With news choppers circling overhead, a scrum of reporters waiting down below and a barrage of puns waiting to be unleashed, Tiger Woods flew into Melbourne on Monday, where he will take part in the Australian Masters golf tournament, attend a gala dinner, play in a charity event for victims of the bushfires, promote Victoria as a golfing destination and pocket a personal appearance fee of A$4m ($3.7m ;£2.2m) for his trouble - more than 10 times the prize money for winning the tournament.

His first visit to Australia in 11 years has the feel of a presidential and royal visit all rolled into one. But then, Tiger has the star power of Barack Obama (I think that a strong case could be made that Tiger helped pave the way for Barack by dominating, and thus winning widespread acceptance in what was long regarded in the US as a whites-mainly sport). He is the undisputed king of golf and, arguably, of world sport.

Awaiting him in Melbourne are an array of tiger treats. A suite at a posh hotel in the central business district which has played home in recent times to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Tickets to the hottest show in Melbourne - Jersey Boys. And the prospect of playing without the jarring staccato of hundreds of clicking cameras. The course has banned spectators from carrying them.

I happen to be in Melbourne covering another story and the front page of the city's tabloid, The Herald Sun, pretty much sums things up: TIGERMANIA.

Admittedly, there are numerous ways to spin this story. Should taxpayers' money be spent on Tiger's appearance fee? Seems like a worthwhile investment, seeing as the four days of the tournament are already a sell-out and that it reaffirms Melbourne's position as the sporting capital of the southern hemisphere, if not the world. State Premier John Brumby, who lobbied Tiger personally, claims his visit will be worth $19m for the state's economy. A figure plucked out of the air, perhaps? But it sounds plausible.

You could view it through the prism of civic rivalries. Sydney tried hard to lure Tiger, but he went with Melbourne instead - a familiar story since the 2000 Olympics, where the Victorian capital has outstripped its long-standing rival.

But I'm going to go with what I reckon is a legacy of the old "tyranny of distance" syndrome. The way that the country lapses still into "aren't we lucky to have a big celebrity visiting little ol' Australia" mode. As I write, I'm watching a news bulletin which is not only featuring Tiger Woods, but the arrival in Melbourne of Britney Spears.

And it's not just big-name entertainers and sports stars. This year we have already had "Christopher Hitchens week", when ABC handed over large chunks of its output to the visiting British polemicist. That followed "PJ O'Rourke week" earlier in the year, when the American satirist was granted the same airtime. Both are brilliant authors, but they hardly merit the red carpet treatment in a country with writers, public intellectuals and polemicists who can rival them. Early next year, we will no doubt witness Prince William week, as he makes his first visit to Australia since crawling around on a picnic rug in one of the happier photo-ops staged by Prince Charles and the then-Princess Diana (there is still a lively Republican referendum debate: ten years on the thread is still going on, by the way).

During my first Christmas in Australia a couple of years back, I was astonished by the blanket coverage devoted to Paris Hilton, who had jetted in to celebrate the New Year in Sydney. Why wouldn't she? The pyrotechnics are worth the trip alone.

The tyranny of distance used to come with a felony of international neglect. But that is no longer the case. As the world has got smaller, Australia has got bigger. Tiger's arrival down under, and the media-driven mania which has surrounded it, speaks of both.

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Last week, I ran into John Howard for the first time since election night in 2007, when, outside a ballroom scattered with discarded, half-drunk flutes of champagne, I confronted him with a conversational opening gambit that to this day makes me wince.

My mother-in-law is an enthusiastic fan of the former prime minister, and was a near neighbour in north Sydney long before he became leader of the Liberal Party. So I passed on her commiserations, and then told him that her youngest daughter - who in her early teens had once served drinks at her parent's party fund-raisers - had recently agreed to marry me.

"What?" shouted the departing prime minister through the lip-shrill chatter of crest-fallen party loyalists. I repeated what I said, this time with less conviction, and got in return a look of puzzlement and a grunt of faint recognition. Then he moved past me to yet another Liberal diehard keen to tell him he was the greatest prime minister that Australia had ever had. I, meanwhile, retreated - wondering whatever possessed me to inject a note of personal happiness on a night of such abject political despair.

Last week, at a lunch organised by constitutional monarchists, John Howard seemed happier to be confronted by reporters. Indeed, he seemed to relish the exposure, for it was just like old times. With a thicket of microphones in front of him, he gave a robust defence of Australia's present constitutional arrangements - he is a true Burkean conservative, in the sense that he wants to preserve all that he deems workable and good, and is suspicious of unwarranted change - and his government's approach to asylum seekers. "We stopped the boats," he said with obvious pride.

Last week, he also sat down with the Sydney Sunday Telegraph and gave a more expansive interview in which he unleashed on Kevin Rudd. He branded his successor a "do nothing" prime minister who was all about spin and symbolism. He claimed that he had bungled the response to the surge in the number of boat people trying to reach Australian shores and had achieved little since becoming prime minister almost two years ago.

"The Rudd government comes up very short," said the former prime minister. "I can't think of a major thing it has done, except spent the bank balance that Costello and I left behind. Nothing else."

Howard was effectively accusing Kevin Rudd of political cowardice, which is a criticism you hear increasingly from supporters as well as a partisan detractors. Kevin Rudd continues to enjoy what, by normal standards, are stratospheric approval ratings (an average over the past two years of 68%), yet he has not leveraged much of that personal popularity by championing unpopular issues.

