The happy festivities that took place during King Charles III’s tour were a celebration of Australia, as it was intended. It is everything anti-Australia activists loathe.

Lidia Thorpe is known even across the Pacific in Canada, whose urban media fetishise anyone who declares for modern values like inclusion and decolonisation.

Any attention-seeking factions within both houses of the Australian Parliament would have relished Thorpe’s opportunity to shout at King Charles III and Queen Camilla. The outburst was scarcely more eloquent than a tantrum-throwing toddler denied sweets, but that was the point.

Deservedly, Thorpe was thrashed by normal politicians and public figures. The condemnation of her stunt united Labor, conservatives, Liberals, Aboriginal groups, First Nations representatives, monarchists, and republicans.

Aunty Violet Sheridan, an elder of the Ngunnawal, was quick to make it clear that Thorpe ‘does not speak for me and my people’. Nova Peris, herself a republican activist, condemned Thorpe as unrepresentative of Aboriginal Australians.

It would be fantastic if the republican movement in the Anglosphere were restricted to Thorpe and her peers. Unfortunately, it is a bigger affair.

Monarchism is not fashionable among the aficionados of international culture, whose accents, taste in food, choice of holiday or mistresses are the only ways to tell them apart, be they Australian, Canadian, or British. Within the international culture of laptops, sushi, and libertinism of the Sydney and Toronto cocktail circuits, republicanism fits right in.

Respectable republicans pose the true threat to the monarchy as they flatten Australia as a cultural and historical nation through small but steady change. These advocates are often bureaucratic and unremarkable when compared to activists such as Thorpe.

Nevertheless, their republicanism gums its way forward, like a carnivorous Ghost slug, swallowing and dissolving its prey alive.

Refusing to portray King Charles III on the banknotes, or the state premiers avoiding the reception of the sovereign, are deliberate acts of erosion. In Canada, one of Justin Trudeau’s first moves as Prime Minister in 2015 was to remove the portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth II from the lobby of the Foreign Affairs building in Ottawa.

God Save the King has been dropped as an anthem by universities in Ontario, while Royal iconography on the ferry services was removed. Provincial politicians make a show of refusing to swear the oath to the monarch. These things are chipping away at the institution of monarchy to the point that ending its presence in Canada will be a quick and painless murder, but a murder is still a murder.

If the monarchy is gotten rid of, we might as well toss out everything else that makes our countries special and distinct. Let Australia become a set of nine letters to serve as a tombstone for a lost cause.

There is undeniably much more to Australia’s uniqueness than the Crown, like the beauty of the land and the spirit of the people, but indulge Thorpe and her ilk, and the King will be the first domino to fall. The flag will surely follow, as will so much more, just as the Ghost slug must embark on new hunts to sustain itself.

The international anti-colonial movement is filled with nihilists whose only instinct is to destroy. All they know is that they reject the foundation of Australia and Canada, but they do not know what to put in its place. They revel in vandalism, such as when a statue of Captain Cook was beheaded in British Columbia to the wild cheers of the feral mob.

Cook has great meaning to both Canada and Australia, the countries the mob seeks to abolish, which is a direct quote written on their protest signs.

Not every lazy republican desires the abolition of Australia, but they are unwittingly pushing the country in that direction. It is happening in Canada too, where the symbols of Canada’s past prior to 1965 are being purged at an alarming rate. What is left alone is the inoffensive globalised culture that truly took hold at the onset of the digital age.

The sad truth is that without non-material cultural inheritance, Australia will become an outpost of pure internationalism, with hollow beaches and lifeless, grey cities, just as Canada is becoming a cold, international redoubt of empty snowbanks and soulless, greyer cities.

Utilitarian reforms should not come at the cost of a rich culture.

Why should Australia not stand out? Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are the lucky few to have the beauty and tradition that comes with the House of Windsor, which is lacking elsewhere.

The wider world is filled with no-name presidents in grey suits overseeing corruption, poverty, and violence. There are no heroes or lore of times gone by to inspire. Australia should not want to look and feel like the wider, greying world. Australia should look like Australia.

