REPUBLICANS DESECRATE NATIONAL WATTLE DAY

Golden Wattle (Acacia pycnantha) is the national floral emblem of Australia. It is celebrated as a national Wattle Day holiday on September 1. The first celebration of Wattle Day was held on 1 September 1910 in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. During World War I sprigs of wattle and colourful badges were sold on Wattle Day to raise money for the Red Cross. Wattle was sent overseas in letters during the war and was presented to homecoming service men and women at what must have been an emotional moment.

For over a century Wattle Day has been associated with raising money for charity including for children. It is a cherished and honourable day, UNTIL NOW.

In 2018 republicans have hijacked Wattle Day and associated it with their furtive call for a series of postal plebiscites all designed to remove the Queen and replace her with a politician-president. They call it their Campaign Day in which they have unsurprisingly been joined by Shorten Labor.

The Queen they want to remove is the very same Queen who honoured Australia on her first visit in 1954, shortly after her Coronation, by wearing the famous wattle dress, thus paying tribute to Australia’s famous flower. This is the same Queen who has been Australia’s sovereign, always accountable to the Australian people and always acting on the advice of her Australian ministers, the same Queen who has seen 13 Australian prime ministers and yet has remained at the head of our system of governance ensuring that politicians cannot thwart the Constitution.

If the Queen goes, so does the Crown. If the Crown goes, so does the Constitution and if the constitution goes, so does the Australian Flag. Make no bones about it.

To use a capricious and casual survey reliant on the vagaries of our postal system as a leadup to effect change on the Australian Constitution is wrong. The constitution provides for a fair process by referendum by which the people are properly informed and the interests of the smaller states protected. We are a federation, not a totally centralised government. A postal survey will only count votes that come in nationwide thus ignoring the role of the States within our Federation.

Christian Porter, the Attorney General, has said about the postal survey

“Well I think this is all kind of sparked to the extent that I can describe it that way by Bill Shorten saying that as an election policy if they were ever elected to government they would have a plebiscite on the republic, which I've got to say is an idea that is quite a lot stupid and a little bit dishonest because I think first of all there's no appetite for this now at all and there are bigger things and more important issues facing Australia that government needs to be focusing its attention on. But ultimately if you were ever to have a republic you've got to change the constitution which means of course that you've got to have a referendum. So what Bill Shorten wants to do is have some kind of plebiscite vote or opinion poll which says; do you like the idea of republic, but not also ask the question what sort of republic is it that we would move to.

“I mean it's the equivalent of saying to people I want you to agree to move house but I'm not going to tell you where you're going to live until much later down the track after you've made the decision to move house. No one's going to wear that. The issue with the republic has always been that you have to put to people with a great degree of specificity what it is that you want to change the Australian constitution and system of government to - like you've got to put up a model. You can't divorce the two ideas and the two concepts of the model from the desire to have a change.” (Radio-6pr- 21-June-2018)

The Australian Monarchist League is organising gatherings, not in response to the republican desecration of Wattle Day, but to celebrate the 117th anniversary of the raising of the Australian Flag. National Flag Day is on September 3.

It was in 1901 that Australia’s first Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Sir Edmund Barton, announced an international competition to design a flag for the new Commonwealth of Australia. There were 32,823 entries and five nearly-identical entries were awarded equal first.

The flag was flown for the first time in September 1901 at the Exhibition Building in Melbourne, which was then the seat of the federal government.

It is honoured and loved by so many Australians as a symbol of a free and independent Australia under the Crown.

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