In May 1977, an advisory referendum was held to determine Australia’s National Song. That referendum offered four choices; God Save the Queen, Advance Australia Fair, the Song of Australia and Waltzing Matilda. At the time there was no argument about the range of choice. What a pity a similar thing could not take place with this year’s republic and preamble referendums. The choice could be constitutional monarchy, elected president or indirectly president on the republic and on the preamble there could be a choice between Prime Minister’s Howard’s preamble and the model put up this week by Labor, the Democrats and the Greens (the LDG preamble), or no change.
Unfortunately, the Constitution does not permit a choice of results when putting a question for a change to the Constitution. It demands a simple Yes or No to a single proposition.
So we have an argument over what sort of preamble and what sort of republic with the result that we might get no change at all, even though opinion polls suggest that change on both counts is desired by a majority of people.
One lesson is that initiating change to the Constitution should not be a monopoly held by federal parliament and that some form of citizen-initiated referendum or states-initiated referendum should also be allowed. But that is unlikely.
Mr Howard’s preamble has had greater attack than the LDG preamble, perhaps because the LDG preamble came after wider consultation. Mr Howard, however, has made it plain that if the Senate does not pass his proposal or something close to it, no proposal will go to the people. Compromise would be better, but perhaps no preamble question this year would be no bad thing. It might be more appropriate to await the outcome of the referendum question rather than invite Australians to commit anew to a Constitution the fundamentals of which are still in the air.