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October 16th, 2011 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
AAP
The Queen’s Australian visit this week may double as two swansongs in one.
No matter what fate awaits Australian republicanism, this is widely regarded as the 85-year-old monarch’s farewell tour down under.
But if republicans have their way, the first reigning monarch of Australia to set foot on Australian soil may also be the last.
It is a mark of the Queen’s personal standing that republicanism has been off the political agenda since the failed 1999 referendum, and it is likely to remain in mothballs at least as long as she occupies the throne.
The high regard for the incumbent does not apply universally to the institution, however, and Australians seem destined at some point to snip the umbilical cord tying them to a faraway motherland.
When the Queen first stepped ashore here in 1954 she was an innocent 26, a radiant, newly crowned titular head of an empire on which the sun seemed destined never to set.
Fifteen visits, 57 years and at least one “annus horribilis” later, she has changed – and so has Australia.
The mother of two has become a mother of four, grandmother of eight and great-grandmother of one.
She has made it clear she will serve at Australia’s pleasure, a stance she could scarcely have contemplated on the day of her coronation, in another age when Edmund Hillary had just conquered Everest.
Australia’s transformation in that time has turned its defence interests to the US and its economic future to Asia.
Advance Australia Fair has replaced God Save The Queen as the national anthem.
The old imperial currency has gone decimal, with Australians opting for a dollar rather than a “royal”.
There are no more appeals to the Privy Council in London; legally the buck stops here.
The old cultural cringe has gone, too, as Australians have shaken off their inferiority complex and grown confident in their own image of themselves.
The 2000 Sydney Olympics were opened not by the Queen of Australia but the prime minister of Australia, John Howard, although the Queen did officiate at the Commonwealth equivalent in Melbourne in 2006.
And there’s a republican movement which, despite the referendum loss and the continuing fascination with royals in general, is not going to go away.
The Queen herself has cut the ribbons at many of the milestones on Australia’s path to real adulthood – from the opening of Canberra’s new parliament house, the High Court, the National Gallery and the Sydney Opera House to Brisbane’s World Expo and even the stockman’s hall of fame.
She has also opened CHOGMs here, and will do so again in Perth on a 10-day visit, from October 19 to 29, which also takes in Melbourne and Brisbane.
The length of her stay reflects another change from the old days of black-and-white TV.
In 1954 she was here for a marathon 57 days.
She went to every capital except Darwin, as well as 70 country towns, made more than 100 speeches, travelled 16,000 kilometres by air and over 3000km by road.
Six-figure crowds attended single events and by the time she sailed home from Fremantle some 70 per cent of all Australians were estimated to have seen her in person.
The regal mystique of that age seemed to have disappeared by the time the Queen came in 1992.
Protocol went out the window, there was no state banquet, and a small but noisy group of demonstrators in Sydney tore up the Union Jack.
Then prime minister Paul Keating was dubbed the “Lizard of Oz” by Fleet Street for lightly guiding the small of her majesty’s back at an informal reception, where his hatless, gloveless wife Annita declined to curtsey.
A succession of Labor leaders have found Elizabeth II to be an intelligent and charming woman, and Julia Gillard is unlikely to be an exception.
Monarchists, like many republicans, are full of admiration for her, but not even Tony Abbott is likely to get as dewy-eyed as prime minister Robert Menzies in 1963 when he invoked 17th century poetry to declare: “I did but see her passing by/And yet I love her til I die.”
Menzies could barely contain himself even after the event, pronouncing that her majesty had unleashed on the Australian populace “the most profound and passionate feelings of loyalty and devotion”.
Even making allowances for his sycophancy and the passage of time, it’s not difficult to see why Australians retain a special fondness for Elizabeth.
When all is said and done, she has been their Queen for 59 years – over half of their history since federation.
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