Are we indeed a nation of hicks? This is a pertinent question to put in recalling the feeding frenzy fomented by Australia’s febrile media when Prince Philip’s appointment as a Knight of the Order of Australia was announced. This question should be addressed in particular to Peter Costello with another Australia Day in prospect. (I digress in acknowledging his competent performance as Treasurer.) In his article ‘Barbecue Stoppers’, in the recent Speccie Christmas Issue, Costello wrote: ‘Monarchist readers of The Speccie might be thinking I raise this recent episode out of some Republican malice’. They could be forgiven for coming to that conclusion.

Costello declared himself a republican at the 1998 Constitutional Convention to the bewilderment of many constitutional monarchists who until then had relied on his assurances that he was one of them. The rivalry obvious even then between John Howard and Costello notoriously never developed into an outright challenge. Costello was content to display it as a form of product differentiation – as distancing himself from Howard as opportunity offered. And what better way to achieve this than to repudiate Howard’s commitment to Australia’s constitutional monarchy in the most ostentatious way possible!

Costello’s speech to the Convention taken from his website runs to slightly more than seven pages. Yet for the first three pages he seemed to be making a robust defence of the status quo. Then he declared: ‘The problem is more with the concept of monarchy. We are uncomfortable with an office that appoints people by hereditary (sic)’. Obviously Costello’s discomfort had smitten him very recently. The rest of his speech dealt with the McGarvie model which he unsuccessfully commended and criticisms of the other republican models on offer. He concluded by returning to the question of heredity claiming that ‘by directing change we will get a better outcome than by allowing pressure to build up and explode with implications far less benign…’ As if the Queen and her successors could have such a dire potential! I was mystified at first that Costello’s apparently precipitate conversion from support for Australia’s constitutional monarchy was for no other reason than that the position of Sovereign passes by inheritance. Then I recalled Molière’s sublime clown M. Jourdain in the title role of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and his sense of wonder on being informed that he had been speaking prose all his life. Costello claimed that there were ‘strong conservative reasons against making this (Prince Philip’s) appointment’ and that ‘Conservatives believe that the true measure of a policy or political action is its consequence, not its intention’. Thereupon he meandered into a study of history only to demonstrate his defective understanding of the historical examples he cited.

Costello claimed: ‘Edmund Burke opposed the revolution in France. It was not those wonderful ideas of liberté, égalité, fraternité that he was against so much as all the bloodshed and murder that went on in its name’. This surely is to travesty Burke’s approach to the French Revolution. Burke’s negative approach to it developed as early as the end of September 1789. Then on 5 and 6 October a crowd of 30,000 Parisians marched on Versailles and forced King Louis XVI and his family to move to Paris and to a form of house arrest in the Tuileries. It was not until 27 January 1793 that the King was guillotined. The march on Versailles hardened in Burke his misgivings of late September. He published his Reflections on the Revolution in France on 1 November 1790 well before the revolution careered to the excesses which Burke had foreseen and which Costello has claimed to have been the principal influence on him.

Costello’s next foray into historical analogy discussed Disraeli’s role in the confused politics of electoral reform in 1866-7. Disraeli’s overriding purpose in electoral matters was to drive the Russell Liberal government from office and to consolidate in office Lord Derby’s third Conservative administration in which he ranked second. Disraeli attained the first objective by leading the Tories in vigorous opposition to Gladstone’s Reform Bill which he succeeded in defeating with the assistance of Liberal dissidents led by Robert Lowe. Costello has attributed to Disraeli a far-sighted statesmanship ‘in understanding that forces of change were taking hold in Britain’ and that this motivated him in sponsoring a Reform Bill ‘that went wider and further than Gladstone’s ever had’. Rubbish! Disraeli’s sole purpose in promoting that Bill was to outmanoeuvre and humiliate Gladstone as Lord Russell’s successor as Liberal leader. In his single-mindedness in achieving this objective Disraeli succeeded brilliantly; but this enterprise was no more principled than Costello’s contribution to the 1998 Constitutional Convention.
I shall deal briefly with the rest of Costello’s article with its ‘gibes, flouts and jeers’, to cite Disraeli’s dismissal of Lord Cranborne’s critique of his Reform Bill. It surprises me that someone of Costello’s experience in public life should be so blinkered and parochial. I could see no cause for outrage in Prince Philip, consort to the Queen who is Sovereign Head of the Order of Australia, in being given the same status in that Order as his eldest son. But did he have to wait until his ninety-fourth year! Costello seemed unaware of all the high honours, apart from the ones he listed in his article, which Prince Philip has accumulated in a long life. For a start he has been highly honoured by many Commonwealth countries and by at least forty-three foreign countries. These include Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain and Japan and such European republics as France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Iceland and Finland. Also included are republics in Central and South America. So why should Prince Philip’s AK create such a storm? The Australian response was so overblown and unbalanced as to display us to the world as a nation of hicks. And officials in those countries which have similarly honoured him must surely see us in that same light.

Finally let me express the hope that Costello, our putative King Hick, will enjoy to the full this Australia Day, undistracted by Knighthood’s, history lessons or the enervating drone of republican barbecue barflies.