A royal dilemma

It’s a big week here in Australia because the Boss is in town. No not Bruce Springsteen, her majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

While many will argue she’s not really the boss, Australia is a constitutional monarchy, so technically she’s still sort of in charge, even if it’s not in a day-to-day government sense.

Her Maj & the Duke arrive in Oz

 As with every royal visit from Her Maj, the monarchists line the streets to see ‘the wave’ and the republicans come out with their protests that ‘it’s about time we stood on our own because what does she really do anyway’. 

The Queen has visited Australia a lot in her 85 years, as have her children and while this is my first as an adult, I know they’ve always been a big deal in Australia. The little town I grew up in actually paved a few rural roads for a royal visit about 40 years ago. Yep, big deal.

Julia Gillard sans curtsy

There’s always a right ‘royal gaffe’ during a visit to keep the media and masses entertained, and the current one is no exception. And the first gaffe didn’t come from the Duke of Edinburgh this time; it was our Prime Minster Julia Gillard straight out of the gates, as soon as Her Maj stepped off her British Airways flight. Yep, Julia didn’t curtsy to the Queen, and shock horror, she chose not to.

I’m not going to pretend I wouldn’t curtsy to the Queen - I think if I ever met her, I would. But it’s the 21^st century people; can’t a woman choose to greet the Queen in the either of the accepted protocols? Yes, the curtsy is the way it should traditionally be done but the PM has defended herself. She said she was told by royal minders she could choose if she wanted to follow the curtsy protocol when meeting the Queen. The English media will probably refer to Australia jokingly as ‘the colonies’ at some point during this visit, so I’ve got no problem with our PM acting like a true ‘uncouth’ and not curtsying. You go girl. And it's not like she wasn't behaving in a respectable way. She still bowed and shook the Queen's hand politely.

Having the Queen in town makes a lot of Aussies think about which side of the monarchist fence they stand on. I will admit I’m a fence sitter, but probably lean towards being a monarchist for a few reasons:

      The Royal Wedding

Hello? This goes without saying. Who didn’t love the Windsors during that royal frenzy? I suspect a lot of people who didn’t have an opinion on the royal wedding had an opinion about Pippa Middleton and THAT dress. If you were one of the minority (or men) who didn’t care about the wedding let me remind you even fiercely independent countries (like the US) got sucked into the royal wedding tornado. On a more serious note, the wedding (as I’m sure the royal family was banking on) renewed a lot of faith and interest in the British royal family. And why wouldn’t it? The couple seems lovely and down-to-earth, with their feet planted firmly in a more realistic world than many other high-profile royals.

THE kiss

The Tudors

In case you haven’t seen it, The Tudors is a TV series chronicling the life and times (and wives) of the infamous King Henry VIII. No only was this series a pretty accurate and easily digestible version of the history of England, and one of the most famous royal dynasties, it also had all the drama and sex of a good episode of Melrose Place. Need I Say more? It’s renewed my interest in British history and the royals to say the least.

There’s also been a string of popular royal family-based movies in the past few years: The King’s Speech, The Young Victoria and The Queen.

R for royal, R for R-rated

Family history

This is a bit of a personal (and narcissistic) one, but I’ve been more interested in English history in general since I found out that one side of my family (like lots of Aussies) comes from the motherland. I thought my dad’s side of the family was German up until a few years ago, and I’ve been looking into our English family history ever since. I may or may not still be entertaining some unlikely fantasy that there’s a royal family link somewhere in my lineage.

So what do you think? Are you excited about Her Maj being in town, or could you care less? And what about the curtsy issue?

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: The Never Ending Election Campaign

Gillard and Abbott: all talk, no policies.

I don’t know about you – but I’m officially over the Australian Federal Election campaign. Just get us a Prime Minster already. It’s not that I don’t respect our democratic process, in fact, I love it. I’ve just had enough. So in an effort to wrap up the election that seems like it will never end…I’ve compiled my own list of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

I will spare you all the ‘hung’ Parliament puns, which have been done to death in the past few days. And I’ve tried to keep the list a little balanced, but you might notice the Bad and the Ugly columns are pretty full. I think that pretty much sums up this election as a whole....

The Good

Social media emerges as a major player. This really was the first election where people (and not just journalists) engaged in debate and expression over the election campaign through social media like Twitter and Facebook. We even saw a couple of the major TV networks attempt to use a Twitter feed to broadcast public opinion during debates. It didn’t quite work – but it was a sure sign social media is here to stay. Never before have we seen an election where you could tweet Julia Gillard (@JuliaGillard) and tell her exactly what you thought. Sure, one of her press secs may have read it – but apparently she did start writing her own Tweets and even using hash tags (# topic identifiers) towards the end of the campaign. Labor seemed to get the message on social media and its importance by the end of the campaign - but the Coalition didn't get there at all. Tony Abbott didn't join the Twitterverse and obviously the party didn't see it as an important way to reach voters. The Coalition clearly need to move out of the dark ages.

Wyatt Roy the young gun. The 20-year-old has all but won the seat of Longman north of Brisbane; postal votes are still to be counted but Wyatt pretty much has it in the bag. I know he’s young and people will argue that he’s too young, no life experience, blah blah. But maybe the Australian Parliament could use some young positive naivety from a Gen Y-er. You go Wyatt. Just ignore the haters.

Wilson Tuckey is out. The maverick West Australian MP has made some appalling contributions to Australian political life during his time, but thankfully, we won’t have to listen to him anymore. He’s been accused of being acutely racist and even resorted once to calling Kim Beazley a ‘fat so and so’ whilst having a debate about an immigration issue. The fact that he lost his seat shows that all is not lost for a positive, progressive Australia. Great job WA voters.

A Greens candidate wins the seat of Melbourne. The Greens will no longer be referred to as ‘the party you waste a vote on’. The win by former lawyer Adam Bandt sends a warning shot to the major parties. The Greens are now (and some will argue were already) a real alternative to the major parties and can no longer be pigeon-holed as lefty greenies who don’t win seats.


The Bad

The ‘Real’ Julia. This was not a great choice of strategy for Labor. They clearly saw that the election campaign was not moving in their direction and that the media and public were sick of the spin. Julia’s attempt to free herself from this simply confused people and raised the question, who was she being for the first couple of weeks of the campaign when she wasn’t the 'Real Julia’? In her attempt to be the ‘real’ Julia we got ‘More of the Same Julia', and given the result (or lack of) at the polls in Saturday, neither were up to scratch for voters.

The debate about the debate. The back and forth between Tony and Julia on how many debates to have, when to have them and what to debate about became farcical towards the end of the campaign. Will someone just lock the pollies into debates and topics and end the pain for us all? I’d rather read stories about what their policies are, than how many debates we need to have and what they will or won’t be about. And it’s not the political journos’ fault. They are reporting on what’s going on day to day on the campaign trail – and if that sort of tripe is dominating the day, in the place of real policies, then we all lose. However, I think that with this election campaign, no matter what the trivial distractions were, we were never really going to see any real, solid policies.

The first hung Parliament in about 70 years. This is bad, if only because we don’t have a resolution yet. I’m sure I’m not the only one who is exhausted by the length of this election campaign. I know it shows democracy at work, and for that reason in itself it’s a great thing, but it will affect a lot more things than who is PM. It has the potential to affect economic stability. Confidence in our economy may suffer due to uncertainty about policy decisions. And it’s very likely that even if a minority government is formed, we could be sent to the polls again very soon (within the normal 3 or so years). It’s a pretty unstable situation.