Laughing at the royal family is an age-old tradition, from jesters in medieval courts to Monty Python, The Windsors and Australia’s Rubbery Figures. Turns out the very notion of a king or queen is actually really quite funny. Nations led not by the person whose expertise and vision earned the job, but the person whose mum or dad just so happened to have the job before. Fronted on location – as Shaun Micallef so elegantly puts it – by their “local stunt double”, the governor-general. Authority conferred not by the democratic will of the people, but by arcane ceremony and glittering crowns. A population expected to keep fabricating the semblance of democracy by indicating consent through curtseys and bows. “It’s just weird to kneel in front of another adult,” laughs British comedian John Oliver on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, describing the British royal family as “an emotionally stunted group of fundamentally flawed people doing a very silly pseudo-job”.

“The modern royals,” writes fellow comedian David Mitchell in Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens, are “just a muted and low-key coda to the centuries of humiliation, incompetence, criminality and failure exhibited by their far more powerful predecessors”.

“And it truly is a wonder,” sings Australian comedian Sammy J in his beautiful Royal Lullaby, “That a colony down under, Will be subject to your whims, We give thanks to DNA, For wisely showing us the way, And picking out our Queens and Kings.”

Perhaps Lieutenant Frank Drebin, portrayed deadpan by the superb Leslie Nielsen, puts it best: “For no matter how silly the idea of having a queen might be to us,” he tells a royal visit media conference in the hit comedy The Naked Gun, “as Americans we must be gracious and considerate hosts”.

A democracy with all this at its apex is a nonsense – which makes pomp and ceremony crucial to its success: all that silliness needs serious camouflage. Entire workforces of public relations professionals and “royal watchers” work hard to humanise and glamorise imperial power.

Because the human face that monarchy gives to non-democratic rule shines a reflected glory on its supporters while framing its challengers as disrespectful. It reinforces the class hierarchies that put us back in our place as “quiet Australians”, “comfortable and relaxed”, with no “ideas above our station”. When colonisation, privilege and power are given a human face, any criticism is reframed as a personal disrespect, thwarting progress. That anyone continues to tolerate this in contemporary Australia is truly astonishing – but such is the power of personifying power itself.

In 1930, then-prime minister James Scullin couldn’t ensure the most appropriate governor-general appointment without causing personal offence to George V. In 2024, disrespecting Charles’ cancer diagnosis was given as a reason to avoid criticism of the monarchy’s role in today’s Australia.

In 1900, the constitutional drafters couldn’t safeguard Australia’s legislative interests without risking offending Victoria. In 1999, disrespect for Elizabeth II was frequently cited as a reason to halt progress towards the future Australian republic. Across the decade to 2020, respecting the Queen’s “personal correspondence” was the argument against releasing the “Palace Letters” between Sir John Kerr and the Queen around the Whitlam dismissal.

Are we truly willing to tolerate royal control over Australian history? It “defies common sense” to define those letters as personal, and that withholding them risks a secrecy that “becomes oppressive and potentially toxic”, wrote Professor of Constitutional Law Anne Twomey for the Sydney Law Review in 2020.

And of course, in 1975 the governor-general placed his own obsequious relationships with Elizabeth II and Prince Charles well above Australia’s national interests, compounding risk by conducting his
prolific correspondence in secret. So captured was Kerr by the reflected glory, and so captivated by the glamour.

Arcane ceremonies, priceless jewels and golden coaches. Fairytale princes and princesses found not in children’s books but in the news. A paparazzi industry filling glossy magazines. Scandal sheets constantly validating royal gossip as worthy of our attention. Locally inducted knights and dames enjoying a lifetime of highly formalised deference. Could it be that, once we strip away any logic that might justify remaining a monarchy, the only thing left is the glamour? Forced to look at it this way, Frank Drebin’s words seem truer than ever: it really is pretty silly.

When a culture of deference is normalised across a society, what’s also normalised is privilege and inequality – the opposite of democracy. Ultimately, that glamour serves as nothing but a distraction from all the warning signs that Australia’s constitutional monarchy just isn’t working – and there’s been no shortage of warnings.

There’s the secret ministries: governor-general David Hurley appointed Scott Morrison to five additional ministries across two years, as well as appointing factional allies of Morrison’s into two junior ministries, without the public nor even the relevant ministers themselves being informed. How many other secrets have yet to be revealed?

We will never know how many times a prime minister has conspired in secret with a governor-general – and a democracy that permits this is a broken one. While former High Court justice Virginia Bell’s independent inquiry found “criticism of the Governor-General to be unwarranted”, Ryan Goss argued in AusPubLaw that this is implausible: the first and last secret appointments were made more than a year apart, Goss reminded us, so there’s no way Hurley could not have noticed that they hadn’t been announced, despite claiming in an August 2022 public statement that he had “no reason to believe that appointments would not be communicated”. More to the point: why did Morrison do it? Quite simply because he could: it was “a power grab”, argued Andrew Probyn and Jake Evans for the ABC, one positively enabled by a monarchist culture.

There’s the reserve powers, the Dismissal and the Palace Letters: secret plots that brought down an elected government – a government that still had the confidence of the House of Representatives. A democracy that allows this to happen is a broken one, and 50 years later we still don’t know exactly how it all happened because there have been no meaningful attempts to clarify or document the reserve powers of the governor-general.

Then there’s the monarch’s “pleasure”, a word whose repetition throughout the Constitution renders quite stark indeed the invisibility of that other word we’d expect to feature prominently, but which features not at all. That word is, of course, democracy. Given nothing in the document guarantees us democratic rights or even democratic government, the Australian Constitution remains open to exploitation.

Each one of these three warning signs is compounded by our poor civics knowledge and that vicious cycle of distrust and disengagement. That campaigns against both the republic and the Voice to Parliament would exploit this so brazenly speaks to the normalisation of a hierarchy – a monarchism – in which knowledge and power should never be distributed equitably. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – but by now we can see exactly how broken it all is, and how urgently it needs fixing.

An edited extract from Esther Anatolitis’ When Australia Became a Republic from Monash’s In the National Interest series, published on October 1.