To The Australian           The death of Roger Scruton invites us to consider the nature of conservatism and the role it might play in the coming life of our own nation ("Life of a contrary don", 14/1). Scruton's horror of mob violence witnessed in France in 1968 alerted him to the need to oppose the revolutionary doctrine (it is nonsense) of human equality. He soon grasped that high culture was a vital bulwark in the defence of the ways of the elders. You are right ("Roger Scruton's brilliant mind") to applaud this life lived in devotion to "beauty, reason and tradition". However, the essence of conservatism is the honouring of the sacred, of the mystery of the holy; and Scruton does not seem to have been strong enough on this. Australians also tend at present to adopt a cavalier attitude to this source of truth, hence the current confusion generally in our intellectual forums. We can learn from Scruton, but we can learn more from the world's great sacred traditions and their wisest exponents.
  Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic

     To judge how far things have gone, consider the ever-politically correct J. K. Rowling, was attacked by the media elites for merely saying that biological sex is real. That is seen as anti-trans, and other celebs, such as Ricky Gervais, and Mark Hamill, who supported Rowling, also got slammed.
  https://www.zerohedge.com/political/jk-rowling-cancelled-woke-outrage-mob-saying-biological-sex-real
  https://www.nme.com/news/jk-rowling-criticised-for-supporting-woman-who-posted-controversial-trans-rights-tweets-2589718
  https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/12/22/u-s-establishment-media-run-away-j-k-rowling-transgender-debate/
  https://celebrity.nine.com.au/latest/ricky-gervais-under-fire-transphobic-tweets-claims-jokes/3c712bd3-80b9-4d73-95aa-fdc13461567b
  https://summit.news/2019/12/20/mark-hamill-slammed-for-liking-jk-rowlings-transphobic-tweet/

“The U.S. establishment media is running away from a lucrative click-bait debate on sex and science, which is sponsored by the wealthy and famous author of the Harry Potter franchise, J.K. Rowling. The December 19 offer came when Rowling championed the free speech rights  of one woman — Maya Forestator — while simultaneously supporting sexual freedom, science, and the public’s right to recognize the different, equal, and complementary biological sexes of women and men. The New York Times‘ article followed the same pro-transgender format, with its headline saying “J.K. Rowling Criticized After Tweeting Support for Anti-Transgender Researcher.” The article quoted three critics but offered no quotes from supporters of Rowling or Forstator. The New York Times blocked reader comments. The Washington Post allowed comments on its news article, and the comments  — were overwhelming in favor of Rowling and against the article’s authors. Many other outlets were even worse.”

     I often wondered how vegans would respond if there was evidence of the consciousness, in a fashion, of plants. I mean to say, we should nor eat meat because animals have minds, but what if plants had a kind of mind as well?
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7773333/Plants-emit-ultrasonic-scream-stems-cut-water-short-supply.html

“A team of scientists at Tel Aviv University have discovered that some plants emit a high frequency distress sound when they undergo environmental stress. The researchers tested tomato plants and tobacco plants by depriving them of water and by cutting their stems and then recording their response with a microphone placed ten centimeters away. In both cases, they found the plants began to emit ultrasonic sounds between 20 and 100 kilohertz, which they believed could convey their distress to other plants and organisms in the immediate vicinity. When a tomato plant’s stem was cut, the researchers found it emitted 25 ultrasonic distress sounds over the course of an hour, according to Live Science.”

     This was a surprising one: if Trump is a Russian agent, and the Democrats cannot let go of this one, then Obama must be an agent of Iran, some commentators are arguing. Consider:
  https://pjmedia.com/trending/obama-administration-stopped-israel-from-assassinating-soleimani-in-2015-report-says/
  https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-01-07-obama-gave-soleimani-amnesty-bogus-nuclear-deal.html

