The birth of the Republic of Australia

Speech by Bill Peach
SA ARM Annual Dinner
6 May 2005

I am for Australia rather than against the House of Windsor. I don't have any personal grudge against any of the Royal family, but I have to say that the prospect of Charles and Camilla as King and Queen of Australia just highlights the absurdity of our present arrangements. How many Australians would feel comfortable swearing allegiance to Charles and Camilla? To most if us, they are no more than figures in gossip magazines. We might as well swear allegiance to Elton John, or David Beckham. Or Mr Bean.

Remember, though, that Kings and Queens are only expected to do two things, to breed and to survive. Queen Elizabeth has done the first, more or less successfully, and she could do the second for a long time yet. So we must not hang around for the arrival of Charles and Camilla. We must decide our own fate as any grown-up nation should.

I am a Republican because I am an Australian, my ancestors came from other places, but I come from here. This is my home country. And as an Australian, I want the highest symbolic position in Australia, the Head of our Constitution, to be held by an Australian.

I don't think this is an impossibly chauvinistic demand. We are not talking about making an Australian the President of the United Nations, or the Pope. We're talking about the Constitutional Head of our own country, our own Head of State. Surely anyone who regards themselves as an Australian would say, yes, of course. Our Head of State should be one of us.

Well, the good news is that an overwhelming majority of Australians - two-thirds of us - do say yes, when the question is put that way - should our Head of State be an Australian, not the British Monarch?

Only one-third of us would still prefer to keep the monarch as our Head of State, and that percentage is falling: firstly, because a lot of monarchists are old, over sixty - not that there's anything wrong with being over sixty, but as the ranks of those monarchists thin, they are not being replaced by the young, because very few young Australians think that way. The second thing sapping monarchists' morale is the realization that the monarch will not always be Queen Elizabeth, whom they're so fond of. Sooner or later, it will be King Charles and Queen Camilla, whom they are not so fond of.

I am still baffled as to why even one third of us would prefer any British monarch ahead of an Australian for what is, or should be, a local job: our Head of State.

If it's the glamour and romance of royalty they are so attached to, well, nobody is proposing to deprive them of Buckingham Palace or the Changing of the Guard or those glittering occasions and fairytale royals. It just isn't necessary to have one of those fairytale royals as our Head of State.

Even the ACM, Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, has not tried to pretend that Queen Elizabeth is an Australian. But their leaders such as Professor David Flint are very fond of fairytales, and they've launched their own little fairytale, that the Governor-General is our Head of State.

If you listen closely, you'll hear the muttered words virtual Head of State, or de facto Head of State - weasel words which mean they know it isn't really true.

And of course it isn't. The words "Head of State" don't appear in the Constitution. But if the title "Head of State" means the constitutional and ceremonial and symbolic head of our country, then our Constitution makes it crystal clear that that person is the Queen.

That is clear and unmistakable, right from the first article of our Constitution which states that our Federal Parliament consists of the Queen, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

The Constitution goes on to say that the Governor-General is the local representative of the Queen, no more than that. He (it's always been a he) does not represent Australia or Australians, he's not even necessarily an Australian himself, and in fact for much of our history, the Governor-General has been British, not Australian.

So it's a complete fraud to suggest the Governor-General is our Head if State, and even he has said it's the Queen. The monarchists have invented this tactic, this red herring, because they really can't tell us why our Head of State should not be an Australian.

They have another tactic, which is to avoid the question of who is the Head of State, and instead talk about the Constitution that works so well, that serves us so well, that it would be so dangerous to tamper with in any way.

They say our Constitution delivers for all Australians. Well, yes, and just now we're seeing what it's going to deliver us next. It's going to deliver us Charles and Camilla.

So our Constitution prevents any Australian from becoming our Head of State, and instead, serves up to us Charles and Camilla, and this is a Constitution that is working for all Australians and doesn't need fixing? In the immortal words of John Elliot: "pig's arse".

Of course you can say anything you like about the Constitution. You can use the classic fear tactic, as the monarchists do, of saying its dangerous to even touch the Constitution.

You can say these things because Australians know so little about our Constitution. Natasha Stott Despoja quoted in the Senate one survey which found that 41% of Australians didn't even know we had a Constitution.

I reckon about .41% of Australians have read the Constitution, and suspect this suits the monarchists very well, because some of it reads very strangely in the 21st century. It's a document of its time drawn by men of its time. Once again, I'm afraid they were all men. Their basic task was to bring the Australian colonies together into Federation.

This was a political reform as important then as an Australian republic is now, a century later. It had to be done, even though the conservatives moaned that it would bring ruin upon our heads - nothing new under the sun, is there? - and the fathers of Federation did a pretty good job of it, but they were mainly concerned with defining the powers of the Federal Government versus the States. They couldn't see into the future, and that's why we've changed the Constitution before, and we'll do it again.

