Why are the UK royals so popular in Australia?

In response to this question, I offered the brief reply:

The UK royal family has rebounded in public interest largely as a result of a strong and well developed public relations campaign that has been aimed at making the family, and especially its third generation, ‘relevant’ and possibly even ‘cool’, while still pressing the buttons of the traditionalists with lots of romance, wedding and baby news.

After the PR disaster that was the second generation – Prince Phillip’s oddities and Diana’s separation, divorce and then death – there has been a concerted effort by the palace to promote picture opportunities and to try to ingratiate royal family with very ordinary folk, both in the UK and loyal dominion countries such as Australia. This is done through allowing them glimpses of what they believe it must be like to be a royal, playing to essentially fairy tale escapist fantasies of princes and princesses.

In reality, the UK royal family is a wholly owned tax-exempt corporation (in a literal sense of the term) that, like other inter-generational wealth, exist in their status as a consequence of an accident of birth rather than by proven merit. Elites are an inescapable element of social organisation, but elites that are born rather than earned are worthy of little more than deposing.

This, of course, does not even begin to go to the question of inherited political privilege, and still that no Australian can become an Australian head of state. At best, we are allowed a local representative of the Queen as our stand-in, which diminishes us as an otherwise independent and largely democratic nation.