“While Democrats flirt with treason in their opposition to President Donald Trump’s recent decision to take out one of America’s biggest enemies, Qassem Suleimani, and their propagandist allies in the “mainstream media” eulogize him as some kind of saint, it’s appropriate to remember not only who he was but who enabled him: Barack Hussein Obama. While Democrats flirt with treason in their opposition to President Donald Trump’s recent decision to take out one of America’s biggest enemies, Qassem Suleimani, and their propagandist allies in the “mainstream media” eulogize him as some kind of saint, it’s appropriate to remember not only who he was but who enabled him: Barack Hussein Obama. First, Suleimani’s record of violence against the United States and, in particular, American forces in Iraq. As head of the Quds Force in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Suleimani was responsible for carrying out Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei’s foreign policy throughout the Middle East. In addition to dominating politics in neighboring Iraq and Syria, that policy includes financing, training and equipping scores of militant organizations in those countries as well as Lebanon — all of which are loyal to Tehran. These groups include Hamas and Hezbollah. The objective here is to box in Israel and, eventually, attack and destroy the Jewish state. But also, the objective has been to keep the U.S. off-balance as it prosecuted the war against Iraqi militants in the wake of deposing dictator Saddam Hussein. In this realm, Suleimani and his commanders supplied weapons and other material support to Iraq’s anti-American militants, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers.

     The countdown is on to the big one, when Iran finishes mourning and retaliates for the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani against the US. Already, Iran has raised, for the first time in history, a red flag over the Holy Dome of Jamkaran Mosque believed to be a warning of a battle to come, which could be conventional war, or more likely, a type of 4th generational, unconventional conflict involving terrorist cells.
  https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/irans-red-flag-war-hints-21213560
  https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-said-seeing-signs-iran-prepping-ballistic-missiles-as-tehran-vows-revenge/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
  https://affirmativeright.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-iranians-are-playing-chess-while.html

     Some articles are speculating that the US power grid, vulnerable at the best of times, may be attacked, and other articles indicate that Iranian hackers are already hacking  some US sites, such as the Federal Depository Library program’s website. This was hacked and the homepage replaced with Iranian propaganda. Admittedly, this was a soft target, but it could be a warning of what is to come:
  https://www.axios.com/us-iran-war-footing-qasem-soleimani-airstrike-13cbe74f-9095-47b4-8d03-85f1e702f447.html 
  https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-01-05-iran-to-activate-terror-cells-across-america-power-grid-vulnerable-infrastructure.html
  https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/cfr-president-says-world-will-be-battlefield-after-iran-escalation
  https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/iranian-hackers-take-down-us-government-site-after-dhs-warns-lone-wolf-terrorists

     While the media here in Australia are going into overdrive about the bushfires being caused by climate change, we need to turn to overseas sources to get some sanity, and uncommon sense. Here is James Delingpole at Breitbart.com, making the sensible argument that it was, and still is, the environmental policies of the largely Leftist environmentalist system and Greens, that allowed the massive build-up of highly flammable dried vegetation:
  https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-01-05-environmentalists-arsonists-australia-policies-forest.html
  https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/01/02/greens-made-australia-bush-fires-worse/

“As Paul Homewood pointed out last month, there has been no significant long-term decrease in rainfall or increase in temperatures in the affected regions. Yes, it has been dry in New South Wales (where most of the worst fires are), but there have been several years, especially pre-1960, when it was drier. The same applies to temperature. Yes, this has been a hot spring in New South Wales. But there have been times when it has been much hotter — making a nonsense of all stories in the Australian media about temperatures being the hottest ever: Neither is the monthly average of 38.0C a record high. The three years from 1899 to 1901 all saw average December mean maximum temperatures well above 38.0C. Since the station moved to the airport in 1993, 38C has only been exceeded once until this year, that was in 2005, when it averaged 38.5C, still well below the December 1899 when the mean was 39.9C. So, to be clear, there is zero evidence of any change in climatic conditions that might have increased the likelihood or severity of these bush fires. This is not — repeat NOT — a man-made climate change story, and anyone who claims otherwise is either a gullible idiot or a lying charlatan. There is, nonetheless, good reason to believe that the stupidity and irresponsibility of man is at least partly to blame for this disaster — just not quite in the way that the left-liberal MSM and the green wankerati would have you believe.

