Tom Keneally is a former Chairman of the Australian Republican Movement

I am very grateful to be invited to this esteemed national forum. Gratefully I take the chance to attack a curious supposition which attaches to the question of the forthcoming Australian Republic. That is the supposition that the Republic is a subject fit only to be discussed in good times, when Australia is sweetly ticking over. The idea of a Republic, the argument goes, is an indulgence separate from real Australian life. Even to mention that name `Republic' at what might be the graveside of the Australian post World War II economy is somehow an act of ill grace, an insult to the other mourners, a wilful slight to the economically decimated.

Combined with this is another astounding canard: That somehow Republicans are only and selfishly concerned about a Republic. Education, the environment, the economy, questions to do with Aboriginal sovereignty, and the commonwealth in general are matters Republicans have wilfully scratched from their platform. While other Australians are democratically allowed to be concerned about a spectrum of ideas: are allowed to speculate simultaneously about the environment, education, immigration, the chances of the Olympic swim team, the hamstrings of various of the golden boys of the Australian winter, this libel asserts that Republicans are concerned only with a Republic. We are somehow portrayed as turning our backs on all other crises, including what are normally called "hard economic realities".

As much as any Australians, members of the ARM, are aware that the conditions faced by Australia's million unemployed are more than hard, are savage, threatening to the person, disorienting to the social identity of the young. I was a witness to the ruining of the neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. I am as aware as any Australian of the price we will all pay for institutionalising the unemployed. The unemployed will pay that price first, but then they will pass it on to the rest of us in the form of outrage and fury.

My real purpose is not however to claim piety or compassion, or to put forward a passionately held solution of the kind we all to our credit harbour in our hearts. I came here to argue against the purblind view which has it that there is utterly no nexus between our Constitutional arrangements and our general national health; to stand against the cramped vision of those who tell Australians we should look at our Constitutional arrangements only after we have fixed the economy, whenever that will be! This is the cow cocky, one tiny paddock at a time tradition of Australian thought. A prominent and talented Australian politician complained of it recently at the Australian Writers' Guild Awards. I wont say who the politician is, because we want Republicanism to be bipartisan, and also this particular man it happens to be a man has been listening to the wrong economic advisers for years and so deserves to be punished by a little anonymity, and if he keeps it up, will be, despite his gifts.

In any case he told the film and television writers, "If Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address in 1992, the chances are the journalists wouldn't report the speech but the so called `doorstop' interview that followed it. And the first question they'd ask is, `How come you're talking about democracy and freedom when there's a war on?'"

I have come here not only to talk of democracy and freedom while there's a war on. I have come here to argue as furiously as I can manage that there is a connection between our constitutional issues as involving the constitutional Monarchy, and the economy and all other areas of Australian life.

Nearly thirty years ago Donald Horne predicted that our attachment to an institution so distant and so irrelevant as the British Monarchy would disable us in all our dealings with the future. "Australia needs sudden shocks of reorientation within its society that will divorce it from the largely irrelevant problems of the British, make it possible to speed necessary changes and to develop some new sense of democracy." (From The Lucky Country)

As dangerous as it might be, I would like to stand aside for the moment from the sad truth that the present disaster is a universal one an idea which will bring no comfort to our bankrupts and unemployed and argue that so many of our present problems grow out of an old dependence upon the export of resources, a dependence which in happier times served us well but which in today's siege proof and often falling markets leaves us poorer and poorer. And if many of us can indulge themselves in the belief that a Republic has nothing to do with our political, diplomatic or economic future, some of our Asian neighbours see things differently. Asiaweek, the Singapore based journal, wrote in an editorial in July 1991, "It is a matter of urgency for Australia to fashion a place for itself in the new world order. As Britain disappears into Europe, the link to Buckingham Palace looks sillier and sillier. But a Republic would be more than an overdue constitutional correction. Australia must recognise that its future lies with the Asian Community of Nations. Most Asians agree that Australia has a rightful place there, but membership is not automatic. It is Australia's natural destiny to be a rich, important and powerful nation in the 21st century... Only Australians can decide whether they really want that. If they do, it might be a good idea to send a signal by cutting the royal apron strings."

