit of his The Churchill Factor manifesto Boris Johnson will be seen as having shared with his hero one single factor. It is the spirit of unrestrained action and commitment when the big picture threat finally and unequivocally presented itself in the form of the actual invasion.
Palace of the Alhambra, Spain
By: Charles Nathaniel Worsley (1862-1923)
From the collection of Sir Heaton Rhodes
Oil on canvas - 118cm x 162cm
Valued $12,000 - $18,000
Offers invited over $9,000
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242
Mount Egmont with Lake
By: John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908)
Oil on Sea Shell - 13cm x 14cm
Valued $2,000-$3,000
Offers invited over $1,500
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242