     You will not find very much MSM stuff about the beheadings of Christians  on boxing Day in Nigeria. But, here is the basic information about the attempt in Nigeria, to eliminate Christianity:
  https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15369/christmas-christians-beheaded

“Martha Bulus, a Nigerian Catholic woman, was going to her bridal party when she was abducted by Islamic extremists of Boko Haram. Martha and her companions were beheaded and their execution filmed. The video of the brutal murders of these 11 Christians was released on December 26 to coincide with Christmas celebrations. It is reminiscent of the images of other Christians dressed in orange jumpsuits bent on their knees on a beach, each being held by a masked, black-clad jihadist holding a knife at their throats. Their bodies were discovered in a mass grave in Libya. On the scale of Nigeria's anti-Christian persecution, Martha was less fortunate than another abducted girl, Leah Sharibu, who has now been in captivity nearly two years and just spent her second Christmas in the hands of Boko Haram. The reason? Leah refused to convert to Islam and deny her Christianity. Nigerian Christian leaders are also protesting the "continuous abduction of under-aged Christian girls by Muslim youths...". These girls "are forcefully converted to Islam and taken in for marriage without the consent of their parents". Nigeria is experiencing an Islamist war of the extermination of Christians. So far, 900 churches in northern Nigeria have been destroyed by Boko Haram. U.S. President Donald J. Trump was informed that at least 16,000 Christians have been killed there since 2015. In one single Nigerian Catholic diocese, Maiduguri, 5,000 Christians were murdered. How much bigger and more extended must this war on Christians become before the West considers it a "genocide" and acts to prevent it?

     Here is how Their ABC described a program about open borders, with guess Dr Sarah Fine of King’s College London:
  https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/keeping-them-out/10169906

“Most people agree that nation states don’t have any moral right to control the movement of citizens within their borders, or to prevent citizens from travelling beyond those borders. So why should we accept that states have the right to exclude or restrict entry to refugees and immigrants? The answers usually appeal to security, or the need to 'preserve' national values and culture. But these arguments may be less robust than they appear.”

     Following Trump’s military strike against Iran, there is great concern among young men that there will be World War III, and the need for a draft so that young men can be killed off for the globalists, as always.
  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/us/military-draft-world-war-3.html

     However, the US draft is only directed at young men, which would seem discriminatory. Clearly, if there is going to be another mass slaughter, then what about the daughter?! Women will need, by the principle of affirmative action, to be the main one’s to be canon fodder now, as there needs to be restoration of the balance as men have died in all past wars. Isn’t it time for equality, and for young women to be slaughtered as well … which is just an argument for not having the draft at all! And, why we are at it, no war either.

     In a multicultural, multiracial society, according to the propaganda made when these were being set up in the West, all races are equal, there are no racial differences, and all cultures are equal. That is equalitarianism. So, it must be ok to be white, by definition, right? Wrong; we saw this in the Australian Senate vote against the motion, meaning that it is NOT ok to be white, and now in Scotland:
  https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-50821872

“Scotland's deputy first minister has condemned the appearance of stickers bearing the slogan "It's okay to be white" in Perth city centre. The stickers were posted on lampposts and drainpipes throughout the city at the weekend. John Swinney, who is also MSP for Perthshire North, said the "atrocious" stickers had "no place in Perth or any other part of our country." Police Scotland said it was "currently looking into the matter." Posting on Twitter, Mr Swinney said: "We must stand together to resist this unacceptable material." 'Sickening and disgusting' Stickers bearing the same slogan appeared in Dundee in September. The message originally appeared as a 2017 poster campaign in the US organised by an internet message board, with the aim of provoking reactions. It was later picked up and spread by neo-Nazi groups. Local group Perth Against Racism said it has been contacted by local people who said the appearance of the stickers had made them feel unsafe. One person told the group: "I am certainly worried now for my daughters who are not white but are from Perth. "It's sickening and disgusting to know that people think like this." A Police Scotland spokeswoman said: "Although no complaint has been made to police regarding these posters, they have been brought to our attention and officers are currently looking into the matter."

