The Duke is now Sir Prince Phillip - I’ll bet he feels suitably degraded by that one. The Prince commands many hundreds of Knights.

Abbott is so out of touch it’s not funny.

Will Sir Prince Phillip be willing to kneel to let Abbott do the sword bit on his shoulder? 

Abbott restored knighthoods for Australia last year amid lots of criticism. His idea was so that people who had done lots for the country (like the Governor General) could be honoured. The idea is alright but why didn’t he choose an Aussie word instead of ‘Sir’, it could have been something Aussie like ‘Cobber’.

I like that, Cobber. Cobber Prince Phillip hasn’t commented yet, probably because he’s speechless.

I think that Abbott must think that ‘Prince’ is his name not his title.

C’mon, man, you can’t play with British Peerages like that!

Also the GG is now called ‘Sir’ so his wife, Mrs Cosgrove is a ‘Dame’ or perhaps a ‘Lady’.

Does this mean that the Queen is now to be known as ‘Dame Queen Elizabeth II’?

And is the new Australian title hereditary? Will we have Sir King Charles and Dame Queen Camilla and so on?

This is big! Mr Abbott, you have opened a can of worms, very naïve ones.

I wonder if we will wake up on January 26 2016 and find that we now have Sir Barack Obama and Sir Pope Francis, thanks to Mr Abbott’s need for aristocratic mimicry.

Daft I call it.

Mike Robinson

Surf Beach