Pipes or news ed. please put in featuresed and send message to bill goodall to say it is there. he wants it first thing Friday. Also can you send a message to macklin to water my indoor plants. ta
The earth circles the sun and we have 10 fingers. The combination of these two facts has an inexplicable power in human activity. We mark anniversaries in lots of 10 encirclings of the earth around the sun.
The anniversaries garner us into activity, into pledges, into acknowledgment of change. Four tens make middle age; six tens make retirement and one hundred tens, beyond the lifespan of nearly all humans, garners even greater cause for reflection, celebration or mourning, and commitment to renewal.
Thus January 1, 2001, will mark 100 years of Australian federation. It need not be any different from any other day: the sun will rise, we will wake, eat and sleep. But our fingers and the circling of the earth inexplicably demand something different.
They will demand activity: of celebration of the past and a change for the future. Because it is the centenary of nationhood the activities will inevitably be of major national significance. Every individual or group with some aim to change things on a national scale unconsciously looks to that date to achieve their aims: a treaty between Aborigines and other Australians; a new flag; a bill of rights; statehood for the Northern Territory; and perhaps most profoundly, a republic.
The reference to 2001 is made in a book published yesterday, The Coming Republic by Donald Horne and others. It argues unashamedly for a republic and its aim is to convince its readers of the benefits of change. The title, of course, assumes it will happen.
This article is not an objective review of the book. That will be done elsewhere in due course. Rather this is the biased view of an Australian whose reading of the book triggered some new and old thoughts.
I recall in my last year of high school looking at an Atlas published in America. At the back it had a list of countries with a table details about them like area, population and the like. It also had a column for type of government in which Australia was listed as a monarchy.
Typical Americans, I thought, Australia is a democracy, not a monarchy. My idea of a monarchy then was bound up with notions of Henry VIII chopping off people’s heads and the other kings of Shakespeare ordering people about arbitrarily. Sure, there was a Queen, but she was in England and did not boss anybody about in Australia.
It did not even say “”constitutional monarchy” just “”monarchy”. Anyone reading the atlas overseas would think we had a king or queen who could chop people’s heads off. They would think Australia was not a democracy but a politically backward unsophisticated nation, like Tonga, which was also listed as a monarchy. I felt misrepresented. The Americans had misrepresented Australia. Or had they?
Eight years later, in 1975, the front cover of Time magazine carried an picture of Sir John Kerr with the headline “Queen’s man sacks Prime Minister”.
Opinions on that issue still divide to a large degree on Liberal-Labor lines. This attitude of my football team is better than yours has set back the cause of constitutional reform.
Supporters of the blue team should envisage this, not unlikely, possibility: John Hewson wins the next election, but fails to get a Senate majority. Eighteen months later his radical changes make him extremely unpopular and the international economy continues to depress Australia. Opposition Leader Keating, forever the opportunist, cites reprehensible circumstances of the go-ahead for an environmentally destructive mine in breach of various environmental Acts of Parliament. Labor joins with the Green-Democrat alliance in the Senate to block the Budget.
The Governor-General, Bill Hayden, steps in and sacks Dr Hewson appointing Mr Keating as Caretaker Prime Minister.
Would the supporters of the blue team think that Mr Hayden was acting as an impartial umpire upholding democracy against a radical wrecker. I think not.
The 1975 incident must be taken out of its Liberal vs Labor context. Perhaps that will happen as more voters swing more often.
Professor Leslie Zines who has been an independent observer of constitutional matters in Australia made a pertinent point earlier this year. Ironically it was made during a function in the old Senate chamber where, in 1975, Supply was blocked. He said the unrectified clauses in the Constitution that allowed the 1975 sacking were ticking like a time bomb and were a much more important issue to be addressed than whether Australia should be a republic.
Several of Donald Horne’s co-contributors argue that the two issues can be addressed at once. This will be an enormous intellectual challenge for those with monovision who say fixing the economy must come first, and that the republic is just a diversion. These people are going to be asked to think about and debate not two, but üthree, things at once: republic, powers of the Head of State and the economy. Will there be room in their heads?
There will have to be. In fact, it may go to four or five issues: Aboriginal claims for constitutional recognition are getting much stronger following the High Court’s Mabodecision earlier this year. And more people are calling for a Bill of Rights.