     The late Guillaume Faye, French dissent right intellectual has had his final book released: Ethnic Apocalypse: The Coming European Civil War (Arktos, London, 2019).  The French title actually translates as A Racial Civil War, but the English publisher did not run with that, worried that the book would get banned or whatever. Pathetic. I will not give a blow by blow account of the book because it essentially follows topics that have been well discussed here, including changing demographics making white Europeans minorities in their own land, and festering crime. Here is some more recent material that this book on the same theme:
  https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2019/09/08/a-race-war-prophecy/
  https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/09/german-citizens-are-arming-themselves-with-firearms/
  https://www.jihadwatch.org/2019/08/germany-25-of-the-population-and-42-of-young-children-now-of-migrant-backgrounds
  https://www.amren.com/commentary/2019/08/the-color-of-knife-crime-in-britain/
  https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/07/migrant-child-gang-puts-fear-into-neighbours-swedish-children-scared-to-go-outside/
  https://www.amren.com/news/2019/07/the-majority-population-in-german-cities-is-facing-its-end/

“Frankfurt am Main, Offenbach, Heilbronn, Sindelfingen — in these and other cities, Germans with no immigration background are still the largest group, but are no longer an absolute majority. That affects West Germany more than the East, and cities more than non-urban areas. As early as the 1980s, the Greens were propagating Multiculti — a multicultural society. Although it had already begun some time before, the very thought of it was hair-raising for some voters. This reality has been accentuated in recent decades. Although the phrase is somewhat out of style. Nowadays, we talk of diversity and mixed society. Meanwhile, the majority society is approaching its end in German cities. That means that Germans who have no immigration background (as defined by the Federal Office of Statistics) are no longer the statistical majority (>50%), but are just the largest of three groups, with foreigners and Germans with an immigration background.

     If we can still believe surveys, 90 percent of England believes that being English is not about colour, yes, 90 percent, supposedly:
  https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jun/30/being-english-not-about-colour-say-majority

“The number of people who believe that in order to be English you have to be white has halved over the past seven years, with the older generation apparently driving a wider acceptance of people with different ethnic backgrounds. Just over 10% of people believe that ethnicity is an important determining factor in being English, compared to 20% from a 2012 study, according to British Future and the Centre for English Identity and Politics, which is about to publish its follow-up to the 2012 study, This Sceptred Isle.  The biggest change was noted among over-65s, where the importance of whiteness fell from 35% to 16%. The new data could challenge the perception that the 2016 Brexit referendum reflected an increase in xenophobic English identity. The findings suggest that during the time of the Brexit vote, perceptions of English identity were becoming more, rather than less, ethnically inclusive.

     Here is one reason why the great replacement of the European peoples should be resisted: they have made an irreplaceable contribution to human history, and are not a flash in the pan as some conservative sites which are supposed to defend the white ethno-racial group think, but are an ancient contribution to the human species:
  https://phys.org/news/2019-07-oldest-africa-reset-human-migration.html

“A 210,000-year-old skull has been identified as the earliest modern human remains found outside Africa, putting the clock back on mankind's arrival in Europe by more than 150,000 years, researchers said Wednesday.
In a startling discovery that changes our understanding of how modern man populated Eurasia, the findings support the idea that Homo sapiens made several, sometimes unsuccessful migrations from Africa over tens of thousands of years. Southeast Europe has long been considered a major transport corridor for modern humans from Africa. But until now the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens on the continent dated back only around 50,000 years. There has however been a number of discoveries indicating the ancient presence of Neanderthals—an early human cousin—across the continent. Two fossilised but badly damaged skulls unearthed in a Greek cave in the 1970s were identified as Neanderthal at the time. In findings presented in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers used state-of-the art computer modelling and uranium dating to re-examine the two skulls. One of them, named Apidima 2 after the cave in which the pair were found, proved to be 170,000 years old and did indeed belong to a Neanderthal. But, to the shock of scientists, the skull named Apidima 1 pre-dated Apidima 2 by as much as 40,000 years, and was determined to be that of a Homo sapiens. That makes the skull by far the oldest modern human remains ever discovered on the continent, and older than any known Homo sapiens specimen outside of Africa. "It shows that the early dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa not only occurred earlier, before 200,000 years ago, but also reached further geographically, all the way to Europe," Katerina Harvati, a palaeoanthropologist at the Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen, Germany, told AFP.”

