The uncomfortable truth is that progress has not just stalled but gone backwards since the historic referendum campaign for an Indigenous Voice to parliament was rejected by 60.6 per cent of voters and supported by just 39.94 per cent.

The whole point of the argument for a Voice to parliament was that Indigenous affairs was in a terrible state and needed more attention. The Voice to parliament was defeated for reasons already well-ventilated, but that should not have given way to malaise, paralysis and near-total silence on Indigenous affairs from our political leaders.

As the Herald’s Paul Sakkal writes today, the goal of giving Indigenous Australians more say over issues that directly affect them has given way to a sense of voicelessness.

Much of the blame for this falls on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. Despite his best intentions, it was the prime minister who took the referendum to the people and failed to adequately make the case for it. Albanese has the levers of government at his disposal to push on with reform but has shown little interest in doing so. Equally, Dutton and his colleagues have done nothing to offer their own policy vision should the Coalition claim the next federal election. It is a depressing state of affairs.

However, this silence is nothing new, according to high-profile Yes advocate Thomas Mayo. That void was one of the reasons Indigenous Australians asked for the Voice in the first place, he says. He also says Indigenous affairs was used as a political opportunity to wedge the Labor government and “they got wind in their sails from keeping us voiceless”.

“The other side [Labor] has returned back to the status quo, which is having no vision for Indigenous affairs,” Mayo tells the Herald today. That is certainly true. But it is as true for both federal Labor and the Coalition.

In an opinion piece for the Herald, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner Katie Kiss says many First Nations Australians feel more disillusioned than ever and rejected in their own lands.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/failure-of-all-sides-of-politics-to-pick-up-the-pieces-after-the-voice-defeat-is-a-national-disgrace-20241013-p5khv9.html

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Rude’, ‘deeply unprofessional’, ‘bad mannered’, a ‘slap in the face’, ‘insulting’, and ‘inhumane’. You could be forgiven for thinking the Australian state Premiers were engaged in a collective criminal enterprise to warrant such strident rebuke from the British press pack. In fact, they had simply declined an invitation to the welcome reception for our visiting (shared) monarch and head of state, King Charles III and his consort Queen Camilla, on their fleeting ‘tour’ of Sydney and Canberra.

Variously elevating the two days of official functions to a 6 day tour or even a ‘9 day tour’ the Daily Mirror was particularly exercised by the ‘disrespectful and arrogant’ decision of the Premiers to attend to more important matters like Cabinet meetings, an overseas trade visit, and a rather pressing election campaign. Apparently, the Premiers didn’t get the memo that a royal invitation is not really an invitation at all, more a command to attend. And when one is ‘invited’, one most certainly does not say ‘No’.

And so the ‘Royal rota’, the hand-picked group of reporters attending royal functions and dutifully reporting as good cyphers do, lest risk getting culled from the authorised pack, unleashed in unison at the ‘pathetic snub’ by our elected representatives against the man chosen by birthright as our King and Head of State. Ever the ardent Royal manqué the Sydney Morning Herald quickly joined in, haughtily adopting what Gough Whitlam would call with apologies to Oscar Wilde, ‘its best Lady Bracknell’; the ‘Royal no-show by Australian premiers is disrespectful and childish’. ‘Childish’ here meaning, I guess, putting the demands of elected government ahead of the expectations of deference, genuflection, and obeisance towards an unelected Head of State and dynastic monarch of 15 realms. Historian Afua Hirsch describes this ‘toxic symbiotic relationship’ between the Palace and the British media as ‘the idea that you can be born into a contractual relationship with the British press’ as a royal on the public purse – ‘we pay, you pose’.

This coded royal language with its expectations of gratitude and attendance mirrors in microcosm the invitation to visit extended by the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – at least that’s how it’s presented. However, shortly before the King’s coronation, itself an exceptional and constitutionally unnecessary expression of arcane ritual, stupendous wealth and dynastic privilege in which the promised ‘modernisation’ of the monarchy amounted to changing two words, royal reporters were quick to reveal an irritation at the Palace that the Prime Minister was yet to invite the King to visit. Just like the welcome reception for the King, an invitation to visit Australia was a royal expectation absent of choice, as the royal rota made clear; ‘A royal source close to the King said that Charles was “disquieted” at the lack of an invitation’ which was again seen as a ‘snub’ by a republican Prime Minister. Charles’s royal biographer, Robert Jobson, weighed in with his own pearl-clutching dismay, ‘that’s not how you deal with the King’, castigating Albanese for ‘failing to follow royal protocol’. A formal invitation duly followed. The Palace chooses where and when the King will visit, and the ‘independent’ realms deliver.

