#I'm only half-serious but it's my pet conspiracy theory | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ellynneversweet · 3 years

Note

Curious English person here. Is republicanism common in Australia? I'm wondering as it sure doesn't feel common where I live. Especially with Labour desperately trying to prove it can do patriotism in order to make its self electable.

‘Lol what’s a political opinion, sounds wanky’ — old Australian proverb.

This gets long, because I can’t leave well enough alone. Short summary of what you probably wanted to know first, and then some history.

Theoretically, a republic of Australia (especially post-Elizabeth II) is generally understood to have the support of the majority of the population. Our last Prime Minister was and is a vocal supporter of a Republic who led the pro-republic campaign in the 1999 referendum, but didn’t bring it up again in the course of his term, and the Prime Minister before him (same party) re-established knighthoods so he could give Prince Phillip an extra title, so there’s a spectrum. In practice a republic of Australia is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, because it would take a lot of money and work to bring about, and would be largely a symbolic gesture rather than a practical one. Actually getting rid of the royals would require a referendum and constitutional amendment, and that’s not on the political table for a variety of reasons.

The general Australian opinion of the Windsor family can be summed up as follows: the Queen is a nice old grandma (depends how recently she’s been seen with Andrew), and it would be cruel to fire her in her twilight years; Charles is a useless tosser whom no one likes, although his wife is funny (depends on whether there’s a Diana retrospective trending on Netflix); the Cambridges seem stylish and wholesomely functional and are about as interesting as pro tennis players; ten years ago it was a quasi-serious joke that Harry would make a good Governor General, because he knows How To Drink Beer And Talk Shit Like An Australian, but then someone realised we’d have to pay him a bigger salary than the usual parade of retired lawyers and army officers and now it’s not funny. They get crowds when they do a tour, and the unofficial tourism advertising of having some pint-sized royal maul a wallaby at a petting zoo is considered a fair return on the cost of security when they travel here, which is the only time they cost Australia anything.

To give you some more detail:

The first thing that needs to be clarified is that that Parliament and Monarch of the United Kingdom have no official legislative power over the Commonwealth of Australia, and haven’t since 1986. The Monarch of Australia is, technically, legally seperate from the Monarch of Canada, the Monarch of New Zealand, and the Monarch of that other place off the coast of France, although by some weird coincidence all those seperate executive persons reside in the body of some old English woman. That’s bullshit, I hear you say, and, yeah that’s true, but consider this: she doesn’t actually do all those jobs. Functionally, the Head of State of Australia is an entirely different unelected executive, the Govenor General, and the office of the Governor General is careful to preserve their public position of political neutrality and independence.

There’s a bit of history here. The federation do Australia as a country happened in 1901, but between then and roughly 1930 the Colonial Office of the British government had considerable legal sway if they chose to use it, and the GG was appointed on their advice. The Australian National identity of the pre-WWII period was very much that of proud (white) sons of empire etc etc, but in 1930 the Australian Prime Minister insists on ‘advising’ the king on the next GG, and the next year the Statute of Westminster 1931 is passed, which establishes the legislative independence of, among other countries, Australia (but, because Australia is a federation of states, there is still some doubt about who has the power to do what exactly at which level of government).

Onward to 1975 and The Dismissal. Gough Whitlam of the Labor Party is the Prime Minister, and, the left having been out of power for some time, is moving quickly to institute a bunch of social reforms (RIP, sir, thanks for introducing public health care and treating the aboriginal population with a modicum of decency). The right-leaning Liberal party is seething over this, and, because they control the Senate, block supply for expenditure in an attempt to force an election in the House Of Reps. Whitlam counters with an election for the Senate and goes to the Governor General for his approval, because elections are called by the PM with the authorisation of the GG. The GG informs Whitlam that he has been dismissed as the PM, and the GG has invited the leader of the opposition to be acting PM instead. This is TECHNICALLY something the GG can do as the queen’s representative, but it’s against the spirit of democracy. It becomes a huge scandal the periodically bubbles along for years, and the reason this is relevent to the question of republicanism in Australia is the Palace Letters — correspondence between the GG and the Queen/their various offices and staff. The Queen claimed that these letters were private or personal correspondence, and thus not able to be released as a matter of public record, which caused a lot of speculation as to whether Whitlam had been dismissed on the orders of the Queen. This went on for years, and last year they were released. Long story short, the Queen did not explicitly know or authorise the dismissal, but there’s a lot of ‘theoretically, if’ in the letters, and it certainly seems like the Queen and her office were keeping closer tabs on Australian politics than was thought at the time. There’s also a conspiracy theory that the CIA staged the dismissal because Whitlam was making overtures to China, buuuuut if that’s the case then no evidence has come to light. In any case, no one wants that sort of scandal, and there are efforts made to distance the role of the GG from that of the monarch, and both from any practical power.