     So we now have a pending federal election with two parties campaigning on the dire consequences of climate change. As a young person at school in the mid sixties I was most concerned to learn that the world was running out of copper. There was widespread concern and debate as to how we could cope substituting aluminium. When I left school, I got a job in the mining industry and soon found that not only was there not going to be a copper shortage, but the mines that would provide the copper were being developed when this hysteria was being spread. It assured a good market price for copper. In the mid seventies we were bombarded with dire predictions that the world oil supplies were nearly exhausted. So scarce was bitumen going to be we would be building concrete highways. I had friends in this industry and collected enough information to see easily that this was a total beat-up, as is clearly evident now. Producers were simply creating hysteria to justify higher prices.

     Such a beat-up is the climate change argument, that they have to use naturally sinking volcanic islands to support the claims of rising sea levels. Since around the time of Charles Darwin, Geologists have known the Earths crust is not strong enough to hold up the volcanic cones rising from the sea floor. These old Volcanoes naturally sink as they have been doing for millions of years. Some volcanic islands have sunk to 6,000 feet below the sea surface with remnant coral reefs that could have only grown at or near the surface. The following is a quote from a Geology text book: "Next came the main islands all with drowned river valleys e.g. Pearl Harbour, with up to 1,200 feet of submergence." (Principals of physical geology, Arthur Holmes).  

     Hillary Clinton on her Twitter has said:

“When I was a little girl, I wrote to NASA and told them I dreamed of being an astronaut. They wrote back and said they weren't taking girls. A new generation of little girls watched today's historic spacewalk. May their dreams of reaching the stars have no bounds.”

     Yet more material proclaiming Sweden’s collapse. However, the metaphor used in this news piece is one of dissolution, bringing to mind acid reactions. Political scientist, whatever that means, Tommy Möller has said to a Swedish newspaper that Sweden’s mass immigration could result in the unravelling of Sweden’s Democratic welfare society:
  https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/01/02/professor-sweden-society-dissolving-due-to-mass-migration/

“No matter what happens, no one can deny that our society has undergone significant changes as a result of the extensive immigration, and these demographic changes will permeate Swedish politics for the foreseeable future,” Moller said and highlighted the rise of the anti-mass migration Sweden Democrats (SD) who have topped recent opinion polls. “Problems in health care and school, the municipalities’ increased costs for supply support, housing shortages and, not least, the accelerating gang crime – all of these are problems and some of them have been linked by SD with immigration,” he said. Mass migration has been linked to several of those issues such as in the southern city of Malmo where the vast majority of shooting suspects in a Swedish media report released earlier this year were from migrant backgrounds. Municipalities who took in large shares of asylum seekers and migrants since the height of the 2015 migrant crisis have also seen financial difficulties, such as the municipality of Bengtsfors which claimed it risked bankruptcy earlier this year.”

     I have written before that new world countries like Australia and America are social experiments in liberalism, to see if the fundamental natural laws that have governed human societies since the beginning of their existence can be over-ridden in favour of money economies, and the rule of commerce. That being so, this idea of a grand experiment has been taken even further by the car man, Jeremy Clarkson, who likes to say crazy things, but things which still have a serious sting to them:
  https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10668071/australia-is-gods-laboratory-and-people-were-not-actually-meant-to-live-there/

“I’VE suspected for some time God didn’t want people to live in Australia. He created it as a continent far, far away where he could house all his experiments that had gone wrong. It was his under-the-stairs cupboard for stuff he wanted to forget about. Like, for instance, the saltwater crocodile. He designed it, built it then realised it was far too savage and bitey to live in, say, Milton Keynes. Or the poisonous redback spider which likes to hide under lavatory seats so it can bite a man’s penis when he sits down to do his number twos. No way could God have that living in Europe or the US. He also made a lot of snakes. Some are very pretty and some are very impressive. But occasionally it all went wrong and he ended up with something that could kill a fully-grown man with one small bite. And again, these could not live in populated areas. He needed a home for all these things, so he made Australia. And to make sure people didn’t go there, he put a huge coral reef on the approaches and filled the interior with a sea of sand that goes on for ever. He even used this remote outpost to house some of his more ridiculous ideas. Stuff he came up with when he was drunk. Like those birds that can’t fly and that otter with a beak. Then you have the kangaroo, which gets about by bouncing, and the koala, which is permanently stoned and catches chlamydia if anyone ever picks it up. For millions of years, this big, sandy cupboard under the stairs went unnoticed. But then along came Captain Cook and now the world knows all about Oz and its stupid, dangerous creatures. Plainly, God is embarrassed. Because he’s decided to set fire to it. It’s been argued the fires raging across the country were caused by global warming or out-of-control barbies. But when you look at the footage, you know something biblical is going on. Those things are huge.”