Our own solid Financial Review argued for a Republic on similar quasi economic grounds on February 26 this year. In language which would be considered extreme in the mouths of members of the ARM, it concluded, "Britain dumped Australia a long time ago and it is time, after two hundred years, that Australia accepted this fact and cut the infant umbilical cord that tied so many people emotionally to Britain. This does not mean dumping Australia's British heritage or even dropping out of the British Commonwealth; it does mean that this country must accept its own maturity and the responsibilities that come with it."

We would be the first to admit that in the near term though the question of a Republic or a Monarchy is chiefly a constitutional one. We are told that a Republic is no use since on its own it cannot be depended on for full employment or an equitable society. That onus is never placed however on the constitutional Monarchy. So that to cease to contemplate a valid and mature change just because the economic fallout will not be immediate and expressible in statistical terms, is the equivalent of a farmer not keeping pigs because they don't grow wool. Very well then: the continuation of the Monarchy itself will bring no Australian any immediate economic advantage. Likewise the coming of the Republic will bring no Australian an immediate economic advantage.

But there ends the comparison. The Republic as both Asiaweek and the Financial Review agree offers much in its ultimate impact, in terms of the new self perception Australians will have and the new perception the world may have of us, and the ultimate rewards we will receive as a result. In the committee and ranks of the Republican Movement can be found entrepreneurs who believe that the Republic will focus our economic, cultural and diplomatic opportunities. Our entrepreneurs include Franco Belgiorno Nettis of Transfield, co-builder of the tunnel under Sydney Harbour and builder of a number of frigates for Australian and other navies; Harry Seidler, architect; Jenny Kee, couturier; Malcolm Turnbull, merchant banker et al; Janet Holmes A'Court.

There are some senses also in which painters like Colin Lanceley, playwrights like David Williamson, novelists like myself are also entrepreneurs or even maybe minor export heroes. But we'll let that pass.

Within the ARM therefore, we are not working for something we perceive as "merely symbolic" alone, even though the so called "merely symbolic" is a potent force in human life and deserves to be delivered of the demeaning adverb "merely." We are working because we also believe that there are fruitful consequences in all areas of Australian life to the coming of the Australian Republic. We are working because we believe that we cannot get to the future in the first place without passing this test: the test of whether we will go on defining ourselves in terms of an institution which is twelve thousand miles (19000 km) offshore, or whether we will at last define ourselves in terms of ourselves, repatriating our fealty from Windsor and placing it in ourselves.

More justification of that position later. For the moment I should perhaps say I chose the slightly mystifying title of this speech Silken Shroud or Honest Name ten days ago while I was in London promoting a book. At every interview I gave there, the question of the Australian Republic came up. Some commentators thought a Republic a sensible Australian initiative and expressed a degree of envy that we were running with it. Others thought it an act of ingratitude. A significant number of journalists raised the suggestion that there was an axis between Australian Republicans and Rupert Murdoch to destroy the British Monarchy... those who believed this thereby doing Mr Murdoch the honour of suggesting that his motives transcended mere questions of circulation. Others again asked such genuinely concerned questions as, "Without the Monarchy, might you fragment like Yugoslavia?" I was continually presented with Paul Keating's statement about the British abandoning Singapore, and was asked why therefore Britain had lost its great two battle ships there and some sixty or more thousands of English lads into Japanese prisoner of war camps. I said that it had to be understood that the Prime Minister was reacting to the Opposition during a parliamentary question time, and there were other things he said which were more accurate, particularly about Churchill's repeated attempts to keep the Australian divisions in the Middle East, and then to divert them on their way home.

And regularly I encountered the most antediluvian opinions about Australia, all of a piece with a column which appeared in the London Sunday Telegraph this March, in which the columnist Andrew Taylor wrote, "There is a kernel of truth in the view of Australians as somewhat simple minded folk. Originally settled by the detritus of 18th and 19th century Britain, Australia has the distinction of being the world's only entirely proletarian country. It is as if 1930s Tottenham had been picked up and plopped down in its entirety in a continent of unimaginable beauty, size, and wealth. Their architecture, sense of humour, and culture are almost entirely lower class..."

