Why does Harry get to leave but we don’t?
Anyone who knows me knows that I loathe the royal family. I distinctly remember as a child when I discovered that Kings and Queens were real things that still existed in the real world, and I was gobsmacked. Santa Claus made more sense – at least he was magical, not just a regular human elevated for being born. It’s absurd that such an institution should still exist at all – but it’s beyond ridiculous that it should exist in Australia.
As such, I generally avoid them as best I can. I skipped past The Queen’s Gambit for months, thinking it was another Crown or royal period drama. I also feel great discomfort at grown-arse adults who seem to idolise them. They are not above politics as many usually claim; they are unaccountable celebrities who use weddings and babies as marketing material to hold onto their power and wealth – and protect themselves from the law (*cough* Prince Andrew).
But schadenfreude got the better of me and I had to pay some attention to the latest drama. Now, I couldn’t stomach the interview itself, but I saw some clips. Gross phrases such as “speak your truth” (vomit) and unnecessary trips to the thesaurus with “falsehoods” (“lies” wasn’t good enough?) were enough to put me off watching the whole thing, but I got the gist – a heavy dose of high-school level gossip from rich people complaining about their privilege while an overrated (junk-science promoting) interviewer acts surprised at everything as though it hadn’t already been discussed prior.
What?!? That institution which has discriminated based on gender, wealth and religion forever is also racist? What a revelation!
The stuffy old antiquated English system expects you to be seen and not heard, and used as a prop for the media? And repress your feelings?! What a surprise!
A truer bombshell might have been the absence of these things. It doesn’t make them any less wrong, but the apparent surprise reveals how well the tabloid marketing works.
The media are picking sides to create more drama, but let’s be real – everyone involved is horrible, entitled, and narcissistic. Once upon a time, elite, entitled celebrities were able to demand, and receive the kind of glorification which would make an ancient Pharaoh envious. Back in the day the media and celebrities had a symbiotic relationship where they both lived in the same bubble and the rest of us had to just tolerate it. Those days peaked in the 1990s. The age of celebrity is dead – it was one of the benefits of the internet. The pandemic has only encouraged the democratisation of media. You only have to look at US late night talk show hosts working from home amid the pandemic and how amateur their efforts looked alongside long-time YouTubers. This doesn’t mean celebrity is gone or that it doesn’t still come with benefits – but it does mean that you no longer get a free pass simply for being famous. Ask Gal Gadot and her imagination.
Sitting on millions of dollars from Spotify and Netflix as you complain about not getting free security? It’s enormously out of touch.
The elevation of one individual for no reason other than their being “famous” or born into wealth has always been wrong – but it is abhorrent in 2021. It goes against the grain of the egalitarian values on which modern Australian society is (meant to be) built.
The royal family are effectively no different to the Kardashian-Jenners (although it could be argued they earned their wealth to a greater extent than the Windsors). Would you sit them at the top of your system of government and society?
I believe that the main element keeping this institution together is the Queen, and it further unravel upon her death in the next decade. In any case, Australia should have removed this anachronism a long time ago. There is absolutely no argument for keeping a foreign, unelected individual at the top of our societal and governmental chain. Especially when that individual doesn’t understand our culture or feel our pain or celebrate our successes. An individual from a country which slaughtered thousands of Australians in the late 18th Century.
Yes, a lot of good came as well, but that river stopped flowing a long time ago. There is nothing gained from keeping an unaccountable family which protects themselves from the rule of law – and is considered to be doing their best work when they are doing nothing.
We can, and should, do better.
I have no shortage of ideas on what “better” could look like. It starts with Constitutional recognition of Australia’s First Nations, and a number of other issues (distrust of politicians, corruption scrutiny for example) could be addressed in the process. But I’ll save that for another day.
