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It
is unlikely that the dream of being that fairly melodramatic
figure - "father of the republic" - is very much on
John Howard's mind this Saturday morning. Nonetheless
it is a destiny he may be facing and even embracing
within a few years.
At last year's annual dinner of the Australian Republican
Movement, Robert Hughes told a story germane to the
question of whether we have an Australian head of state
or not. He said that on Bill Hayden's visit to represent
us at the 50th anniversary of the United Nations last
year, that organisation, and the United States officials
in charge of the protocol of the event, had decided
not to accord him the honours and the security appropriate
to a head of state.
Recently a United States official I asked about this
told me that at the time the American authorities checked
with the British Embassy in Washington, which quite
correctly told them that Hayden was not a head of state,
that Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain (note, not
of Australia) was our head of state, and Hayden was
her surrogate. That is, better than many Australians,
the United Nations, the United States and the British
Embassy in Washington all understood our constitution
correctly. Ultimately, and only through political pressure,
the level of security and honour was upgraded. But all
parties to this transaction understood that grudging
respect was very close to no respect at all. Hayden
was discovering that it was a very limited honour he
could enjoy under the rubric of the lion and unicorn,
and that as for the rest of us, his better chance of
glory lay in the kangaroo and emu.
This proposition remains unchanged by the recent election,
and faces the government of John Howard as naturally
as it would face any other government. Given that there
is hardly an Australian left who believes that the interests
and culture of Australia, and the interests and culture
of the United Kingdom, coincide, it is interesting that
we continue to go along with the situation. Chris Hurford,
a former diplomat, recently wrote of this problem. "I
became convinced of the cause when I represented our
country amongst 50 million Americans in the north-east
of the United States as consul-general in New York.
Month after month we had members of the British royal
family visiting the eastern United States, marketing
exports and supporting charities - but of course, they
were always British ones. On no occasion has Australia's
head of state promoted our nation by means of an overseas
tour; this is not the fault of the British royal family
but the inevitable outcome of maintaining another nation's
head of state as ours."
The first reason why Howard may become the father of
the republic is that he himself has cleared the way
for the process. As a matter of Liberal Party policy,
he has declared himself in favour of a constitutional
convention, to be called in his first term, in which
a number of constitutional issues will be broached,
but in which the chief agenda item will be the republic.
Other items for debate would probably be questions of
Aboriginal title in Australia, and whether and how this
should be recognised, of coast-to-coast human rights
and whether they should be constitutionally codified,
and issues of Federal-State powers.
Howard has guaranteed that if the convention wants the
republic, he will commit his Government to support it.
Despite a recent estimate that an election of delegates
would be costly, he has stood up to any pressure to
revise this undertaking. Indeed, as the conventions
of the 1890s showed, there could be incalculable pay-off
(yes, even in a dollar sense!) from a well-conducted
constitutional convention. With one part of his brain
he may wish the convention to produce such a confused
mandate on the republic that the issue will be indefinitely
side lined. But he is also running the risk that activism
on the part of citizens might ensure that the convention
recommends the republic. One Liberal recently described
the convention, perhaps a little wishfully, as John
Howard's mechanism for permitting a gracious dismount
from the royal horse.
Two things in particular can John Howard do. He can
assure the populace that what is intended is an Australian
agenda of fraternity, not a cultural revolution - not,
that is, an apparatchik rewriting of Australia (although
God knows large swathes of it are suppressed now), not
a smashing of coronation mugs, not a frantic excising
of the engraved VR from the architraves of bush courthouses,
nor the forced renaming of all those institutions, from
pubs to hospitals to charities to golf clubs, in whose
title the word "Royal" occurs. Howard can say that the
republic is a maturation of what Australians have done,
not a cancellation. He can persuade his partners in
the Federation to project the same message.
Second, Howard has the capacity to attend to the boring
but major question of defining the powers of the President.
Our Governor-General, whatever his currency at the United
Nations and wherever else he goes, has startling powers,
powers more appropriate to a Tsarist empire than a free
country. For one thing, the Governor-General is given
the power to annul or reserve legislation of the Federal
Parliament, and, as we know, to dismiss an Australian
Prime Minister in certain circumstances. He (it has
always been a he) is stated to be Commander-in-Chief
of the Armed Forces. It is true that all these powers
are moderated by Australian parliamentary convention
derived ultimately from Westminster. But what are such
things doing there on the page, in our central document?
The reason the monarch and her representative were given
such wide reserve powers was the fear of the imperial
parliament in 1900, the year the Australian constitution
was legislated in Westminster, that an Australian parliament
might try to frame laws prejudicial to British interests
in the region. The imperial parliament never foresaw
a day when an Australian would inherit those powers,
as Sir Isaac Isaacs did in 1931. Leaving 1975 aside
for now, it is simply true that the Australians who
have exercised the power of Governor-General have admirably
and sensibly refrained from the exercise of the more
exorbitant of these reserve powers. It is very interesting,
and more eloquent of cargo-cultism than good sense,
that monarchists expect that the restraint governors
general have shown will break down the instant we become
unambiguously our own people! In other words, it's all
right to have a governor general nominated by the Prime
Minister and appointed by the Queen, but God help you
if you have someone appointed - directly or indirectly
- by the Australians!