These debates cannot be stopped. Horne argues that opinion polls are gradually showing more people in favour of a republic. As this happens polling will get more accurate, asking more refined questions. To date, most polls have presented all-or-nothing options: the present system or the American one. Small wonder people opt for the present.
Pollsters will frame questions that do not predicate a republic upon a directly elected president, a change in the flag and withdrawal from the Commonwealth of Nations. Once that happens, he says, more people will be seen to favour ending the position where the Queen of a foreign country is also Queen of Australia. And once that happens, opportunist politicians will seize upon it and put it into reality. Indeed, there have been signs of that already.
Perhaps this is why Horne thought he could title his book üThe Coming Republic.@
I recall the Queen’s visit in 1980. During it she opened the High Court in Canberra. This should have been an event celebrating Australia’s legal innovation and the achievements of its judges. Surprisingly for many non-lawyers, buried beneath the quagmire of litigation and legislation that threatens to engulf us all, there can be found gems of ingenuity and solutions to legal difficulties that have been admired and copied in many parts of the world: the Torrens system of land tenure; strata title; some elements of the Family Law Act to name a few.
Instead, the opening ceremony was subsumed in the pomp of a formal occasion in a royal visit.
The opening of Parliament in 1988 was almost the same. The focus was on a visiting foreign dignitary, not on the celebration of Australian democracy as one of the first places to have the secret ballot and give votes to women and so on. The Queen’s visit even relegated the joy of the architectural and construction work in the building itself. The building was magnificent only because Her Majesty said it was.
Mother said we had done well; and the child was pleased with the praise.
In the book, Thomas Keneally argues lucidly about the importance of these symbols. He wrote that since white settlement, “”we have harboured a suspicion that store ships, bounties, kindnesses would be sent of their way to us from a more benign hemisphere than our own. We came to feel we possessed both an inherent worthiness which would assure that others _ our betters _ would look after us; and an inherent inferiority which convinced us we were not worthy to manage ourselves or speak with an independent voice. Both these suspicions were delusions, and both have damaged us and kept us a stunted nation. It is time we ceased to divide our soul”.
The difficulty is not with the republic argument, but the emotion of the thing. Emotions and feelings about political matters often go back to childhood. Tracts of learning by political scientists show that voters tend to vote like their father and his father before him. “”We’ve always been Labor, here.”
Thus 80 per cent of the vote is determined genetically, God help us.
But it works the other way, too. Not which political philosophy you like, but also that which you do not like.
The raucous suspicion between Catholic and Protestant, certainly among primary schoolchildren in the 1960s and before, is legendary. “”Catholic dogs, sitting on logs, eating maggots out of frogs.” And the suspicion lingered until doused by the flames of puberty.
Political suspicions, too.
Ludicrously, my father told us children: “”You’ll be grateful for the sprouts left on your plate when the commies come.”
The commies were coming, no doubt. These communists did not have eyes, or indeed faces. They were just coming.
For many Australians in childhood, communists were linked to foreigners and other opponents of the British Crown, like Irish republicans. The recollections of these childhoods can be seen in Australia’s blossoming literature.
Naturally, those writers and many others have put the indoctrinations of childhood behind, but presumably others have not. The words “”republican” and “”republic” for them evoke indeterminate feelings of negativity. They have lingered from childhood. “”Republicanism” is not quite decent. A “”President of Australia” sounds incongruous, especially to those in primary school who put their hand on their heart and promised “”to do their duty to God and the Queen”.
I’m not talking Ruxtons here; but apolitical agnostics. People who have grown out of primary school pledges, who none the less do not like the words “”republic” and “”republicanism”. And thus they cannot yet support them with feeling, only with intellect.
This could be why the opinion polls are not tracking a feeling that we should not have a British Queen. It is because the alternative has (however irrationally) a sinister element to it.
Sir David Smith others will probably now write a letter in saying Queen Elizabeth is really Queen of Australia. This is tosh. She was born in England, speaks with an English accent and if put to the real test as to whether she was Queen of Australia, she would undoubtedly fail: If given the choice between her English and Australian thrones, which would she take? And when she visits Saudi Arabia is she Queen of England, or Queen of Australia or both? If both, how does she feel about her Australian subjects when the British Government shoves a speech into her hands which promotes British and European interests ahead of Australian ones?
