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Further implications
The issue of whether Australia should reintroduce Knights and Dames reflects the confusion in this country surrounding national identity and the nature of our connections with Great Britain.
Support for remaining a constitutional Monarchy is currently high, as is the popularity of the Monarch and her family, especially the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The significance of such support is uncertain. Queen Elizabeth II appears to represent a stabilising figure for the Australian public, someone securely above the vagaries of politics who is revered for her long years of public service. The young royals, on the other hand, have the glamour of any attractive celebrity couple, as well partaking of the gloss associated with royalty. The fact that Catherine Middleton was a commoner creates the possibility in the public mind that any suitable young person can aspire to marrying into 'the Firm', as the Royal Family is ironically known to its members.
The principles of egalitarianism and inherited privilege which once lay at the heart of debates surrounding the imperial honours system seem to have become obscured. Even in Britain awarded honours are no longer inherited and at no point in the 38 years since Prime Minister Gough Whitlam removed the imperial honours system from Australia has anyone contemplated re-establishing it. What has been done, first by Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and now by Prime Minister Tony Abbott, is to reinstate some of its terminology, namely 'Knights' and 'Dames'. What, sociologists are likely to ask, is the purpose of such an exercise?
The title of Tony Abbott's 1995 book on Australia as a constitutional monarch is instructive in this context. The work is titled 'The Minimal Monarchy and Why It Still Works for Australia'. What this seems to acknowledge is that Australia is no longer a colony, nor yet has it fully separated itself from its British heritage. It is a country within which a 'minimal' monarch, shared with its mother country, can be accepted and allowed to function. Unlike the United States, Australia (in common with the fourteen other Commonwealth countries that call the Monarch of Great Britain their monarch) has never fought a war of independence. Therefore, these countries display a stronger tendency than they would otherwise to hang onto the cultural and political trappings of the country from which their culture and political structures originally derived.
The difficulty resides with the imperfect fit that sometimes occurs between British traditions and an evolving sense of Australian identity. 'Dames' and 'knights' may well prove to be an example of such an imperfect fit.
However, it is to be hoped that before another government, probably of a different political persuasion, once again removes the honours of Knights and Dames, that the question is put to the Australian people. At no point, including in 1975 when these honours were first removed, has that been done.
Once the view of the people on the matter is known through an election at which the proposal is tested, the changes should be made through parliamentary legislative process, not through Letters Patent from the Queen. It should cease to be easy to change Australia's honours system on the whim or fixed belief of a Prime Minister.