Greg Barns is the chairman of the Australian Republican Movement.

EVERY picture tells a story and last Friday's front page of The Australian was no exception. There they were, the would-be king of Australia and his subject, our Prime Minister. Dressed to the nines and surrounded by the glitter of an ancient world, the Guildhall. Or as Paul Kelly put it, "a memorial to British pageantry and glory".

For many Australians the image of us as a nation celebrating our centenary of Federation in such surrounds is incongruous. What does it tell the rest of the world about us? And the Guildhall dinner wasn't the only event in London that jarred with many Australians.

Justice Michael Kirby's Menzies Lecture (Opinion, July 4) was another exercise in myth-making – this time about last year's republic campaign and the lessons to be drawn from it.

Kirby might be a distinguished High Court judge but if his Menzies Lecture on the republic referendum is any indication, he is no political commentator.

Kirby, like most people associated with the monarchist campaign, continues to attack the republicans for failing to convince the Australian people to set aside their deeply ingrained caution in large constitutional changes.

What Kirby refuses to acknowledge is that it was lies and deception, coupled with a grossly inadequate public education campaign, that sank Australia's opportunity to enter the centenary of Federation with our own head of state.

Kirby lists what he calls 10 errors made by the republic campaign. Let me just pull apart a few of these, which are clearly wrong.

For not the first time we have a monarchist throwing the elitist tag at republicans. The reality is that the republican campaign was inherently less elitist than that of our opponents.

There could not be a less elitist message than to argue that Australians should cast off its commitment to an outmoded, sexist, anti-Catholic institution that sits at the pinnacle of the British class system.

And while Kirby is right to say that the voting patterns in the referendum showed higher income earners and those living in the cities were more likely to vote for the republic, this was not the fault of the republican campaign strategy.

The fault lies with governments that, over many years, have failed to educate Australians from an early age about how our system of government works. It is not elitist to say that this lack of knowledge is particularly evident among those who went through an education system where civics education or political science were not taken seriously.

The lack of knowledge about how our current constitution works, and therefore what the changes would or would not mean, laid fertile ground for a ruthlessly cynical scare campaign against which I never heard Justice Kirby protest.

Kirby then goes on to talk about what he calls the pundit error. He says that the republicans, by using well-known Australians to support their cause, failed to reach the grass roots. Of course this criticism comes from a campaign which had as its heroes former chief justice Harry Gibbs, Sydney University Chancellor Leonie Kramer and Australian Broadcasting Authority chairman David Flint, not to mention scions of the Adelaide establishment.

In fact, it is fair to say that most of the Australian Republican Movement campaigning on the ground was spent in draughty church halls and on windswept street corners.

Our job was to try and fill the gaps left by the woefully inadequate public education campaign. It should be noted that less than $20 million of taxpayer funds was spent on this education campaign, in contrast to the $430 million tax reform campaign. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on educative material that we distributed as best we could with limited resources.

Finally, let me put to bed the myth that we had the media on our side. Kirby says that the media's coverage of the referendum was so uneven and biased it became part of the problem. It tended to reinforce opinions that this was a push by intellectual, well-off east coasters not necessarily to be trusted.

For a start, the Brisbane Courier Mail never supported the ARM model, nor did the West Australian. Furthermore, most talkback hosts were either indifferent or hostile, as was the case with Alan Jones.

The bottom line of the republic referendum is not, as Kirby and his fellow monarchists erroneously and continually claim, the republicans' flawed strategy and hubris that led to the defeat in November. It is simply that scare politics, as Robert Menzies well knew, generally works if run effectively.

As we celebrate the centenary of Federation, we can perhaps reflect on the lost opportunity to deliver a federation with an Australian head of state rather than one who lives 19,000km away and is sovereign of a country which, as Phillip Knightley pointed out on Tuesday (Opinion, July 4) has emotionally drifted apart from Australia.

When we celebrate the bicenentary of Federation let's make sure The Australian's front page record of the event captures an Australian head of state with his or her fellow Australians in a venue as far away from the Guildhall as possible.

Greg Barnes was national campaign director for last year's yes campaign.