     The multicultural elite are jumping for joy at news that England’s Muslim population has now topped 3 million, which exceeds the total population of Wales or Northern Ireland in the 2011 census:
  https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/01/04/englands-muslim-population-3-million-tops-populations-wales-ni/

“Office for National Statistics (ONS) research based on the Annual Population Survey (APS), a new a data collection method based on a “continuous household survey, comprising the Labour Force Survey (LFS) supplemented by sample boosts in England, Wales and Scotland to ensure small areas are sufficiently sampled”, indicates that the Muslim population of England and Wales increased by over 400,000 — 16 per cent — between the 2011 census and 2016. The Muslim population in England alone is thought have reached around 3,092,000 by 2016, greater than the total populations, including Muslims and all other minority groups, recorded for Wales (3,063,456) or Northern Ireland (1,810,863) in the 2011 census, according to coverage of the research in the Daily Mail. If accurate, the APS data — which naturally does not account for people resident in Britain illegally, or for people who live in “communal establishments” such as prisons rather than households — would put the Muslim share of England’s population in 2016 at 5.6 per cent. However, the impact on the country’s culture, demographics, and social cohesion is likely to be much greater than this figure would suggest, given the Muslim population has “tended to be concentrated in particular areas of England”, according to the last national census. “In over half of local authorities the proportion of the population who were Muslim was under one per cent,” the 2011 census reported noted — but added that in areas with “the highest proportion of Muslims” — namely Tower Hamlets and Newham in London, now governed by Muslim left-winger Sadiq Khan — their share of the population was far higher, at “34.5 per cent and 32.0 per cent respectively.”

     The resource war, especially the battle for water is now on, and China is making sure that it does not get thirsty. As for the local Aussies on water rations, well the governments will be doing all they can to do precisely nothing, and allow China first, second and third drink, as is the law of the New World Order:
  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/02/queensland-government-was-warned-about-risks-of-chinese-companys-water-extraction

“Queensland government experts raised repeated warnings about the long-term sustainability of groundwater extraction at a southern Queensland property which has since been approved to operate as a commercial water mine. The approval for the 96m litre a year bottled water extraction operation at Cherrabah – in a severely drought-hit area where locals are on water rations and communities at imminent risk of running dry – has raised significant questions about the oversight and regulation of critical water resources in Queensland. Documents obtained by Guardian Australia show how longstanding concerns about groundwater security at Cherrabah were overridden by changes to Queensland law enacted by Campbell Newman’s government in 2013. Under the changes, the Chinese-owned company Joyful View Garden Real Estate Development Resort Pty Ltd was automatically granted a 94-year extraction permit at Cherrabah when a short-term allocation expired in 2017. Written concerns outlined in the documents obtained by Guardian Australia include the expert review of a study commissioned by Joyful View in 2009 that was the basis for its subsequent water extraction applications. The study contained repeated qualifications that its modelling could not be relied upon for a period longer than 12 months.

To The Age        John Pinniger is wrong (11/1) to describe our monarchy as "a failing organisation that is becoming less relevant by the day". Perhaps the truth is the other way around: that there is a danger of the Australian people failing the Crown. Our constitutional monarchy brings a special grace into our lives that no republic can ever do. It calls on us to bow to the sacred and to live lives for the benefit of the common good rather than for selfish pleasure. It helps maintain a national memory of our history, its grandeur and the examples of our heroes. It offers a focus of national unity beyond party politics. It is a fair bet that if the republicans triumph here, it will not be long before a sizable majority of Australians yearn for a return of the monarchy; but by then the stable door will have been long opened and the horse bolted, alas!
  Nigel Jackson, Belgrave