The Governor-General Bill Hayden made statements this week about the position of the president in a republic. They follow comments about euthanasia, same-sex marriages and his change of mind and heart on democratic socialism.
The question of what sort of things a Governor-General should say is a tricky one. Like the job itself, it is governed by convention, not rules. Mr Hayden can say what he likes. There are no rules to which he is answerable. Rather, if he is seen by the Prime Minister to go over the top, the Prime Minister can ask the Queen to remove him. Nothing Mr Hayden has said or done to date would warrant that. None the less, at the very least, he has dipped his toe into public debate about matters which are clearly matters which are also being debated in the party political arena. And he is doing it in a way that would annoy many people on the Labor side. It could be argued that he has in fact joined a party political debate by directly attacking the model for a republic proposed as part of the platform of one of the major political parties which is opposed by the other major party.
There might have been some justification for Mr Hayden’s input if he was giving some unique insight from his experience as Governor-General. However, the substance of his comment had been canvassed before … that a president only removable by a two-thirds majority of Parliament could behave in way that made governance difficult and provided he or she could cobble a third of the Parliament’s support together could not be removed. Moreover, there is ample material for a rebuttal from the Republican side. The well-trodden republican position is that if the president is going to be hard to remove, his powers must be set out with more clarity and he must not be in the position of Governor-General who on paper at least can wield arbitrary power.
It was within the convention of not taking sides for Mr Hayden to talk about same-sex marriages and euthanasia because these are subjects that political parties usually give conscience votes on, or when they don’t there are enough rebels to prove it is a “conscience” matter not a party one. It was also just within convention for Mr Hayden to talk about the changes in his personal political convictions, even if it would likely cause anguish in Labor ranks and wry amusement among Liberals.
But his entry into the republican debate in the way he did … to question directly some elements of the Prime Minister’s model … was not wise. It displayed the recklessness of someone with only a short term left in office.
That said, Mr Hayden’s interview with The Sydney Morning Herald contained some apparently self-verifying propositions. It revealed the truth of the proposition that convention alone cannot be relied up to bind office-holders and that it might be necessary to have clearer stipulations about what a head of state can and cannot do. It also revealed the truth of another proposition put by Mr Hayden about why a future head of state could not be relied on to always act sensibly. Mr Hayden said: “”You have got to account for the uncertainties of human nature and the way in which certain positions, in particular where there is status or power involved, can affect personalities.”