Chris Whiting Blog: Brisbane's Bonds of Empire

WHAT LIES within the legislation program of the Queensland government in 2013?

According to the Queensland Attorney-General, we may be passing laws to tighten the bonds of Empire.

Our future of head of State (somewhere behind the flowers)

The Queensland Attorney-General wants to bring in an Act to nominate the unborn child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to be a subsequent Head of State in Queensland. The Federal government may be doing the same.

Let us pause and consider the long term implications of this rush to solidify the links to Empire.

Do we want to legislate that an unknown Englishman or woman will be the font of authority in our democracy in about 50 years time?

Many Queenslanders feel we will get nothing from being attached to the British Crown. In fact, it is an attachment that has always entailed a significant cost.

Startlingly, I found this very sentiment reflected by Benjamin Franklin in 1775.

Franklin had spent months trying to negotiate with the British government to avoid war in the American colonies. As Don Cook says in The Long Fuse, Benjamin Franklin became disgusted by the "futility of his efforts" and the continued British attempts at bribery.

Here’s what Franklin said:

When I consider the extreme corruption prevalent among all orders of men in this old rotten state … I cannot but apprehend more mischief than benefit from a closer union. I fear they will drag us after them in all plundering wars which their desperate circumstances, injustices and rapacity may prompt them to undertake; and their wide-wasting prodigality and profusion is a gulf that will swallow up every aid we may distress ourselves to afford them.

Benjamin Franklin: still relevant today

These are the rapier-like words of a man whose nation was about to launch into a colonial war. Yet they have a real resonance with Australia in the 21^st century.

One phrase that leaps out is “swallow up every aid”. It is what happened to Australia in the 20th century.

After World War II, Australians endured rationing for years as we sent our grain, meat and butter to England to relieve their paucity of food.

Yet the biggest aid we have always sent the English was ourselves. In uniform.

“ … drag us after them into all plundering wars …” is a line that should send a thrill of recognition through nearly all Australians.

Most of the tens of thousands of Australians who have perished in war have died fighting under the British flag, not the Australian flag.

And although not plundering wars, they were wars of Empire that gave us no benefit.

The Australians who served in wars in Sudan and South Africa helped deliver an African empire to the British Crown.

And The Great War, a war that transformed our nation as much as any other event, was an avoidable clash of European empires within Europe.

The supply of men in uniform to fight the wars of Empire was what the British government really needed from Australia. To make sure we were up for the job, Lord Kitchener toured Australia before World War I and assessed our military preparedness for colonial adventures.

Pick who is enjoying the "bonds of empire" here.

And when we ultimately needed our military, they were tied up under a British flag, half a world away.

Our airmen were in the air over Europe, inexorably embedded in the Royal Air Force. When we needed our own air force above our own troops in New Guinea, we had to rely on American aircraft and American airmen.

It is our experience at the forge of war that makes Australians truly question if our system of government should be hinged upon a British monarchy.

One Australian Prime Minister saw the bonds of Empire through the prism of that war-time experience.

In 1992, Paul Keating addressed in Parliament Opposition “charges” that he had snubbed and insulted the Queen. Echoing Benjamin Franklin, he said:

I learned about self-respect and self-regard for Australia – not about some cultural cringe to a country which decided not to defend the Malayan peninsula, not to worry about Singapore and not to give us our troops back to keep ourselves free from Japanese domination. This was the country that you people wedded yourselves to, and, even as it walked out on you and joined the Common Market, you were still looking for your MBEs and your knighthoods and all the rest of the regalia that comes with it.

It’s a speech delivered like a mace more so than a rapier, but many get that same rush of recognition. It articulates a sense the British Empire has got much more out of us than we have from it.

So why are we running to bind ourselves once again to the British Crown? Why not let future generations decide if they want the child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to be our Head of State?

They can assess whether, as Ben Franklin said, there is any benefit from a closer union with this European nation and its ruling family.

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