Onward again to 1986, the Australia Act 1986 is passed in both Australia and the UK, confirming that Australia is legislatively independent from the UK, and that the Queen of Australia is a legally distinct position from the Queen of the UK (see: James VI and I, etc). This is very similar to the 1931 Statute, but clarified that this independence exists on a state level as well as a federal level, in order to prevent states from appealing to the UK to overrule the federal government (as with Western Australia’s attempted succession in 1933).

Onward again and most recently: the 1999 Republic Referendum, aka my earliest political opinion. Labor proposed a referendum in honour of the centenary of federation. The Prime Minister in power was a Liberal (you may remember them as the party who stole the government in the dismissal). There was A LOT of debate over how, in the event of Australia becoming a republic, we would resolve the issue of the powers of the executive. Would we have an American style presidency (the Clinton impeachment was happening around this this time, FYI) or something more like the supposedly-detached monarchy represented by the GG? The proposal that eventually went to the people was a president appointed by the Prime Minister + 2/3rds of both the Senate and the House of Reps, who could be dismissed by the PM. This was a fairly unpopular take for a bunch of different reasons, not least because it managed to give the Head of State an implied mandate without actually being elected, and it was defeated by 54.4%. So, no Republic, and unfortunately, for those of us who do favour revisiting the question, it’s mostly seen as either unimportant or settled, or both. Whomp-whomp.

For my part, if we’re getting a referendum any time soon, I’d prefer it to be on section 44 of the constitution, which bars people with (potential) foreign allegiances from standing for election, which is frankly ridiculous in a country where nearly 30% of the population was born overseas and something like half the population potentially has at least dual citizenship.

#tumblr keeps eating this post #obviously this is biased and foreshortened #but hey #auspol

52 notes · View notes

lovelyirony · 5 years

Note

Hello friend! I'm in a mood and just feel like reading something sad. Could you pretty please maybe write some sad winteriron? Maybe something to do with terminal illness but it's up to you!

Being human means that there are many things that could happen to you and you can’t help it.

Like cancer.

Or being hit by a bus.

Maybe a heart condition that you didn’t know about until you were thirty-two, had weird chest pains, and then found you didn’t have genetic testing done and neither parent told you about any extensive medical history because they both were estranged from the family.

Okay. That was specific.

But Tony was laying in a hospital bed and the doctors told him that he wouldn’t live past forty and he would die of heart failure.

He feels like he should be hit harder by this. He only has eight years left to live. He shouldn’t be in his kitchen making eggs, he should probably be hysterically calling Rhodey and Pepper and Happy and asking them about funeral arrangements and what he’s going to do and quite possibly if spending the extra money to get the executive suite at the fancy hotel in Switzerland is worth it.

Except he doesn’t want to.

Death is a messy process. Not for him, they assured him of that. But everyone asks you questions and your loved ones. You have to figure out where to bury someone if they didn’t do it beforehand. Sometimes you have debates about cremation. Other times about how much you want to spend on a casket.

He really doesn’t want to look at Rhodey or Pepper or Happy when they talk about that because he knows that their faces will break into tears and he will see the tear tracks when they go home to their houses and cry some more.

Nonsense.

If he can hide it, then he will. He doesn’t want to be a bother, it would be...unfortunate.

Besides. He’s lonely at the top, and there’s no climbing back down the mountain. He won’t pull a Scrooge and get visited by three ghosts.

So he lives.

He pulls some risky moves, but nothing that makes Pepper have the “are you up to something serious that could potentially cause my midlife crisis to go off-schedule” talk.

Again.

He donates more money to charities and helps people pay off medical bills and walks around New York late at night to wonder why he’s going to die in eight or maybe even seven years instead of the proposed twenty to thirty. (What? He wasn’t going to be too generous, he knew himself.)

Tony wonders sometimes if he will meet someone and they will make him want to live so much more than he can. It will be like those romantic dramas with rainfall and hair plastered to foreheads and passionate kisses that leave some of the older women teary-eyed and wishing that their husband would do something like that.

But he’s a genius, so he knows statistics like the back of his hand.

There will be no one.

Eight turns into seven. He celebrates by getting absolutely slammed on New Year’s Eve and wakes up to the shittiest radio station blaring. He’s pretty sure they’re playing Maroon 5, which fucking ugh.

New Year, new resolutions. He doesn’t bother to make one.

“Why not? You usually make a joke one,” Rhodey says.

