Originally Posted by
aero383
It's like Federation never happened. Australia still behaves like a colonial relic; an outpost of empire from which the mother country(ies) can launch military adventures and source cannon fodder and commodities.
A tragic waste of what could have been a genuinely great nation.
A useful distraction though for alleged leaders trying to draw attention away from debacles of own their making like Afghanistan, Brexit and the vaccine "stroll out". The "yellow peril" is still a potent political tool as it was in the 1800's.
It's because we're not a republic. A lot of people can't see that when we finally make that break, it will change the way we think of ourselves as a nation - it's not about getting rid of the Queen, it's about standing up and being counted not based on what some other country thinks, but because we will start to think independently.
Sadly, at this point in time the opposition to such a move (although dwindling from 85% in the 60s to probably less than 40-50% today) is characterised by people who are either moribund in their thinking or can't escape the anglophile mindset that Britain is largely irrelevant in today's world and they show their lack of imagination by trotting out hackneyed garbage lines such as "served us well" and the most annoying of all "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" - I often ask when someone says that "Do you own a car and have electricity in your house????" They of course say yes, to which I reply "Well you should have stayed with candles and a horse, because, you know, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
If everyone had that attitude and society rested on that foundation, we'd still be inhabiting caves and running around half-naked killing animals with a club.
Then there's the 'but the US is a republic and look at the problems they've had with their previous President' - as if they are happy to discard 234 years of general stability because of the last 4.
It might seem esoteric what I'm saying but there's a subtle but powerful mindset that comes with making your nation independent. That includes a realisation that we are where we are today with a fairly stable democratic state because we have a written constitution (based on the US and the Swiss as the UK doesn't have a constitution) and because of a general respect for the rule of law. NOT, because some nonogenarian woman in London has some magic powers of casting stability....... which is clearly nonsense because if she did, Scotland wouldn't have an independence movement, the IRA wouldn't have been setting off bombs everywhere and Fiji would have been protected from their coup by the juju up the mountain nonsense attributed to one Elizabeth Saxe Coburg von Gotha or whatever her real name is.
Bottom line, to make credible and Independent decisions, Australia first needs to grow the hell up.
When Britain abandoned us, we cottoned on to the United States. Now the ANZUS Alliance is seen not as an equal partnership but is almost worshipped like a religious icon. Why???? Because when Mummy let us down we had to have a Daddy to turn to, so incapable of independent thought in foreign policy, defence policy and many other areas because we still are an 'almost nation'.
Yes, people can say correctly that 'legally' we are sovereign and independent but as long as we have a head of state that isn't even a citizen (it's like if the Rome was still a 'country', the leftover from the Roman Empire, Britain having the leader of Rome as it's head of state still) and a flag that screams BRITAIN!!!! or subordinate then the mindset isn't going to change.