Monarchist Petition Dutton to Level the Playing Field

Monarchist Petition Dutton to Level the Playing Field

The Australian Monarchist League, Australia’s major organisation in opposing the government’s plans for a republic, is so concerned about the unfair advantage the Labor government has provided to republicans by gifting them a government minister that it has raised a petition with over 1000 signatories calling on the Leader of the Opposition, the Hon. Peter Dutton MP, to create a Shadow Assistant Minister for the Constitution.

The government minister, the Hon. Matt Thistlethwaite MP, Assistant Minister for the Republic, has been involved with the Australian Republican Movement for many years and can be said to be one of their own. Furthermore, he is not merely a government minister but one with the full backing of the government with resources paid for by the taxpayer that no not-for-profit organisation, like the League, could possibly meet. As he goes about the country propagating change to a republic, the costs of taxpayer-funded airfares, hotels, booking of venues and the like would alone amount to thousands of dollars.

According to Mr Thistlethwaite his “role is very much one of education in the initial stages: explaining to people that we do have a foreign monarch as our head of state, we have a proxy representative in the Governor-General, but that we can have an Australian as our head of state." (ABC 2/6/22). Monarchists would object to calling the Queen ‘a foreign monarch’ particularly when it was a previous Labor government which legislated to identify the Queen as Queen of Australia. (Obviously the late Gough Whitlam understood these matters better than Mr Thistlethwaite.)

However, the fact is that no provision whatsoever is being provided by the government, which is supposed to be representative of all people, to the defence of the Australian Constitution as it is.

The Albanese government should not forget that around one third of Labor voters voted against a republic in 1999 and that their appointment of an Assistant Minister for the Republic has completely disenfranchised them.

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