Or Donald Trump. Whichsoever POTUS you like.
But let’s not pretend that declaring ourselves a republic makes any sense. We have neither the smarts nor the personal power to be such. It is dangerously delusional to try.
Australia was born a client state. It was raised a client state. It has prospered as a client state. It will die a client state.
I know that Australians recoil at this suggestion but that’s defensiveness. On the whole, Americans are better educated, more articulate, more cultured, and more worldly than us southern hemisphere bogans.
Admittedly, America is a puzzle. At once ultra-modern and weirdly atavistic, especially in religious terms, which is one sphere in which Australia rightly claims superiority to its master.
But Americans are powerful. They are martial and have made an art form of violence. It is a near miracle that they have sustained themselves as a liberal force given this streak.
Whereas we are subaltern, unable to wield power effectively, and naively optimistic instead of strategically hardnosed.
It is no wonder. We are a people that barely cling to our own continent. Clustered around its fringe like aphids on a leaf. Waiting to be blown into the sea at the slightest gust of wind.
America is a nation steeped in the blood of conquest. Its sons and daughters have been churned into the very earth they walk upon. Unsentimental. Ruthless. Belicose.
If Australia were part of the American continent it would be situated culturally somewhere south of the perverse South. An island curiosity in the Gulf of Mexico peopled by the softest of the breed.
There is no arena of politics more true of this than the hard power force that is the bedrock of Indo-Pacific freedom and liberalism.
America the Great underpins it all. The flaws are many and some are extreme, but the power is remarkably well-intentioned. Americans find it self-evident that all men are born equal.
The alternative to client status within the liberal American empire is not republican self-determination. It is client status within its pre-enlightenment opposite, the illiberal Chinese empire, chaffing to be born across the Indo-Pacific. An imperium based entirely upon the superiority of a tiny caste of communist insiders.
There is no better example of this than what is playing out in the Pacific today. There is no freedom of republican choice underway as the Solomons pivot to China and other islands that mull the Sino bribe.
There is only a choice of whose client each island wants to be.
On one hand, choose America and gain your freedom of advancement. But very likely watch your island be plundered by rapacious corporations, that bring with them only a small sense of accountability.
On the other hand, choose China, be stacked with mind-controlling brown shirts, and also be plundered by rapacious corporations. This time, owned by the government and enforced at the point of a rifle. The only accountability is your own face smashed into the concrete floor of the gulag.
Some would say it is a choice of nightmares. I would say to them to look to the broader sweep of history. Look at the repeated and relentless rise of tyrants, mass repression, and slaughter. Now tell me that American subjugation is a bad offer.
As we mull the removal of QEII’s head from our $5 bill, I say to you do not fall for the infant mewling of the fake republicans. They have nothing to offer beyond empty symbols behind which lurks a dark truth.
There is no Australian freedom without American subjugation. A paradox to be sure, but an infinitely preferable compromise to the alternative.
Let’s be grown-ups about it and put POTUS on the $5 note to make it official.
It’s either that or we get the bomb.
