“”After considering the report of a committee established and operating as the Parliament provides to invite and consider nominations for appointment as President, the Prime Minister may, in a joint sitting of the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, move that a named Australian citizen be chosen as the President.
“” If the Prime Minister’s motion is seconded by the leader of the Opposition in the House of Representatives, and affirmed by a two-thirds majority of the total number of the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, the named Australian citizen is chosen as the President.”
Thus will read Section 50 of the Constitution if the republic referendum is passed on November 6.
And Section 69 will read:
“”The Prime Minister may, by instrument signed by the Prime Minister, remove the President with effect immediately. A Prime Minister who removes a President must seek the approval of the House of Representatives for the removal . . . The failure of the House of Representatives to approve the removal of the President does not operate to reinstate the President who was removed.”
These are the sticking points in the republic debate. They are contained in the Constitution Alternation (Establishment of a Republic) Act 1999.
They have caused a number of republicans to urge a No vote in November and continue with the Queen until some indeterminate time when a new (at present indeterminate) proposal can be put to the people for a directly elected president. They have been joined by monarchists who want to keep the Queen as the Head of State of Australia to form a bizarre alliance that may see the referendum defeated.
“”Australians choose to stay with Britain’s Queen” headlines in the US will stay.
Presumably, our Head of State, the Queen, should open the Olympic Games.
At the weekend, Workplace Relations Minister Peter Reith joined the fray on the side of the direct-elect people. Also at the weekend the Australian newspaper ran a convention in Cowra to mirror the Cowra convention 106 years ago that reignited the pushy to federation.
It is surprising that the method of election and removal of the president should cause such alarm, because they are for practical purposes exactly the same as the present provisions for the election and removal of the Governor-General.
The present Constitution provides in Section 2:
“”A Governor-General appointed by the Queen shall be Her Majesty’s representative in the Commonwealth, and shall have and may exercise in the Commonwealth during the Queen’s pleasure, but subject to the Constitution, such powers and functions of the Queen as Her Majesty may be pleased to assign him.”
The key words there are “”appointed by the Queen” and “”during the Queen’s pleasure”.
The Queen does not do the appointing herself. She appoints the person the Australian Prime Minister tells her to appoint. “”During her pleasure”, means she can dismiss the Governor-General at will. But she does not do that off her own bat. She only does it if she is asked to do it by the Australian Prime Minister.
In short, the Australian Prime Minister appoints and can dismiss at whim the president/governor-general in both models.
True, the new model allows for public nominations to be considered by a committee which reports to the Prime Minister. But that is no different to the present system of the Prime Minister listening to less formal public and private nominations.
The new model adds a requirement that the President be an Australian citizen. The Governor-General can be a Pom. Indeed, he could be a Panamanian. Other than that simple (but important symbolic) requirement that the Head of State be an Australian, there is no change.
So why the fuss?
The monarchists put forward a lot of scare issues about the new model. At Cowra the convenor of Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy, David Flint, mentioned the Spanish dictator Franco, Napoleon and the Vichy French pro-Nazi leader Petain in his speech. It is laughable and illogical. The words of the new Constitution provide for nothing more nor less than the present Constitution, so if the new Constitution is going to allow for the rise of an antipodean Franco or Napoleon so does the existing one and we had better be concerned about it right now.
Why can’t the monarchists be honest enough to say that they like the Queen and that she should remain titular head of Australia and open the Olympic Games and visit every now and then?
On the direct-elect side, the fear is that if the republic wins now, there will be no pressure to go a step further and change the system of government.
They have a point. If the referendum goes down, there will still be pressure for another referendum. It will not just go away as John Howard hopes, though he could put it off for as long as he holds office. Pressure will build.
The ACT convenor of the Australian Republican Movement, Anne Witheford, is quite wrong when she says, “”The history of referendums shows that if this goes down, it’s going to be dead in the water for a long time.”
We had four referendums in 14 years on the question of the terms of the House of Representatives and Senate. There have been three or four referendums on various economic powers such as monopolies, prices and industrial relations. And there have been a couple of cracks at fairness-of-elections proposals.
The direct-election people are probably right in saying that there will be another crack at a republic if this one goes down and are probably right in fearing that if this one gets up, there will not be another one to change the method of electing the president. People with the energy and commitment of Malcolm Turnbull, Janet Holmes a Court and Thomas Kenneally (ch sp) will not emerge. The heat and life will go out of the republic debate and there will be no direct election.
However, the direct-elect people are being optimistic if they think that the ARM and other minimalists will support them in a later move towards a direct-elect republic if this one goes down. The Andrew Robb conservatives for a republic would desert the cause. The only reason they support the present model is precisely to prevent a direct elect system which could change the system of government. (In so far as there is a Napoleon threat, this is it.)
So to that extent, the ARM is right. It is this model (or something very much like it) or none.
The message they have to sell is that a direct election would mean a Liberal candidate and a Labor candidate and one or other would be elected. We would have a politician president for sure. Who else can fight an election other than a politician?
With the help of conservatives (ironically egged on by the spectre of a direct-elect future) they will probably get across the line. Most people don’t focus on these things until the few days before the vote. When they do they may realise that a direct election means a politician president and that a parliamentary-prime ministerial appointment means a non-politician.
Reith may have misread this. He got great kudos on his side of politics for spoiling the referendum in 1988. But conservatives will not thank him in 1999 for blocking a minimal-change republic and leaving alive the possibility of a direct-elect republic and a wholesale change to the system.
There is a way to illustrate how little formal change will come with the November 6 proposal. The present Governor-General, Sir William Deane, could easily stay on as President after January 2001. People will wonder what all the fuss was about.