Some people have strange reasons for wanting Australia to become a politicians’ republic. In the nineties, the conductor Simone Young announced that she was unhappy because she and other Australians in Europe were often thought to be British.
So she insisted we change our Constitution and become a republic. She did not explain how this would stop others from assuming Australians were British.
(This can have terrible consequences , as we have seen in the still unpunished murder of Australians by the Irish Republican Army.)
Now we find that at the November 2010 G20 Summit in Korea, the Australian Prime Minister seems to have been taken for an Austrian.
In a Central Seoul display of figurines representing G20 leaders, Prime Minister Julia Gillard is presented as if she came from The Sound of Music.
We expect to hear from the republican movement that the solution is to become politicians’ republic.