Their Constitution didn't, and still doesn't, describe how Australia is really governed by a Prime Minister and a Cabinet, and their Constitution gave remarkable powers to the Queen, such as the power to reject laws passed by our Federal Parliament.

Why was it so? Because they were men of their time, and their time was the end of the 19th century. Queen Victoria, who is the Queen referred to in our Constitution, had reigned over the British Empire for 60 years. The Empire was at the height of its power and glory, and these men, the Fathers of Federation, considered themselves citizens of the British Empire, a sort of super-country much grander and more important than Australia.

They saw no problem, no conflict of loyalties, in bestowing on us a British Head of State, because they saw themselves as British. Many of them literally were. We forget this, but it was only in the ten years before Federation that we had an Australian-born majority in this country, for the first time since 1787.

We were an immigrant country. Most of the immigrants were British. Many of them occupied positions of powers. Many of the men who drew up the Constitution, as well as the Prime Ministers Cook and Fisher, who said we would defend England to the last man and the last shilling in the Great War, and Billy Hughes, who tried and failed to get Australians to vote for conscription in that war - all these men were literally British. They were born in Britain. When they talked of Britain as "the mother country" and "home" they weren't just being sentimental - they meant it.

Of course a lot of other Australians talked of Britain as "home" for sentimental reasons. My mother was one of them. Quite ironic really, considering her Scots ancestors were kicked off their lands by the First Duke of Sutherland, an Englishman who forcibly replaced all his Highland farmers with sheep. He called this his "improvements", which were like our "tax reforms", not as benign as they sounded.

Mum's ancestors on the other side were English, "terribly English" she used to say. But that was even more ironic, because unbeknown to Mum, her English forebears were kicked out even more forcibly than the Scots - transported to Van Diemens Land on one of those early package tours so thoughtfully arranged by the English Government. The food and the accommodation below decks weren't so hot, but, as they say, the price was right.

Well, Mum wasn't alone in being sentimental about the mother country, but she was born a century ago. People traveled around the country in Cobb & Co. coaches. They suited the times. They don't suit our times. We have moved on, as our Prime Minister says, although this is one of the areas in which he seems to have great difficulty in moving on, and is more interested in staying put.

But the majority of Australians have moved on. We know that we are a separate nation and separate nationality to Britain, and we know that it no longer fits us to have a British Head of State when we should have our own.

The referendum was not lost because most of us want the British monarch to be our Head of State. It was lost because it was controlled by the enemies of the Republic, and they turned it into a quite different question, the one on which republicans were divided.

That was the question of how to chose an Australian Head of State. "Divide and rule" usually works, and it worked in the first referendum, but it won't work again if the policy of the ARM is followed.

Because our policy is now what I think it should always have been - to turn the whole question over to those who will make the ultimate decision - the voting public, the people of Australia.

We must consult the people by plebiscite, a poll of the people. We want to ask them not just whether they want an Australian Head of State, but how the Head of State should be selected and what the title of the Head of State should be.

Unity is strength, and the ARM, the Corowa People's Convention Committee of which I am Convenor, and just about everyone who really wants to see a republic in our lifetime - we're all agreed that these are questions for the people as a whole to consider and to settle, and that we will support the popular choices which emerge from the plebiscite, and they will be the choices put back to the people in a referendum.

I'm confident that this process will bring us majority support in a majority of states for an Australian Head of State. I believe it would win now, and win easily in all states, if we had the plebiscite this year and the referendum at the same time as the next election.

When it will happen is not up to us of course. It is up to the Australian Government, and when the government is prepared to put these questions to the people in a fair and inclusive way.

I don't think any attempt to introduce a minimalist republic will work, not after that last referendum. I think we, the people, expect to be consulted about the type of republic we want, and we have the right to be consulted, as the free citizens of a free democracy.

Like the diggers if Eureka Stockade who swore under the Southern Cross to stand by each other and defend their rights and their liberties, we have to insist on our rights and our liberties. In particular, on our right to be consulted about the shape and the meaning and the future of our country, and our liberty to vote for the best kind of Australia we can foresee for ourselves and our children.

The diggers of Eureka lost the battle, but they ultimately won all the rights they'd fought for.

The Fathers of Federation lost the first referendum, and battled for eleven years after the first Convention before they achieved the Commonwealth of Australia.

We will win too. It's a matter of time, but we have to stick to it and stand our ground, because in the end our efforts will be rewarded, and I believe, and I'm sure you believe, it will be worth it.

An attitude of independence can lead to all kinds of worthwhile things. That is why it is very important that we should not wait to let fate decide this matter for us, at the end of the Queen's reign.

We must decide our own fate, and we must do it as soon as possible. Australia will be a better country and we will be a better people when we stand up, at last, on our own feet. There is a birth coming that will be more important to us than any royal birth. It will be the birth of the Republic of Australia.

Bill Peach is a member of the ARM's National Committee