In the tsunami of syrup that gushed from the world's media in the wake of the royal baby announcement, a few enlightened flames briefly spluttered.
There was Private Eye's reality-check headline 'Woman has baby'. And here in the remote Antipodes, there was constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey's reality-check answer during an interview with Michael Rowland of ABC News Breakfast. Noting that it might be 70 years before the new prince, as third in line of succession to the Queen, becomes king, Twomey added the sensible caveat: 'What are the prospects of Australia still having the king of the UK as its sovereign in 70 years time? I sort of suspect not great.'
Take the long view and the absurdity of an independent nation retaining a foreign monarch as its head of state is instantly apparent. But it's absurd now, too, and for the same reasons as it would be absurd 70 years from now.
Even avowed monarchists know it's absurd. Remember the 1999 referendum, when no one mentioned the Queen? Monarchists — then a minority — posed as defenders of the constitution ('if it ain't broke don't fix it') rather than the monarchy, while the rest of us argued about whether the republican model on offer was sufficiently democratic. The three-way debate felt acrimonious at the time, especially to those of us publicly engaged in it, but in retrospect it seems bizarrely polite. No one mentioned the Queen.
The oddity of Australia's republican debate is that so many people readily agree that becoming a republic is desirable and even inevitable, while in the same breath insisting that it can't, or shouldn't, happen yet. This preference for deferred satisfaction, so strange in a political culture in which almost every demand is for immediate gratification, is the chief reason that the republic hasn't happened yet. If the preference persists, 70 years from now Australians might well be subjects of King George VII.
Deferred satisfaction is now the default position among Australian politicians who call themselves republicans. Whatever else Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have disagreed about, they've always been in accord on this. The 2020 summit, which the first Rudd Government convened in 2008 'to help shape a long-term strategy for the nation's future', placed the republic at the top of its recommendations for reforming governance. I have never heard a prime minister sound less enthusiastic about a proposal he notionally supports than Rudd did about that one.
And