At a reception held for Queen Elizabeth II in Parliament House in 1963, then prime minister Robert Menzies delivered a remarkable speech describing the queen as the “living and lovely centre of our enduring allegiance” and himself as “prime minister — your prime minister, ma’am”, before closing on the words, “I did see her but passing by, and yet I love her ’til I die”.
The obsequiousness radiating from that speech has powered a lot of monarchist thinking in the country ever since. Since Elizabeth passed away last week at the age of 96, that cohort has been coping as well as one might expect.
Tony Abbott lead with a piece in The Australian which argued: “Probably not a single death in human history will be as widely felt as that of Queen Elizabeth II.” Which is a pretty wild sentiment for someone who believes Jesus Christ sacrificed his life to atone for the sins of humanity. Nick Cater, Australian columnist and Menzies Research Centre executive director, marvelled at “the eternal miracle of the Crown” and closed with another Menzies quote:
The present Queen, who is the most remarkable monarch since the first Elizabeth, has done so much to strengthen the position of the Crown and to inspire general respect for it that I am constantly horrified to find that some alleged intellectuals in Australia want to have a republic. I hope they fail dismally. I am proud to name myself a loyal servant of the Queen.
State member for Kew Tim Smith’s response has been to flood his Twitter feed with royals content and has shifted his set-up thus:
Initially he shared a letter he’d written to the new king, swearing “by almighty God that I, and the people of Kew, will be faithful and bear true allegiance to you, our Sovereign, Charles the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Australia”.
For whatever reason, the tweet sharing that letter has since been deleted.
Peter Malinauskas, the world’s most-shredded premier, asked his constituents to “turn on their porch lights” to honour the late queen, which is apparently a thing — and a particularly easy way to claim as a symbolic gesture something that for most people was going to be doing anyway.
We should note that, of course, some people are keeping a sense of perspective. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton put out a tribute saying there had never been a “more decent human being” than the queen, but kept an eye on what’s important — warning the incoming king that he ought to stay out of the politics of climate change now he’s on the throne.
