CITIZEN PARKINSON
The divisive comments of Citizen Michael Parkinson (surely a true knight and a Commander of the British Empire) would not be so churlish as to incite the removal of the Crown within one of Her Majesty’s Realms?) are sorely misplaced at a time when all Australians are uniting behind the thousands of those who have suffered in the floods which are still affecting vast parts of Australia.
As a foreigner, Parkinson was accorded the distinct honour of addressing us on our national day. He may be a celebrity, but in this task he failed miserably. If the situation was reversed and an Australian spoke similarly on a British national day, there would be a justifiable howl of outrage, probably including from Parkinson himself. The fact that some Australians watched his programme does not give him the right to involve himself in the internal politics of a country in which he is a visitor.
In assuming that Australians want a republic (probably because this is what his café-set friends are telling him), Parkinson is ignoring the enormous groundswell of support for our system of Constitutional Monarchy as proven by the fact that more Australians are trav
elling to the United Kingdom at the time of the Royal wedding, than from any other commonwealth country.
Parkinson is reported as telling reporters: “Why should Australia not be a republic? It’s its own country, its own man …. I find it, in a sense, incomprehensible that it’s not that now.” He is obviously totally ignorant of our own democratic system of governance, If Australia was not truly independent -“its own man” – how then could the Australian people themselves – not Britain, not the Queen nor anyone else, but the people themselves – have been able in 1999 to vote upon and decide whether we would be a republic or, as occurred, remain a constitutional monarchy?
In 2009 Parkinson wrote on the tragic death of Jade Goody so cruelly describing her as “barely educated, ignorant and puerile,” adding, “When we clear the media smokescreen from around her death, what we’re left with is a woman who came to represent all that’s paltry and wretched about Britain today”.
In 2011, we say, rather more politely to Parkinson. ‘People that live in glass houses should not throw stones.’
As the Queen always so wisely comments: ‘the matter of constitution change in Australia is a matter for AUSTRALIANS alone to decide upon.’
© Australian Monarchist League