This is Charles’s 17th trip to Australia and his first as King. In stark contrast to the packed crowds seen at previous Royal visits by the Queen and, more recently and no less popularly, the royal escapees Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. The imminent visit of King Charles and his consort, Queen Camilla, has been met with at best curiosity and at worst, indifference. And for the survival of the Monarchy as head of 15 constitutional monarchies – in which Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are still considered the ‘jewels’ in the King’s dwindling Crown – this public disinterest and official disregard represent an existential threat more potent than the uncertain support for an Australian republic. A republican movement is a point of argument, public disinterest is a lost one.

These considerations of the appropriateness of dynastic succession for both Monarch and head of state in a modern democracy, and of the need to acknowledge and address the violence, dispossession, and depredations for indigenous peoples of colonial settlement, burgeoned after the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the advent of the politically interventionist and less popular, King Charles III. With the Queen’s last breath, the new Monarch’s began. We simply woke that morning to find we had a new sovereign over which we had no choice and no say. The opportunity for these important national conversations was lost at every juncture in the name of ‘respect’ – respect for the Queen’s age, for her death, respect for the new King, for the coronation, and now for Charles’ own ill health. Yet these are the times, during points of tension and challenge in the post-colonial relationship, when such conversations are most appropriate and most needed. Indigenous author and journalist Stan Grant wrote of his distress and anger at this expectation of a deferential silence following the death of the Queen; ‘We aren’t supposed to talk about these things this week. We aren’t supposed to talk about colonisation, empire, violence, about Aboriginal sovereignty, not even about the republic’.

The Governor General David Hurley declared King Charles III of Australia to be Australia’s head of state, in a ceremonyoutside Parliament House in Canberra two weeks after the death of the Queen. The proclamation reads: “We … now proclaim Prince Charles Philip Arthur George to be King Charles the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Australia and his other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, and, with hearty and humble affection, we promise him faith and obedience.” We might ask by which faith are we promising ‘by the grace of God’ to obey the King? And is it appropriate that we ‘promise obedience’ to a foreign monarch whose dynastic elevation was contingent only on the Queen’s death, not the wishes of the Australian people?

A Roy Morgan poll following the coronation, when support for the monarchy was at a high, showed that 60 per cent of Australians wanted Australia to remain a constitutional monarchy. By 2023 however, a YouGov poll suggested that number had fallen to just 35% although these polls on a republic often with very different lead questions are notoriously imprecise. Nevertheless, and perhaps more importantly, that poll also showed that 34% thought the monarchy was good for the country, 21% thought it was bad, and 38% were indifferent – neither good nor bad. In both the UK and Australia support for the monarchy is in inverse proportion to age, giving further concern for the future of the monarchy.

In Australia however, moves towards a republic have stalled. Despite the Prime Minister’s early commitment to a republic referendum and the appointment of our first ‘assistant minister for the republic’, with the loss of the Voice referendum that moment passed as has the Minister for a republic position which was dissolved in the last ministerial reshuffle. And while I support the government’s sequencing of a referendum on the republic following a referendum on the Voice to parliament as a necessary and essential pathway, if the Voice shows us anything it is the need for a sustained educative process to build support. The assistant minister for a republic ought to be restored to begin that process.

One of the most potent ‘imperial myths’ as Professor Caroline Elkins described the coded trappings of the royal public image is that of the political neutrality of the monarch and the Crown. This as we now know is a sophistry maintained and sustained by the exceptional secrecy surrounding royal activities, correspondence and interference. I have written about this previously in these pages however for now, as King Charles arrives for his first and possibly only visit as King, let’s not forget his active role in the dismissal of the Whitlam government in which, as David Marr noted recently, Prince Charles was ‘up to his neck in it’.

Charles was the initial go-between from Kerr to the Queen, discussing with Kerr in September 1975 the possible use of the reserve powers against the Whitlam government, Kerr’s fear for his own position should he do so, and the Palace’s response to that ‘contingency’. Charles relayed that conversation to the Queen and her private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, from where Charteris began the sequence of Palace letters with Kerr on the existence and use of the reserve powers, secret from the prime minister and against the advice of the solicitor-general, Sir Maurice Byers, and the attorney-general, Kep Enderby.

Thanks to the High Court’s decision in the Palace letters case there can now be no doubt as to our King’s support for Kerr’s removal of the elected government without warning, with the release of an extraordinarily improper letter from Charles to Kerr just months after the dismissal; ‘Please don’t lose heart, what you did .. was right and the courageous thing to do’. We should use this time of King Charles’s visit to reflect on the appropriateness of a dynastic monarchy with titles, wealth, privilege and power conveyed on a single family by birthright alone, to a modern democracy and to embrace an Australian republic which is fully independent, free of ‘colonial relics’, with a head of state determined not by succession of an unelected British monarch but by the Australian people.

https://johnmenadue.com/we-promise-him-faith-and-obedience-king-charles-and-the-premiers-in-a-royal-display-of-indifference/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.