![buck house](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/buck-house.png)
The Royal Pain of Brexit
Bill Shorten has promised a plebiscite on the “Australian Republic” in his first term, a pledge that fills this lapsed republican with anxious dismay — lapsed because the debate about the Australian Head of State has been so corrupted that, were a republic to come about, it would be a divisive moment, not a uniting one. With the current head of the Australian Republican Movement a grandstanding social justice warrior and all-round goose on constitutional matters, the only way to avoid the upwelling of poisonous social-media vituperation and the brandishing of identity politics is to spurn the debate altogether.
What prompts this thought about our own situation is the current impasse in Britain with regard to implementing the will of the people as expressed in the Brexiteers’ victory at the ballot box. I wonder, does the Monarch have a role to play? Parliament exists to give effect to the will of the people, whose interests the Queen was crowned with the responsibility to…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
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6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
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23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
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2 mins