The scrapping of the appointment of Australian knights and dames is the latest step in our lengthy struggle over identity, belonging and mother.
The ancient monarch in her palace 17,000 kilometres away must be puzzled. Tony Abbott asked her to reinstate knights and dames as part of the order of Australia in March 2014. That category had been in a state of suspension since she co-signed letters patent in March 1986, at the request of Bob Hawke, removing Malcolm Fraser’s reintroduction of the titles that had been abolished in 1975 by Gough Whitlam’s government.
Now here she is again co-signing letters patent on the advice of Malcolm Turnbull’s government to do away with the freshly-reinstated Australian version of this imperial bauble. Abbott’s self-imposed quota of four dames or knights a year has been reduced to nil. When is the panto going to stop?
We have already gone through the excruciating experience of having the Queen herself wean us off the teat of the British honours system, a fixture of Australian distinction and chivalry that remained well after those fruity awards had turned rancid.
In 1990 the Queen’s private secretary wrote to government house in Canberra, more or less begging us to stop recommending the appointment of knights and dames within the British honours system. This had been a particular speciality of tin-pot state governments.
“This seems a good moment to consider whether the time has not arrived for Australia, like Canada, to honour its citizens exclusively within its own system,” Sir William Heseltine wrote from Buckingham Palace.
In other words, if you’re going to have gongs for dames and knights, bloody-well use your own.
Since colonial times, state governments were doling out knighthoods to captains of industry, often in return for generous contributions to party funds.
Former NSW premier, Sir Robin Askin, was believed to grant knighthoods for this purpose – in some instances, to pay for gambling debts owed to Sydney’s famous cluster of Eastern European property developers and industrial types. This gave rise to the so-called Asko-Hungarian empire.
It was not until 1992 that then-prime minister Paul Keating was able to announce that all the states were onboard with the radical idea that they would no longer be recommending British honours to Australian citizens.
In fact, the last states to make imperial recommendations were Queensland and Tasmania in 1989. These old gongs are now regarded as “foreign awards”. The case remains that at any time a monarchist-inclined state government could usher in a return to imperial honours. The Newman government in Queensland with its frantically royalist attorney general Jarrod Bleijie, was a case in point.
After reintroducing queen’s counsel for Brisbane barristers, the next step would have been Queensland knighthoods, with no objection from an Abbott government. The prospect of restoring queen’s counsel in NSW and other states may recede, now that the tide in Canberra has turned against royalist flourishes.
Yet, there remains a whiff of monarchy about the home-baked Australian honours system. The awards are made in the name of the governor general who, after all, personifies the Queen in Australia.
Apart from Australia Day, there are also a clutch of honours announced each year on the second Monday in June, in celebration of the Queen’s official birthday. In New Zealand the official birthday is the first week in June and in Western Australia it is something else again. Her real birthday is on April 21.
Fortunately, monarchist David Flint has put the Turnbull government’s reversal of Tony Abbott’s captain’s pick into perspective.
“It’s obviously part of his plan to revenge 1999,” he said, referring to the time Turnbull led the Australian Republican Movement to defeat at the republic referendum.
Prince Philip’s Australian knighthood, which was overwhelmingly greeted with derision by Australians when it was awarded on Australia Day this year, was welcomed by Flint – who gushed about the sacrifice and miserable conditions under which the Duke of Edinburgh laboured.
“I think it’s about time that we recognised a man who, even at the age of 93, is obviously not going to retire, will receive no superannuation, no golden handshake, has never been paid for the service he gives the country and the Commonwealth.”
So it goes, a tiresome process of reinstatement and abolition as we struggle to work out who we are, and to whom our allegiances belong. And this in a country with a declining English-Scottish ancestry, now at around 42% of the Australian population.
It’s not been easy to get this far, and, even with Abbott out of the top job, it’s not impossible to imagine another Little Englander as prime minister, besotted with God and monarchy. Some of them lurk in the darker corners of the Coalition and may still pop out.
So the abolition of Abbott’s dames and knights is an easy symbolic gesture by Turnbull, and important nonetheless. The really big confronting constitutional question – how we turn ourselves into a republic – can be left to snooze on a bit longer.
