Multiculturalism and Sectarianism
Republicans argue that Australia has changed demographically and culturally, from being "British to our bootstraps", as prime minister Robert Menzies once put it, to being less British, albeit maintaining an 'English Core'. For Australians not of British ancestry, they argue, the idea of one person being both Monarch of Australia and Monarch of the United Kingdom is an anomaly. It is also claimed that Aborigines and Australians of Irish origin see the Australian Crown as a symbol of British imperialism.
However, monarchists argue that immigrants who left unstable republics and have arrived in Australia since 1945 welcomed the social and political stability that they found in Australia under a constitutional monarchy. Further, some Aborigines such as former Senator Neville Bonner, said a republican president would not "care one jot more for my people".
It has also been claimed monarchism and republicanism in Australia delineate historical and persistent sectarian tensions with, broadly speaking, Catholics more likely to be republicans and Protestants more likely to be monarchists. This developed out of a historical cleavage in 19th- and 20th-century Australia, in which republicans were predominantly of Irish Catholic background and loyalists were predominantly of British Protestant background. Whilst mass immigration since the Second World War has diluted this conflict, the Catholic-Protestant divide has been cited as a dynamic in the republic debate, particularly in relation to the referendum campaign in 1999. Nonetheless, others have stated that Catholic-Protestant tensions — at least in the sense of an Irish-British conflict — are at least forty years dead.
It has also been claimed, however, that the Catholic-Protestant divide is intermingled with class issues. Certainly, republicanism in Australia has traditionally been supported most strongly by urban working class of Irish Catholic background, whereas monarchism is a core value associated with urban and rural inhabitants of British Protestant heritage and the middle class, to the extent that there were calls in 1999 for 300,000 exceptionally enfranchised British subjects who were not Australian citizens to be barred from voting on the grounds that they would vote as a loyalist bloc in a tight referendum.
Read more about this topic: Republicanism In Australia
Famous quotes containing the word sectarianism:
“In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)