Abbott’s Knightmare ‘Captain’s Pick’ – 10 years on

Australia Day 2025 was the 10th anniversary of Prime Minister Tony Abbott using the Australia Day’s honour list to award Prince Philip with a resurrected Australian knighthood.

Editorials of newspapers across the country on 25 January 2015 slammed Prime Minister Abbott’s bizarre decision to hand Prince Philip a Knighthood, an imperial bauble, labelling the move “ludicrous” and “flabbergasting”.

On 27 March 2014, Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the former director of Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy, had announced his intention to facilitate the return of imperial honours for Australians.

At the time, the PM said he believed this was: “… an important grace note in our national life.”

Tony Abbott’s ‘Captain’s Pick’ of Prince Philip for an Australian Knighthood on the day we should be celebrating Australia’s national identity resulted in the people of Australia being dragged by our elected leader into a cultural cringe so remarkable that it was almost beyond comprehension.

Abbott’s ‘Captain’s Pick’ of Prince Philip was to become a ‘Knightmare’ that has never been repeated since.

There’s no place for any Downton Abbey play acting in Australia. Aristocratic titles and imperial baubles have no place here. They belong over 9000 kms away on the other side of the world with the North and the Past. 

Henry Lawson wrote true in his 1887 'A Song of the Republic':  

Henry Lawson

Sons of the South, awake! arise!
       Sons of the South, and do.
Banish from under your bonny skies
Those old-world errors and wrongs and lies.
Making a hell in a Paradise
       That belongs to your sons and you.

Sons of the South, make choice between
       (Sons of the South, choose true),
The Land of Morn and the Land of E'en,
The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green,
The Land that belongs to the lord and the Queen,
  And the Land that belongs to you.

Sons of the South, your time will come —
       Sons of the South, 'tis near —
The "Signs of the Times", in their language dumb,
Foretell it, and ominous whispers hum
Like sullen sounds of a distant drum,
       In the ominous atmosphere.

Sons of the South, aroused at last!
       Sons of the South are few!
But your ranks grow longer and deeper fast,
And ye shall swell to an army vast,
And free from the wrongs of the North and Past
       The land that belongs to you.

Thankfully, for the past 10 years, it has been Goodnight to knights and dames. 

The Bushwackers – Republic Day