Andrew Bolt: No common sense at all in becoming a republic

Anthony Albanese can’t accept that Australians really have no passion for a republic that seems to promise only more politicians and division. Will he never learn?

The Prime Minister has not learnt one lesson from the sacking of the incompetent Whitlam government 50 years ago. Call it Gough Whitlam’s final big defeat.

Still fuming that Whitlam was sacked by the Governor-General – the Queen’s man – Anthony Albanese declared on Tuesday’s anniversary that we needed a republic:

“I think it’s common sense.”

Really? You’d think 50 years were enough for Labor to realise the sense that we must become a republic is not common at all.

You would think 50 years were enough for Labor to realise the sense that we must become a republic is not common at all. Picture: Martin Ollman

Yet tomorrow-belongs-to-me republicans have treated a republic as imminent and inevitable, like all “progressives” who foolishly believe history marches in a straight line.

How often did they treat royalists, as Labor prime minister Paul Keating put it, as “forelock tuggers” trapped in a “sort of fogeyism”?

These people also treated Whitlam’s sacking as the detonator of an explosion that would blow our monarchy to bits.

Said Whitlam’s speechwriter Graham Freudenberg: “The residual rage over the conduct of the Queen’s representative found a constructive outlet in the movement for the Australian republic.”

Whitlam did crusade for the republic and was even joined eventually by Malcolm Fraser, the Liberal who had replaced him as prime minister and worked off his guilt by later pandering to the Left. They starred together in pro-republic TV ads ahead of the 1999 referendum scheduled by Paul Keating.

But Australians instead voted no to a republic. Even the electorates formerly held by Whitlam and Keating voted no.

Under Charles, a YouGov poll found, 59 per cent of Australians would vote no to a republic. Picture: AFP

Albanese, though, still couldn’t accept that Australians really had no passion for a republic that seemed to promise only more politicians and division.

Like so many frustrated republicans, he clung to a macabre belief that when the Queen finally died, Australians would junk her successors.

He was even so crass to appoint – while the Queen was still alive – an assistant minister for the republic, Matt Thistlethwaite, to prepare for what would surely come. More disappointment. The Queen died, but long live the new King. Under Charles, a YouGov poll found, 59 per cent of Australians would vote no to a republic.

Poor Albanese has now scrapped that ministry, and having lost one referendum already – the Voice – says he won’t hold another.

A republic has gone from sure thing to dead duck. So much for the march of history.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: No common sense at all in becoming a republic