Some people complain about a First Nations senator raising her voice before the King of Australia.  The irony is that she and the complainants combined to deny her a  constitutional voice in Australia.

It is best to pass over her behaviour in silence.  (She was, after all, presented to us by the Greens.) It then got really comical.  Some suggested that the senator may have violated her oath of allegiance – and that there may be legal consequences. 

I am not aware of any legal sanction for an alleged breach of this oath.  When the oath evolved, God had real clout.  What does the oath entail now – if there is no divine or civil sanction for breach?  That I will do whatever King Charles III commands me to do?  (Putting to one side that down here, he is only King Charles I.)

I had to take an oath of allegiance to be admitted to practise law.  I was curious, if not worried, by its scope.  What if the Queen commanded me to enlist for war in Vietnam?  Mr Justice Smith told me that they were just putting me on notice that you could still be hanged for treason.

That must be so.  Royal proclamations died centuries ago.  The King of Australia can only act in Australia on the advice of his Australian Ministers.  (We may as well offer the gig to the King of Tonga or Siam.) 

And then the government can only go after me according to the laws of Australia.  That is part of the law of England since 1215, and it is of course fundamental to us – the rule of law.

If you want to commit real heresy, say that the loyalty is personal.  Like that procured by Hitler or sought by Donald Trump.

There are troubling undertones here to accusations of disloyalty.  Most Australians regard ‘patriotism’ as at best mawkish.  In the U S, it is a lethal weapon.  It is normally fired by the ‘conservative’ side.

Any form of subservience to a foreign power is worrying in any nation.  There is therefore another real irony in the fact that many of the most fervent supporters of continuing here with a foreign king also subscribe to a faith that calls for loyalty to a foreign prelate under God.  And no sane person wants to cross God.

So, the English put their current model in place in 1689 and after.  The immediate reason was to prevent any Catholic taking the English throne.  Thousands of people had been killed because of the conflict between England and Rome.  The immediate cause of the Glorious Revolution in 1688 was the refusal of the last Stuart king (James II) to see that his allegiance to Rome put him in a hopeless conflict with his duties as King of England.

That exclusion is still fundamental to the constitution of England and therefore Australia.  It is not just that no Methodist, Muslim, Jew or atheist need apply.  Our king must be in communion with the Church of England.  It is an irony that at our constitutional pinnacle, there is a law that violates our laws about religious discrimination.

Never mind.  The framers of the U S Constitution went to great lengths to ensure freedom of religion and that there should be no state religion.  The King of England is head of the Church of England.  Putting to one side reports that more people in England worship in mosques than in Anglican parish churches, this linkage of government and religion would be utterly anathema in America. 

The result?  Religion has next to no impact on English politics.  In America religion is a major part of the current attempted demolition job. 

And that, my friends, is a real irony.  At least the German churches of old put up some resistance to their debasement and destruction – at the hands of either Berlin or Rome.