The key to overcoming the slightly sinister connotation of “”republicanism” is to repeat the sinister word until it is no longer sinister. This is a device used by D.H.Lawrence.
Those who no longer want a tabloid besplattered British family to provide the Head of State for Australia should stand in front of a mirror every morning an say three times: “”I am a republican.” It works, as it worked for those of us who in primary school each Monday pledged duty to God and the Queen. The primary-school exercise led in adulthood to the lingering, indeterminate feeling that duty to the Queen who lived in a palace half way around the world was a Good Thing.
This feeling about words is not a minor matter. It has to be overcome if the intellectual arguments are to carry credence.
There is a good argument that far from saving Australia from economic catastrophe in 1975, the monarchical exercise of reserve powers actually made things a lot worse than they should have been.
Many on the hard right say now that Malcolm Fraser could have done better as Prime Minister and missed a great opportunity when he had a majority in both houses. They usually explain this by saying that Fraser was really a Wet all along, subtly pointing to his views on South Africa and world starvation.
There is another way of looking at it. Fraser perhaps subconsciously recognised the need for a national reconciliation or healing and to restore legitimacy to Australia’s constitutional processes. It was therefore impossible for him to push through some of the tougher reforms that Australian needed then. If his Government had done that, despite its majorities in successive elections, it would have lost legitimacy. If Malcolm Fraser had won power in the ordinary way he would have had a much freer hand to implement reform than by winning it the way he did.
If the 1975 timebomb goes off again, the same economic ill-effects could flow _ a government grappling with a constitutional and national lack of cohesion and legitimacy with its eye off the economic ball.
Fixing that timebomb ultimately requires a new statement about where sovereignty lies in Australia. Where does power and legitimacy come from? Does it come from the British Crown and Parliament which in turn gathers authority from the doctrine of the divine right of kings, or does it come from the Australian people?
This may some like idle hypothesising to people who have voted in elections and are well aware that Australia is a democracy. However, a High Court judge was willing to assert only last month that sovereignty ultimately came from the Imperial Parliament. Further, the events of 1975 and the potential for their repetition also point the non-democratic way. Yes; we enjoy democracy and freedom in Australia, but that is different from saying they are üprotected.
Donald Horne has suggested a President elected by federal and state parliamentarians. The president would do what the Governor-General now does ceremonially or by convention, but “”would have the power to intervene to protect the Constitution if a government broke the rules in regard to the appointment or dismissal of governments or the calling of elections; if a government persisted in conduct that the High Court had declared to be illegal or unconstitutional”.
It has been argued that an elected (directly or not) president gets a glow of legitimacy and therefore might feel free to intervene more readily than a Governor-General. Well, that is more legitimacy than the present set-up. It will also demand that other constitutional matters be made more certain. The present constitution, if read literally, gives dictatorial powers to the Governor-General. This should be fixed, if Australians generally are to feel Australian, and not the subject of the exercise of power by someone appointed by Buckingham Palace, albeit on the advice of the Australian Government.
Another point about formalising the presidency is this: just as the Governor-General can sack a Prime Minister, a Prime Minister can sack a Governor-General. If Australia were to become a Republic, the third-world-style power-play of an Governor-General and a Prime Minister rushing to sack each other would not be played out, because the Prime Minister could not sack a President. (And given the forewarning of the 1975 experience, such a rush would be more, not less, likely than last time.)
If Australians are to take pride in their Constitution it must be honest. At present it says the Governor-General is boss, but the reality, usually, is something else. Small wonder Australians are bemused and/or ignorant of the document that describes how they are governed.
However, in doing something about this, there is a danger that our 10 fingers and the revolution of the planet will catch up on us. The republican issue gives rise to so many related questions. Given the complexity of them there is a danger that “”2001: A Constitutional Odyssey” will become too hard and nothing will happen. If so, it will be a tragedy: not only because we will remain in semi-dependency, but because it would show that we as a nation we still lack even the self-confidence to even put the assertion of independence to the test. The Coming Republic. Donald Horne and others. Pan MacMillan. $14.95. 215pp