So that if there were misrepresentations in the Prime Minister's speech, they were richly reciprocated.

I then pointed to the contrast between our treatment of the Royal Family of Great Britain and the treatment given them by the British press. During the royal visit to Australia in February, the Monarch received no incivility from Republicans. The hand the Prime Minister offered her was, as far as we know, a genial hand, an honest one. By contrast the British attitude to the Royal Family seems related to that of Thai conspirators of the 18th and 19th century. Not permitted to touch the Monarch, they trapped him in a silken sack or shroud, and beat him to death inside it. The very British who are so appalled at the Australian honest hand have been beating the British Monarchy to death inside its silken, untaxed shroud.

The fact is that the behaviour of the Family, what happens on royal stairwells and in Royal bedrooms, is of no relevance to the Australian Republican impetus. Of far more significance is the fact that the Monarch recently went to Strasbourg and more unequivocally than ever before committed her government and her sovereignty to what she referred to as "the great European fraternity". In her speech, her kingdoms of Australia, New Zealand and Canada received no mention. Why should they, since she was obeying the instructions of her government at Westminster? But isn't her government also the government of Australia? And how is it that our Head of State can commit herself to an economic arrangement which disadvantages us. When we enter Britain, we enter through a door marked `Others'. When we trade in Europe, we trade through a door marked `Others'. And our own supposed Head of State has legitimised this arrangement.

I make this point not to imply any malice on the part of the Monarch, but merely to show that her position as Head of State of two nations, Great Britain and Australia, both of them oriented in diametrically opposed directions, has become impossible. Beside such a phenomenon as this, the question of how long Prince Charles spends in Princess Diana's company is a howling irrelevance. That is silken shroud stuff. There is no redemption for us in that.

For the question which really hangs over us is: what sort of people keep on investing their fealty in a nation whose ruling class despises them and whose powers have locked them out at Strasbourg? What sort of inferiority complex could commit us to consider the questioning of such a situation as somehow peripheral, an indulgence or an irrelevance? What journalist could look on such a phenomenon as normal, desirable, of no concern?

For fear of misunderstanding, it is important to say though, for the sake of the large numbers of people of British descent and heritage in Australia and for the sake of our future kinship with that nation, that this is not a rancorous movement, nor is it a movement associated with denial of the past or of the part of the British in Australian history, whether that part be the contributions derived from the Westminster system, the Chartists, the mass of British immigration, or even negative aspects, such as the bombing of Maralinga. And in the hope of making the point, I shall conclude with a tale of two women, both of whom represent different sides of the Australian tradition.

Last Sunday, the genial wife of a Manly committee man at Brookvale Oval, where Saints were not only humiliating Manly but not doing themselves much glory either, spoke about her English parents, and the obvious emotional, symbolic and spiritual nutriment they had drawn from George VI. When George VI, she said, broadcast on the radio soon after the start of World War II, her father had risen in his place and saluted. A similar scene occurred by the way in John Borman's brilliant film, Hope and Glory. She said she realised Australia had changed, but hoped that there would always be room for her tradition, for her memory.

Then in Adelaide in March another Australian woman rose as we were launching a branch of the Republican Movement for South Australia. She said that her children were all Australian citizens and were urging her to become an Australian citizen, which she would dearly love to do. But she claimed that she could not in conscience take that oath to the Monarch which anyone in Australia has to take if they wish to serve in parliament, in courts, the armed services, or to become an Australian citizen. Make it possible, she begged the Australian Republican Movement, for me to die an Australian.

In Monarchical Australia, there is room only for one of these two decent women. In the Republican vision there is room for both. For Republicanism is not the slamming of a door on the past, but the opening of one on the future. The constitutional Monarchy is now a limiting factor on our national identity and the real scope of our society. That door which awaits us, that. honest gate, must be opened in the end. There, beyond, in a new and glittering century knowing who we are, denying nothing, affirming all, no longer wearing the deceptive demeanour of a colony, we will have settled the most basic Australian question: Who we are. Then perhaps we can go on to make something even. further of ourselves, and to confirm, celebrate and redeem our remarkable history.