When the Chilla & Camilla nuptials were announced, there were two quite different, yet utterly predictable reactions.

In the sense that neither could make much claim to having the status of intelligent critical analysis, they are similar. Yet, counter-intuitively, those attracted to the first have probably more nous than those fixated on the second.
Firstly, there was the frenzy by the glossies and the tabloids [including tabloid-type treatments in the nation’s two big-city “quality broadsheets”] with the latest pics, scoops, exclusives and pseudo-facts. It hardly matters that some TV file shots portrayed the happy pair looking rather like the northern aspects of two southerly-tending camels; nor would have limiting the news to a three-liner in the classifieds of the em>Warrnambool Standard have made any difference -  features editors know that there’s a widespread readership for such guff. 
Still, it’s not compulsory to buy, let alone read, this sort of coverage, and it’s still a free country, and there seem to be no laws broken.  Perhaps, “Come the Republic”, there will be laws against such stuff?  At any rate, other far more important events have overtaken the latest Windsor knot-tying.
Secondly, and much more importantly, there was the Pavlovian knee-jerk frothing from some of the nation’s republicaneers. OK, once again, it’s a free country, and if some Citizens and Citizenesses wish to indulge in programmed emoting at every set of HRH pixels, it’s still a free country isn’t it ?
It’s the Economy, Stupid!!

However, it is relevant to wonder whether the second type of reaction should be taken any more seriously than the first.
 
Probably not.
In a recent, 1990s, US presidential election campaign,  one of the teams was kept on task and on track by plastering its offices everywhere with the pithy and provocative slogan, “It’s the Economy, Stupid!!”  Even the most tightly managed political parties have their loose cannons, and with American parties being more like random aggregations of vaguely like-minded groups and individuals, such a “Keep your Eye on the Ball” campaign tactic was essential. And, as far as can be told in such a multi-factored set of circumstances, it worked.
Political nomenclature, especially in shorthand mode, can be quite misleading. Take the very word “republic”, synonymous with “democracy”, right ?  Not so. Two of the long-lasting republics of history -  the Roman Republic (509-31 BCE) and the Venetian Republic (726-1797 CE) -  were closed oligarchies: the Greek historian Polybius wrote: “Rome is a republic, and its Senators are kings”. The last century was replete with “Peoples’ Republics”, few, fortunately, still extant, which were so undemocratic that, in their efforts to gull outsiders (often successfully) and to fool their own inhabitants (usually in vain, hence, that Wall in Berlin, and that death-strip from Luebeck on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic), went to the trouble of putting “Democratic” in their official styles and titles. 
Crusty old fuddy-duddies in matching twin sets

Next, take that descriptor “monarchists”: it evokes images of crusty old fuddy-duddies in matching twin sets and leather-patched sports jackets slavering for a peek at the corgis, hoping for a missive from Her Maj, or pining for a re-rubifying of Mercator’s Map of the World. Not to worry: in ten or twenty years, in John Maynard Keynes’ phrase, “in the long run [they’ll be] all dead”, and the inevitable republic will arrive. But, as somebody quite sagely said, nothing is inevitable till it happens.
“Put not your trust in journalists, . . . for there is no help in them”, the Psalmist probably would’ve said in Psalm 146 [verse 2] if she’d been around now.  Very few “monarchists” focus their political stance re the republic on any of the individuals in the Royal Family; few would have considered a “No” vote in the November 1999 Referendum as a “Yes” specifically for Her Maj, or Phil the more-Dane-than-Greek, or Chilla (with or without Camilla), or Willa, or any of them. The media’s “monarchists” are not literal monarchists.
They would rather see themselves as Defenders of the Constitution. They’d be more accurately termed Constitutional Monarchists, though they’d possibly agree that an adjectival phrase involving eight syllables is about five too many for some elements of the media.
Vicious personal invective directed at the Royals

They’d reckon that our Constitution, while having its faults, ain’t broke, so ain’t in need of fixin’  -  certainly not in the way that the Referendum Question proposed. They’d consider that its deficiencies, such as, among others, the federal-state imbalance or the over-supply of politicians, are remediable in detail without changing its essence. Largely, they got to the guts of the matter.
They might, on impulse, now ‘n’ then, buy a glossy with some new “Exclusive !!!!” about the House of Windsor -  or about Ms Lopez or Nice Mr Pitt, or Our Nic or Our Cate or, now, Our Very Own Princess Mary.
What they didn’t buy was the proposal that becoming a republic would increase trade with Asia, even if a Jesuitical equivocation had to be made for “monarchist” Japan, Thailand and Malaysia. Nor did they buy the notion that the vicious personal invective being directed at the Royals was so persuasively relevant that a “Yes” was imperative. Although lacking in post-nominal tertiary ed letters and often entirely bereft of enlightenment from post-modernism, they had the good sense to be suspicious of handing more power to politicians. Despite unrelenting sloganeering from most of the media, including, especially,  “our” ABC, they thought for themselves. 
The suggestion that our Constitution should be changed because it confused ignorant foreigners was dismissed with the contempt that so cringe-worthy a claim deserved. And as for the professional long-distance fifth-generation Irish “exile” harping on about the Famine he himself never suffered: yes, it was a terrible atrocity, but it was over 150 years ago, wasn’t it, and 12,000 miles distant -  so, what’s it to do with the Question on this 1999 Australian Constitutional Referendum paper ? 
As has been shown so very clearly time after time, Robyn and Leslie Voter were not stupid: they weren’t, and still aren’t, easily swayed by wankers, by poseurs, by anyone who treated them with contempt, by sloganeering which failed the test of reality.  They worked out what the November 1999 Question was about, and that it was not about Achieving Independence, or Maturity, or National Self-Esteem, or Feeling Post-colonial in the Presence of Foreigners, or the “Foreign Queen”,  or the corgis, or Chilla and Camilla, whether married, in sin or just plain adulterous
It was the Constitution, Stupid !  That’s what it was about.
And still is.
Leonard Colquhoun 7248.
The writer was a member of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy 1998-2001