Australian Secularism, Whiteness, and the British Monarchy

Abstract

The secular composition of nation-states such as Australia presents them as liberal and autonomously governed. At the same time, their formation through the imprimatur of the British Crown continues to involve symbolic rituals of exchange and deference to the British monarchy. Despite the presence of a monarchy within democratic state arrangements being premised on principles that are, ostensibly, antithetical to secular democracy, the British monarchy and Royal Family are often framed in media and political discourse as ensuring the stability of secular democracy through tropes around celebrity, family, and divinity. This is exemplified in the epigraph to this chapter, from an official welcome by Prime Minister Tony Abbott to Prince Harry during a Royal visit to Australia (cited in Wilson 2013). It follows one of the more common rationales for the continuation of the monarchy: the idea that a democratic state benefits from an enduring and transcendent symbol of British parliamentary and Commonwealth traditions. The British monarchy also embodies specifically Anglo-British religious and cultural values, which are coextensive with the colonial precepts of Crown law used to invalidate the status of Indigenous peoples as sovereign custodians of the land. Terms such as grace, transcendence, and continuity are used to displace the imperial and racial origins of the monarchy as well as the colonial foundations of the Australian political system.¹

You grace us as your family has graced our nation from its beginning … you are here as the Crown is a symbol of stability, continuity, decency in our public life.

—Tony Abbott