On climate change, as Mr Howard noted, his emissions trading scheme is close to what the Coalition was proposing at the last election, with cautious cuts and targets. He has done nothing to advance the republic, another contentious issue where he risks alienating the swing suburbs. The stimulus package was centred on generous cash hand-outs - a giveaway injection. After the symbolism of his much-vaunted "Sorry", indigenous groups have wondered what he intends to do to close the gap between white and black Australia. On the boat people, he has emphasised the toughness of his policies, rather than setting out the case for compassion.

The conventional wisdom is that Kevin Rudd is a poll-driven prime minister rather than a principle-driven national leader. His focus is on day-to-day managerialism rather than bold, long-term vision. Last week saw an interesting example of this. On the eve of a bad poll coming out, which showed Labour's lead over the Liberals had plunged, Kevin Rudd went on a media blitz with five hastily-arranged afternoon radio interviews and an appearance on ABC's 730 Report, one of the few truly national early evening news programmes. The prospect of a bad poll had apparently produced a flurry of prime ministerial panic.

Even many detractors of John Howard would concede that he was politically bold and daring, from his decision to back gun controls early on to the introduction of the GST, Australia's initially unpopular sales tax. Howard clearly thinks his successor is something of a political wimp. So is he right? Has Kevin Rudd emerged as a do-nothing prime minister?

PS: I found it hard to suppress a wry smile when Jonny Wilkinson slotted over a drop goal - or field goal, as they are called in Australia - in the early stages of the England/Australia game at Twickenham over the weekend. Memories of 2003. But Australia ended up on top, deserved winners with two tries to zip. Viewers in Britain might have wondered why so many Aussie players were sporting such pathetic, post-pubescent moustaches, some of which looked in danger of being blown away in the south-west London winds. It is, of course, Movember, the month when thousands of men groom moustaches to highlight prostate cancer, depression and other male ailments. In the land of memorable, iconic moustaches - Dennis Lillee, Rodney Marsh, David Boon - they are carrying on a long, and great, Australian tradition. So all power to their whiskered upper lips...

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Ten years after the republican referendum, it is Australia's constitutional monarchists who have the most cause for celebration. And celebrating they are, with lunches in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth to mark what they call "Affirmation Day". Republicans, meanwhile, are gathering on the forecourt of Parliament House in Canberra, to remind their fellow Australians that it is time to mend the nation's heart - a reference to Malcolm Turnbull's anguished rebuke on the night of the referendum to the then Prime Minister, John Howard, whose support for the monarchy was one of the reasons why the referendum failed.

Certainly, these have been fallow years for Australian republicans, and remain so now, even though the prime minister is an avowed republican and the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, used to head up the Australian Republican Movement.

I've just finished reading a book on the subject by the Melbourne academic Glenn Patmore, who, among other things, examines one of the great paradoxes of the 1999 debate: that 88% of Australians told pollsters that they supported an Australian head of state while only 45.1% voted for one at the referendum. In Choosing the Republic, Patmore points the finger at a number of suspects: a wily Prime Minister, John Howard, who knew that the constitutional convention which preceded the referendum would pit republican against republican; a referendum question framed exquisitely to exploit divisions within the republican movement between those who wanted en elected president and those who wanted an appointed president; a No campaign that gained traction by arguing the Australia would get a "Politician's Republic"; the lack of bipartisanship and the difficulty of winning a referendum without the active support of the prime minister of the day.

Add to that the "status quo" argument, voiced most forcefully by John Howard, who believed that the referendum failed "because of the inherent unwillingness on the part of Australians to change something that they haven't been persuaded was no longer working".

But perhaps the overarching argument of Choosing a Republic is that the movement has failed to produce an irresistible and animating vision of a monarch-free Australia. "It was as if the proposal for an Australian head of state was put to the people without any resonance with a philosophy of republicanism," Patmore writes of 1999.

We've spoken before in this blog about the Elizabeth factor: how the popularity of the present monarch presents problems for the republicans. When bold rhetoric is required, her continued presence is perhaps one of the reasons why politicians like Rudd and Turnbull are so timid on the question. Republicans would argue that the popularity of the Queen needs to be decoupled from the uselessness of the institution, but that is the kind of abstraction which goes against the grain. It's a tough one: to divorce the principle from the personality. So for all his talk about accelerating the republican debate when he took over as prime minister, Kevin Rudd has mothballed the issue until at least his second term.

The survival of the monarchy in Australia is endlessly intriguing. From Gallipoli to the great betrayal in World War II, the Brits have not always treated Australia with much respect or consideration. And yet that has never fuelled any significant anti-British backlash, save for the odd sledge on the cricket field or a bit of flippant Pom-bashing in the bar. Equally, you would have logically thought that the character traits which many Australians hold dear, such as their laconic informality, lack of snobbery, anti-authoritarianism (though this is surely exaggerated) and egalitarianism, would have militated against the idea of hereditary privilege.

My sense is that so much cultural space in Australia is occupied by the British made or British influenced that the idea of a British head of state is not as incongruous as it might be. And then there's the demographic factor: the huge, if declining, proportion of Australians whose roots are in Britain.

I've written a longer piece on the whole question which has sparked a debate here. You can read the full piece in full here.

So over to you. Why did the referendum fail in 1999, and why this week was it the constitutional monarchists rather than the republicans who seemed in much more chipper mood as they look to the future?

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