Proponents of republicanism usually frame their cause as a benign step towards becoming more ‘modern’, as if the word is not among the most abused in the English language. Pushing modernity for the sake of modernity is a shallow exercise, and change is only good if it makes things better.

The iPhone is the supreme icon of modernity, but has it made the lives of children any better? All you hear from parents is lamenting that they do not go outside to play like they used to, while attention spans get worse with every generation.

Modernity brought the insurgency against national culture into the Anglosphere, with yearly demonstrations in favour of getting rid of Australia Day and Canada Day.

There will only ever be one Australia, and it is a colonial country. It is foolish to try and deny that reality.

The radical anti-Australia activists now scathingly describe Australia as a ‘colonial’ country, or literally a ‘colony’ in the discernible words of Lidia Thorpe. In response, all that should be spoken is an acknowledgement, followed by asking what the point of their statement was.

Australia cannot be restarted; it can only play the hand it was dealt, and it got a great one that should not be ruined by discarding the Kings and Queens.

The stories of the old Dominions like Australia are far more than tales of colonialism. There is heroism, adventure, bravery, and hope, which cannot be divorced from the tradition and heritage of those ages that should still inspire younger generations.

As with all the other Dominions, the Windsors have been part of Australia since the beginning. It is as Australian as the English language, the Common Law, free economies, and the widely understood conception of liberty.

Framing King Charles III as a foreign entity is constitutionally illiterate. He is the King of Australia, just as he is the King of Canada, not the ‘British monarch’, as the lazier members of the media will refer to him, as if he is a foreigner.

Even monarchists can be guilty of this mistake.

During his excellent speech welcoming the King and Queen at Parliament House over the weekend, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton made a point of mentioning Shakespeare, Darwin, democracy and so much else of what is shared in the English-speaking world. Rightfully so.

The question for Dutton is this: will he defend the monarchy to the hilt if he becomes the Prime Minister, just as he would defend the flag and national pride? Ideally, the monarchy is not politicised, but it has come to that, and it needs its defenders to endure.

Conservatism’s essence is to conserve what is good and right, and that includes the Crown. Those who call themselves conservatives but only get worked up about tax and regulation policy are just accountants and economists at heart, clogged up in materialism.

There are true empirical and utilitarian arguments to make for the Crown, one of which is that constitutional monarchies are stable, peaceful, clean, and, on balance, prosperous compared to their republican counterparts in the Commonwealth. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand remain healthier societies with better governments than South Africa, Ireland, and Pakistan.

Furthermore, the King as the head of state is an excellent check on authoritarianism by frustrating the possibility of a demagogic cult of personality.

Demagogic or not, what exactly would a ‘modern’ republican head of state achieve?

Look around the world, any symbolic republican head of state is as forgettable as a corporate executive. They are, almost invariably, a moderately successful former civil servant or academic.

Furthermore, assuming this theoretical republican president is elected, it will add another layer of factionalism and partisan contests that no country needs. The idea of a non-partisan presidential election is farcical, and factions will form along blue and red lines to support one candidate or another.

However, all of this still engages the hollow republican materialists on their terms and misses the greater point.

The Crown has undeniable power that overcomes even the most ardent of republicans. Anthony Albanese himself seems to have also become enamoured with the sovereign during his visit. It is not unlike how Malcolm Turnbull of the Liberals came to call himself an Elizabethan during the reign of Her Majesty, despite his past as an energetic republican.

The calm, cheerful crowds of men, women, and children, young and old, born in Australia or abroad, might be the most unifying celebration seen in the Commonwealth for some time.

For critics who claim reverence for the Crown is simply the imperial nostalgia of aging Anglo Australians, consider that in Canada, it is new immigrants who are the most reverent of the monarch, as well as the most celebratory on Canada Day. They want to be part of the Canadian story, as it has played out for hundreds of years.

Defending the Crown is to defend the honour of the historic, cultural Australia, as a distinct and unique nation that lives there.

To defend the Crown is to declare that Australia is, and always has been, a good place that need not apologise for what makes it special.