The Roy Morgan survey on trends in opinion polling tabled at our national conference in October showed that support for a (politicians’) republic had fallen to 34%.
This confirmed a trend we have long identified. Support for a republic has been falling for some years.
This survey set the context for media reporting in Australia and around the world concerning the Royal Visit by The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Two aspects of the poll demonstrates the wisdom of the advice not to put all your eggs in one basket
..youth and immigrants…
Those aspects of the poll were given little or not much emphasis by the media. These were that among both youth and non-electors (including new immigrants) support for a republic was even lower than in the general population.
Only 31% of the nation’s youth, those aged between 14 to 17, supported a republic. Among non-electors (including new immigrants), support fell even lower to 28% .
On the former we have frequently reminded readers of Federal Minister Nicola Roxon’s confident but entirely wrong mantra that no new monarchists are being born.
As we have with former Senator Susanne Ryan’s unwise and arrogant observation that all the republicans had to do was wait until the present generation of monarchists drop off.The moral, Citizenesses, is not to put all your eggs in one basket.
And as for new immigrants, the letter below in the Daily Telegraph indicates that republicans should not assume immigrants automatically support them.
In fact they should know this already . Haven't they have derided me (on the site controlled at the time by a deputy chairman of the Australian Republican Movement) as a “perma-tanned …Indonesian born blow–in”?
…letter to Daily Telegraph….
As an Asian I am happy to be in a country that has an English Queen as the symbol of democracy has its head (Queens birthday holiday rethink, November 26).
I have lived in a republic – it is no match for what we have in Australia.
[Charles Lee in a letter published in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, 28 November 2011]