Dark clouds over the land of sunshine

It is not the best of times to be John Howard, arch-monarchist and leader of the Australian Liberal Party (for which, since we are in the Antipodes where all is upside down, read the conservatives). Nearly three years ago, Australia held a referendum on whether it should become a republic, with an Australian citizen as Head of State, thus rendering wholly obsolete a figure whom many Australians regard as a benign anachronism: the Governor-General, representing the real Head of State, the Queen. This was narrowly defeated by the Oz monarchists, marshalled by the adroit backstage manipulations of Howard.

The combination of sentimentality and insecurity remains a strong toxin in Australian public life, despite the independence we boast about. In the more imbecilic moments of Oz-monarchist rhetoric, anyone who thinks the post of Australia's Head of State should not automatically be decided by inheritance within a single megamillionaire Brit family becomes an "elitist". An elitist, in Australia, signifies anyone Howard and the Right-wing radio jocks don't like. Simple and meaningless as that. But it has replaced "poofter" and "pseudo-intellectual" as the six-inch (sorry, 15cm) mortar-shell in our once rich arsenal of insult.

The anguish of the nonelitist royalist populist is condensed into a question often heard in the 1999 campaign. "If we don't have the Queen, who can we look up to?" Not, it now seems, to her vicar on the Australian earth, unhappy Dr Peter Hollingworth, 66, formerly the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane, who was appointed Governor-General 10 months ago.

Dr Hollingworth's alleged sin has to do with the sexual exploitation of minors. Not that this eminently decent exclergyman is suspected, still less accused, of doing any such thing himself. But rather that, as archbishop, he tried to minimise and cover up the deeds of clergymen and teachers who did it, or may have. His critics claim that some priests and bishops in his diocese, on penitently admitting their propensity for chicken-fiddling, were not fired but encouraged to remain in office, under a cloak of "discretion". Tight secrecy was more like it.

Australians have grown more tolerant of some vices over the years, but not of pederasty, and especially not among the clergy. The mere suggestion that the G-G, earlier in his career, had turned a blind eye to it convulsed the polls: one, set up by Melbourne's Sunday Age, found that 70 per cent of the respondents felt Hollingworth was in the wrong, and no less than 53 per cent thought that, to minimise national embarrassment, he should resign before the Queen's arrival today for a conference of Commonwealth heads of government in Queensland, where his duties would oblige him to meet and greet her.

Meanwhile, Howard is digging in. He warns of a "constitutional earthquake" if Hollingworth is sacked - though, in truth, nothing in this sex scandal threatens the Australian constitution: it's merely Howard's own priorities that are at risk from the public anger. Hollingworth can only be sacked by the Queen, on Howard's advice as Prime Minister. Ordinary political pressure can't force her to oust him, and Howard, more noted for stubbornness than real moral courage, will resist giving such advice.

The Labour Party has withdrawn its support from Hollingworth. It is right. He should go - the pressure is mounting too fast for him to stay, and he can't tough it out and keep his office bipartisan, which it is meant to be. But his departure could only be a severe blow, not to Elizabeth II herself, but to her prospects as the Australian Head of State, and especially to John Howard's banal and romantically servile brand of monarchism.

It's sad for the Oz conservatives, who until the scandal blew up must have figured that they were (just) out of the woods. Against a feeble Labour opposition, Howard easily won a third term as PM by appealing to the racism of the electorate. His bacon, like George Bush's, was temporarily saved by Afghanistan.

Refugee ships were trying to disgorge their miserable human freight in Australia: hundreds, then thousands, of refugees from the atrocious sufferings of Afghanistan, conned onto the leaking tubs by people-smugglers operating out of Indonesia, hoping for sanctuary or at least a bit of dry land and a chance of life in Oz. They gave Howard his chance to play Horatius on the bridge. It wasn't that these folk were, well, othercoloured; we're not prejudiced here, not in the new multi-culti Oz. It was just that they didn't have visas, and weren't going to get them by emotional bribery.

Who knows what might happen if Afghans run wild here? Qantas Jumbo tails might be sticking out of the charred shells of the Opera House. So Howard got set to please the more conservative (for which read xenophobic and racist) parts of his electorate by fending the beards and chadors off.

Disgracefully, the leader of the Labour Party, Kim Beazley, went right along with him, competing to see who would be voted for as more Pure-Oz. Howard won hands down, by getting his navy to run an illegal migrant ship out into international waters, where it sank in high waves, drowning hundreds on board. The government added insult to slaughter by claiming that the Afghan mothers themselves were throwing their own children into the briny, in the hope that the navy would pick them up. This has since turned out to be a pure lie, and despite Howard's protestations that he knew nothing about it, the trail points right to his door in Canberra.

So what kind of Australia is Elizabeth II alighting in today? One that respects and even likes her, because it now sees her as a "battler" - but whose sense of loyalty to her as Head of State has fallen even below where it was in 1999. Her presence there will be seen as a benign irrelevance by most Australians, so many of whom are not of English stock anyway.

This is the twilight of the monarchy for us. Whether the G-G insists on meeting and greeting the Queen among the raspberries of demonstrators - "Sorry, yer Madge, I'm not booing you, I'm booing him" - or whether Howard reluctantly assigns the Governor of Tasmania, Sir Guy Green, to do the job, a sour taste will remain. And thanks to Howard's brutal and cynical treatment of the Afghan refugees, the carefully cultivated picture of a sunny, tolerant, multi-culti Australia is disintegrating like a Kleenex in the Pacific - or like the reputation of poor Dr Hollingworth, the figurehead no one checked out.

Robert Hughes is art critic of Time magazine. He was born in Australia but now lives in New York.