The Australian published a reply to their editorial on 7 February under their heading, " Our crowned republic":
You say in your editorial praising the Queen (6/2) that a different monarch would almost certainly have seen Australia become a republic long ago.
Have you forgotten that the republican charge in 1999 was that monarchists were not mentioning the Queen? The suggestion was that doing so would damage our case because of the matrimonial problems of some members of the royal family.
The fact is, our case was always 100 per cent based on the constitution and not on the virtues of the Queen who was neutral in the campaign.
If republicans demonstrated one thing in 1999, it was the inability of their best minds to construct a model superior to our present crowned republic.