“We are all going to die,” Tony answers. “Why make a resolution if I don’t want to? If I were to die in a year, it wouldn’t really matter.”

“Okay Lord Byron,” Rhodey says, rolling his eyes. “You want Hot Topic giftcards for your birthday? Huh?”

Tony laughs.

Rhodey always knows how to make him laugh.

Tony doesn’t know how he’s going to make Rhodey laugh when he’s dead. So that’s a breaking point where he stares at the wall and starts to write random memories down, like the time they snuck up onto a hotel’s roof to see the city wake up and the wind chapped their lips and Tony swore that he’d never leave Rhodey.

Except he is.

And he realizes that he needs to let Pepper and Rhodey and Happy know that he loves them a lot. So he starts the letters.

He writes a letter to Pepper to remind her about how much she regrets getting light blue nail polish every single time she gets a manicure, and she should never get it. (Yes, even for a wedding she’s in, get something, anything other than that.)

He writes a letter to Happy that is basically just wondering about how they can troll asshole celebrities that they know. He doesn’t know, but maybe he will find some dirt so that if Happy ever falls on dire times, he will have some extra cash flow coming in. Not that Tony would let that happen, but say Happy ever did. Maybe someone stole his bank information. Who knows what will happen in seven or six years.

Summer still sucks. He thinks maybe he’ll like it more, now that he knows that his heart is going to quit. But it still smells like piss and garbage on the streets of New York, people are still blasting shitty music and riding bikes too dangerously, and he still feels gross by two p.m. when he goes outside to face the world.

Not even the treat of shaved ice helps this.

“At least I won’t have to face another one in seven years,” Tony murmurs. “Thank god for that.”

Seven turns into six.

It’s around this time when an attractive redhead shows up at his office, bends down a bit lower than necessary, and Tony gets the feeling that SHIELD should really train their agents a bit better if they want something out of him.

He organizes a meeting with Fury, walks in, and states that they cannot afford him.

“You know that your help would be particularly useful,” Fury says.

“For you to get what?” He asks. “Don’t bullshit me with some answer about compassion. Peggy Carter was kind, but she wasn’t a damned saint.”

“There are new...developments.”

Like the fact that they’ve found Captain America. And Bucky Barnes didn’t fall off into a random ravine, so the four different conspiracy theory documentary videos that Tony watched last year were about five hours of wasted time.

They need somewhere to stay. Fury wants Tony to foot the bill.

“What, can’t ask the government for funding?” Tony asks. “I’m sure if they can up the budget for military every year, that covers Cap and his old pal. Hell, I bet they’ll even open up the champagne fridges.”

“They don’t know about it.”

“And why would that be? Because you’d rather have idols to yourself?”

It’s a low-blow. But Tony agrees to take them in. He just doesn’t want to see them, notably because his father was a bit of a Captain America fan, Tony had had a crush on the former sharpshooter when he was a younger guy, and it was all kinds of messed up.

But he gives them their own little apartment, one of his safehouses.

“This ain’t little,” Steve mutters to himself, unpacking a box of plates. Natasha has been nice enough to show them around and tell them about the changes she finds relevant. She forced them to listen to what she called ‘the goddess of pop’ in the car, and Bucky nearly clawed out the stereo after “Toxic” came on.

“Fuckin’ palace,” Bucky mutters. “Who’s is this?”

“A man in high places,” Natasha answers. “He doesn’t want to be known. Doesn’t exactly play well with others.”

She leaves them be, and there’s so much that has changed. Steve is still looking for any sign of the past he can find in Bucky, and Bucky...

He’s not who he used to be. He doesn’t remember half the shit that Steve does. Perks of having your brain so fried up that you can barely remember your middle name.

They eat together in silence.

“I guess...I guess we have to figure out who we really are,” Steve says. “Because you’re not who I remember, and I’m not...I guess I’m not either.”

Bucky nods.

“Do you reckon we’ll like going out dancing?”

The answer is a strong no, although Steve has to say the drinks have improved a hell of a lot more. He likes the ones that come with the small paper umbrellas. He doesn’t know where they get them, but it gives him an idea for an art project.

Tony doesn’t hear much about the wonder boys. He doesn’t want to, not really. Natasha just says they’re getting more and more adjusted and she has evidence of Steve Rogers going clubbing.

“Oh my god,” Tony groans. “Romanoff, do not.”

“It’s funny.”

“I don’t wanna know.”

“What, you jealous that you’re not dancing with him?”

“Hardly. Blonde and beefy isn’t my type.”

“Then what is?”

“Classified.” Tony answered. “Now, is there anything else you want SHIELD to suck out of me?”

“Well, my manicure funding is getting rather low...”

Tony snorts, but points towards the door.

