Australia's public image of being a "larrikin" place - all beer on the beach and shrimp on the barbie, is at odds with its incredibly authoritarian attitudes. I'm always amazed at Aussie enthusiasm for the "smack of firm government" and their hatred of anyone breaking the rules.

It's really strange that of all the former British settler colonies, the one that's the most republican in attitude is also the one that's most enthusiastic about maintaining the surveillance/police state parity with UK. Canada and NZ are doing much better.

The beaches and sunshine mean that there are better things to do than worry about f*cking politics.

Australian frogs are coming to the boil.

The thing that's most odd about this is if you consider the history of the cause of settlement of Australia... the first settlers weren't exactly renowned for following the rules... that's why they were there in the first place.

Irony at its finest.

You need to look at our country from a historical point of view. We have a lot of cultural ties with the UK. Australia did not become a country until 1901 and no it wasn't a penal colony for that whole time, There was a lot of migration primarily from the UK - to this day UK is one of our largest source of permanent migrants.

Most of Australia's laws, our parliamentary system etc was based on UK Westminster system. In the early years of our country most people were very pro British Empire. There was enormous social pressure on people to go and "fight for the empire" during World War 1 lots and lots of Australian went and fought and died in Europe, then the same thing happened in World War 2, except suddenly the Japanese were threatening us (A lot of people don't know the Japanese bombed Australia cities during WW2) and most of our military was over in Europe and Northern Africa after the fall of Singapore Australia realized how vulnerable we were and that British could not be counted on to defend us, which caused a strategic realignment behind US and things like the ANZUS treaty etc.

To this day there is still a lot of positive British sentiment in Australia. A lot of people here really like the Queen it's a little bizarre, not so evident in the city but if you go into regional country towns it is pretty pro monarchy. When I was in high school the Queen visited my area and it was crazy big parades huge event I have never seen another politician of any sort anywhere in the country get the kind of reception she did. Most people here are completely cynical about politicians but they love the queen - weird.

Australia's (and Australians') attachment to the monarchy is one of those things that will change dramatically over the next twenty-odd years as the 60+ year-old set, who have anachronistic romantic notions of the monarchy, die off.

The "royal weddings" (good lord, kill me now) do their little bit in fluffing up pro-monarchy anachronistic romantic notions in some of the younger set, but nowhere near the amount needed to sustain the 'no to a republic' vote even in the next ten years.

My assumption is that a lot of these same monarchists are fundamentally racist as a direct result of the various wars, which is semi-understandable. Humans don't tend to change their minds beyond a certain age, no matter the changing context.

There's a quote somewhere about "beliefs don't change, their proponents die out". I'm finding it applies in almost universal contexts.

> Australia's (and Australians') attachment to the monarchy is one of those things that will change dramatically over the next twenty-odd years as the 60+ year-old set, who have anachronistic romantic notions of the monarchy, die off.

Also the general opinion appears to be that we'd rather be a Republic than have Charles as our king ;)