Politicians and the Australian people are at variance
on the issue of how to elect the President. Nearly all,
if not all, of the politicians of both sides of Parliament
want the House of Representatives and the Senate, voting
together, to elect our future head of state, whereas
most of the people still want to vote directly. There
are certainly benefits to indirect election. Direct
election favours those who have the money to campaign.
Direct elections will tend to involve political parties
or political blocs, whereas an Australian elected to
the post by a two-thirds majority of both houses would
have, by definition, to be a person of bipartisan, non-political
support, because a party majority in the House of Representatives
is very rarely matched by a majority in the Senate.
Maybe in time these arguments in favour of delegating
the power to Parliament will resonate with citizens.
For the present, the people remain strongly in favour
of direct election. They have been encouraged - ironically
- by such monarchists as Tony Abbott, who asks, "What
is wrong with the people having a say?" (What indeed?
They have precious little say under the system Mr Abbott
stands for.) I suspect that when the republic becomes
an inevitability, even Tony Abbott will plump for the
parliamentary option as enthusiastically as - in his
proposals last year - Paul Keating did.
In any case, if it is decided that indirect election
is the answer, then definition of the reserve powers
of the President would be wise. These reserve powers
would include, for example, the power to appoint as
prime minister the person who can form a government
with adequate support in the House of Representatives.
They might also include the power to be titular head
of the armed forces. If direct election is in the end
the desired option, definition of those powers would
be quite wise, merely to avoid the unlikely event of
some sort of popularity contest between Prime Minister
and President.
However they are defined, it is true that this crucial
question of powers is a yawn for most Australian men
and women. It is fraught with the risk too that from
behind that veil of boredom, opponents of change will
conjure up illusory dragons to keep Australians away
from their inheritance. If, however, John Howard, the
Mr Belt-and-Braces of Australian politics, says that
defining the powers is a sane and responsible option,
most Australians will believe him.
How fascinating that it will be easier for John Howard,
who is indifferent to the proposition, but of course
not indifferent to popular opinion to deliver a copper-bottomed
four-square republic than it will ever be for those
who, like Keating, dreamed of it. The two events above
all which are likely to exert this pressure are the
election of Tony Blair as Prime Minister of Great Britain
next year, and the Sydney Olympics in 2000. If Tony
Blair is elected, it is very likely that the ceremonial
role of the monarchy in British society will shrink,
and that indeed the monarchy will be reduced to the
status of a significant British family. It will be hard
in that situation for the monarchy credibly to maintain
its position as the overarching source of sovereignty
and identity for Australia, New Zealand, Canada and
Great Britain, or for that matter Tuvalu and the Solomons.
Could we continue to pretend that these people who know
nothing of us are the source of our national validity
and the focus of our allegiance?
The second issue will be the Olympics, and it relates
to the earlier story about Bill Hayden. Despite all
the decent and brilliant Australians - Sir Isaac Isaacs,
Sir Zelman Cowen, Sir Ninian Stephen - who have filled
that post, we are fools if we dare enter the Games with
that dependent office as our symbol. And we dare not,
if we want to be seen aright, enter the Games under
the aegis of the monarch of Great Britain. It is very
little use telling us that she is also Queen of Australia
when two thirds of us, according to the polls, and the
British Embassy in Washington as well, simply do not
accept the British monarch as our sovereign.
The Games always serve as a focus upon the standards
of the society that hosts them. We continue to hide
the considerable glories of our community behind two
utterly dispensable fictions. One, that the Aborigines
had no sovereignty and entitlement to Australia, the
other that the Queen of Great Britain stands for who
we are. If we are still indulging in these fantasies
by the time the Olympics arrive, we shall deserve to
be judged harshly and the aftermath of these fictional
versions of ourselves will resonate well into the next
century.
Years ago I debated John Howard at St John's College
at Sydney University. Our rostrum stood in front of
a huge picture of two men perishing of thirst in the
Australian wilderness, perhaps a symbol of Australian
thirst for a valid identity. Howard's position was basically
this: that he considered a republic dangerous. But,
when asked did he see Australia being eternally under
the sovereignty of the British Crown, he said, "Ask
me in 20 years' time". And of course the question then
was asked, if it might be safe in 20 years' time, why
should it not be safe now?
Mr Howard won't have to answer that question in 20 years
for, by a grand historic irony, we will be a republic
by 2000. John Howard, having long argued against the
option, will be the Prime Minister, who, with the authority
of the populace at referendum, and in a celebratory
spirit of consensus, is likely to make it occur. Such
an apparently drastic change in personal opinion would
not be unexampled in Australian history. An earlier
generation told us of Yes-No Reid, a New South Wales
politician who, having fought Federation for most of
the '90s, yet became the fourth prime minister of a
federal Australia. Argument is one thing. But reality
in the end catches up with everyone.
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