Robert Hughes is an internationally renowned art critic

This, as we all know, requires some amendment to our Constitution. Thomas Jefferson, one of the framers of the American republic and its constitution, and the third president of the United States, thought that since the earth belongs to the living and not the dead the constitution could be amended every thirty years, to suit the needs of each generation. But we Australian republicans are not 18th-century radicals. We are mild and conservative creatures, compared to the men of 1776. We just want to edit the last colonial bugs out of our program. We want to change a clause or two in a colonial document that was written for us not quite a century ago, a document which, strictly read, as the British monarch governing Australia through a viceroy. We want to enter the 20th century just after it ends, by the year 2001.

The desire for a Republic is not a peripheral matter. It has not lost momentum. It is the most pressing single issue in the broad framework of Australian politics. And the thing that most surprises me, when I come back every six months or so, is to see what efforts of delay and obfuscation are lavished on it. You would think there was no reason to delay putting it before the Australian people for a vote - and, I might add, a compulsory secret vote, which is one of the great assets of Australian democracy.

And yet, despite the electoral promises of John Howard and the Coalition, this hasn't happened. On the basis of those promises, some of you here tonight no doubt voted for Howard, in the belief that, while not a Republican, he would give Australians the opportunity to choose, or reject, the chance to have an Australian citizen as their head of state. For it is the essence of Australian Republicanism that it should not be the property of any political party, that it should transcend the ideologies and policy debates that divide us, and express what is common to all sides of our political aspirations.

Like many of you, I imagine, I am disappointed that the Government chose the Constitutional Convention Bill as a means of engaging in experiments in electoral science. But then, I am not a psephologist.

Surely what we needs is what we seem to have so little of; leadership. Is it beyond the wit of our Government, and indeed the parties in the Parliament, to agree on a method of gauging the wishes of the Australian people?

John Howard is a viscerally nostalgic monarchist. He makes no bones about it. And it is inevitable that most Australians will assume that he is doing his best to delay the inevitable outcome of a multi-ethnic, culturally tolerant Australia, an Australia vastly different to the one in which he and I grew up, which is the creation of a republic. In the end, the kind of monarchy that he and his allies affirm is not that of Elizabeth II and her heirs : it is the monarchy of King Canute. It has often been said that the main question about the Republic is not if, but when. And this is true, but there is still a wide gap between that if and that when, and a great deal of patient explanation remains to be done if we are to have a Republic by the emblematic date of 2001, the centenary of Federation. The irony is that Howard's one chance to enter the history books could be as the father of the Australian republic. He does not see it that way, of course; perhaps he cannot be persuaded of it; but the voters can be. We must send the strongest signal we can, tonight and wherever else we have the opportunity, that Australians want to have their say. They want this issue put before them, fairly, promptly and democratically.

I often wonder why some of us are so timid?

Disinformation, to begin with, and misunderstanding. Partly, I guess, because some Australians vaguely suppose that the object of the Republican movement is to convert Australia into a carbon copy of America, which is simply untrue. We no more want to install here a replica of the American republic than we seek to create a clone of the French one.

And yet the idea still continues to circulate that there's something un-Australian about the very idea of a republic. So that you have foaming right-wingers like Alan Jones, hopping up on radio and calling for a national boycott of Poppy King's lipsticks, in the hope that this will recall Australians to a state of monarchist virtue.

My friends, even our opponents would concede that the republic is more important than Alan Jones' taste in lipsticks.

Then there's the old and sometimes useful motto, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". But this doesn't apply too well to Australian attitudes towards monarchy in 1997. The magic cord frayed out and snapped some time ago. We no longer faint in front of the Town Hall and have to be carried away by the zambucks when the Queen grants us the royal epiphany. And there are several reasons for this. The most obvious of them is that so many Australians are no longer of English origin. And just as it is incumbent on certain Irish-Australian republicans not to fetishise the ancient woes of the convict Irish in Australia and carry them forward into the debate about modern statehood, so it is necessary for monarchists to pluck their heads from the sand and realize that other Australians whose families came from Pnom Penh or Riga or Athens or Beirut are just as Australian as those who originated in London or Manchester - but that they have no more automatic reverence for the English Queen than I do for Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Respect and esteem,. no doubt, and a certain curiosity, but the old-time mojo just isn't there.

The monarchist objection that I find weirdest of all is the cultural one. It says, in effect, that if Australia rejects the English queen as its head of state, then the cultural bonds between us and England will come undone. It is never clear exactly what this means. It isn't the Queen who sustains the cultural relations between us and England. And these relations aren't bonds, by the way : they are part of a freely chosen dialogue. The people who sustain it on both sides are writers, historians, artists, actors, musicians, film-makers and dancers, working from all sides of a common matrix which also includes other creative minds from all over the world and holds vigorous differences. The monarchy has absolutely nothing to do with these links, and when the Queen ceases to be our Head of State she will not take them with her. They exist at levels far deeper than political form. But they are also, as all culture is, continually in change.

And it is the prospect of change - not the kind or value of change, but change itself - that seems to alarm our monarchists. Do they imagine that, if our head of state is an Australian, that we will cease to speak English? That our shared and native tongue will collapse into pidgin forms of Croatian or Tagalog? That Australian kids will cease to read The Man from Snowy River and be forced, instead, to memorise great slabs of the Ramayana? That the few remaining 19th-century buildings in our cities that escaped the wreckers' balls of impeccably Monarchist developers in the 60s and 70s will be torn down and replaced by circular thatched huts? What is this nonsense about?

It's about apathy and nervousness. That apathy, that nervousness, are summed up in the good old anti-Republican bleat: without the Queen as our head of state, whom would we have to look up to? It's a question that doesn't even befit the citizens of a democracy. In a democracy you look up to values, to shared ideals, not to charismatic totems that have lost most of their charisma. In a democracy you take a level look around at your fellow citizens, back to the past, ahead to the future. That is the Australian way. It is the Republican way. It is the way we have to go.