His chest hurts. It’s been happening. He’s actually gotten used to it. In a way, he’s more concerned when it doesn’t hurt. He went to another specialist. They say his death sentence is signed, even if they don’t word it like that. Here’s how it is usually worded:

“I have a colleague who works at insert-clinic/hospital-here...I can refer you to Dr. So-and-So?”

They can. But it’s another list of referrals of so-and-so’s and clinics and appointments at the most inopportune times.

All for nothing, because Tony knows that he can’t be fixed. The human body sometimes works like a machine. But it’s not one. It’d be like Tony calling a dog a wolf. Similar, but no one wants to bring a wolf into their house as a pet.

He gets a phone call from someone named Deputy Director Hill.

He needs a new arm.

Barnes needs a new arm. Of course he does. Tony should’ve expected that, of course. Hydra isn’t exactly known for revolutionizing prosthetics or being particularly kind to their projects that they work on. So Tony automatically has a one-up.

He gets Barnes to come to this mechanic garage, surrounded by old tin signs and vintage cars that cost more than most of the monthly rent of penthouses in New York.

Bucky does a double-take.

“Howard?”

“I hope not,” Tony answers. “Hop up on the chair for me, please. I’m getting you a new arm.”

“This is fine,” Barnes automatically spouts. Tony can see the damage from here, and can even point out that the arm’s reaction time is probably the worst it has been currently.

“If you want to stick to your Great Depression ideals, then by all means be my guest and go bitch in a grocery store about prices,” Tony responds dryly. “But if you want an arm that’s gonna be actually good, then sit.”

So he does.

Tony looks incredibly similar to his father. But there’s something different about him. Something softer, almost. Bucky didn’t know Howard nearly as well as others did, but he knew that Tony wasn’t his father.

“How are you adjusting to the city?” Tony asks.

"Still the shithole we all know and love,” Bucky swears. “I think the rats got bigger.”

“They did. It’s amusing and horrifying at the same time. You ride the subway yet?”

“Yes and I’ve come to terms with it. Lots of new things to learn about it.”

Barnes’ visits become more frequent. They talk about New York stuff. Tony tells him all about the fun events that have happened that he missed while he was doing time as an icicle.

It’s nice, talking to him. Tony finally has someone who understands fatalistic humor and doesn’t respond with

“That’s scary, Tony.”

“What do you mean?”

Bucky just says “cheers” and decides to tell Tony about the time he nearly died in 1992 because he lost his footing on the Eiffel Tower.

Tony laughs, and laughs harder than he thought he had in a long time.

Six turns into five.

Bucky gets closer, and they have...something. He’s not sure what it is yet, but he knows that they go on breakfast dates most of the time and he knows the coffee orders by heart.

“I think you’ve found someone,” Pepper says, teasing. “Look at you.”

“Yeah, look at me,” Tony murmurs.

He has five years left. That’s plenty of time to date someone and break up, right?

Except.

It’s...wonderful to date Bucky. They go all over, have fun trying the shittiest restaurants in town, and even get Steve to get out more and socialize with the group.

They date and celebrate holidays together and have fun candles and--

Five turns into four.

“Not that bad,” Tony whispers to himself when he’s getting ready for bed.

“What’s not bad?” Bucky asks.

“Nothing, sweetheart,” Tony says. “Just got a new toothpaste.”

They watch It’s a Wonderful Life and Tony can’t really focus, not when he’s thinking about the fact that he still hasn’t picked out a design for his urn.

Not when he realizes that he needs to break up with Bucky and make it a whole big scene so that no one will talk to him. It has to be about two years before the date, he thinks.

He goes to another Dr. So-and-So. They say he might actually have one more year, but who knows.

He doesn’t.

But he wakes up with Bucky every day and they make breakfast, and he thinks that maybe he could tell him? Maybe?

The words get stuck in his mouth.

He can’t.

He meets with his lawyer for the will.

“Why making sudden changes?”

“Just like to shake things up,” Tony says with a smile. “Never know what’s going to happen, right?”

“You are right about that,” the lawyer says. He’s a bit uncomfortable. Tony Stark looks at him like he knows that his life is short and that something else will come up. But it’s not the lawyer’s job to ask if things really are okay, and it’s not like Tony would tell him anyway.

So he makes the changes to the will.

Tony looks at Bucky as he’s napping, face so peaceful.

He can’t ruin that.

#lovelyirony writes #for some reason tumblr never lets me put in a 'read more' link until like after i've done all this shit so here's to hoping this works #winteriron #:(#hope this fits the sad theme anon #tony stark #bucky barnes #rhodey #pepper potts #happy hogan #steve rogers

55 notes · View notes