A republic in the too-hard basket

At first blush, the title of Esther Anatolitis’ new book, When Australia Became a Republic, seems nonsensical. Australia is not a republic. It remains, to the chagrin of many including her, a constitutional monarchy.

Nor is that legal status likely to change any time soon. Just last Sunday Anthony Albanese, in an interview in Scotland where he had gone to pay obeisance to King Charles at Balmoral Castle, told the host of the ABC’s Insiders program, David Speers, there would be no move to make Australia a republic so long as he was in charge.

“I think I’ve made it clear that I wanted to hold one referendum while I was prime minister, and we did that,” he said.

In fact, Albanese had not made that clear, which is why his comments made news.

Before that interview, it was understood he would run just one referendum – the failed attempt to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament – in his first term. It was not clear the commitment applied to subsequent terms.

Given the shambolic state of the opposition, Labor’s huge parliamentary majority and Albanese’s grip on the leadership, it’s quite possible there will be not only a second but also a third term.

Even if Albanese were to change his mind, and act in accordance with the Labor Party’s policy platform, which advocates working “toward establishing an Australian republic with an Australian head of state”, the chances of running a successful referendum seem slim. Referendums in Australia have a record of failing unless they have bipartisan support. The 1999 referendum on a republic failed for this reason, just like the Voice referendum.

It is perhaps a measure of Albanese’s battle fatigue following the Voice failure that in the last parliament there was a minister, Matt Thistlethwaite, whose job title included being assistant minister for the republic. There is no such portfolio now.

Furthermore, public support for a change seems to have declined. A YouGov poll taken last year, to mark 25 years since the Republic referendum, found a “Yes” vote would get 41 per cent support – 4 percentage points lower than in 1999.

Given these realities, the title of Anatolitis’ book, which was released this week, was clearly not meant to be taken literally. Instead, it is a trope intended to hammer a point that, to quote the publisher’s blurb, “Australia became a republic many years ago – culturally, if not yet constitutionally”.

In When Australia Became a Republic, Anatolitis, the current co-chair of the Australian Republic Movement (ARM), sets out a long list of democratic and cultural changes that, she argues, have demonstrated this country’s increasing independence from the United Kingdom.

The key to reviving support for the republic, she tells The Saturday Paper, is to get people to see throwing off the undemocratic constraint of monarchy as “the culmination of a process, not the beginning”.

“What we should be championing is the quality of democratic innovation, which is what has set Australia apart from the rest of the world for a very long time.”

Thus, she says, Australia “became a republic” in 1856, when South Australia introduced the secret ballot, a reform still known in much of the world, including the United States, as the “Australian ballot”.

Australia also became a republic in 1930, Anatolitis says, when Labor prime minister James Scullin became “the first prime minister in any Commonwealth nation to end ‘get what you’re given’ governors-general”.

“The previous practice had been that a fancy, titled person who the monarch knew personally would be shipped out to supervise the colony. But in 1930 Scullin said, ‘Mate, look, no, we’ve actually got this incredibly well-qualified person who’s been a High Court justice and a Supreme Court justice, and knows the Australian Constitution inside out and backwards, and we’re putting forward Sir Isaac Isaacs to be the first Australian-born governor-general’.

“And at the next meeting of Commonwealth prime ministers, this became the standard.”

Another instance of becoming was in World War II, Anatolitis continues, “when the UK abandoned us militarily and decided there was no longer going to be any special, preferential military and defence relationship between the Crown and the Commonwealth nations. And so, very rapidly, Australia had to look towards the US.

“In the ’70s, we became a republic when the UK ended the preferential trade relationship with us. But of course, by then, they were not our major trading partner. We’d already well and truly moved on,” she says.

Another example of Australia’s independence: the 2000 Olympics, at which Cathy Freeman lit the flame and went on to win the women’s 400 metres.

“This was a moment where the world saw Australian culture in all its confidence and diversity without a single reference … to the United Kingdom or to the monarchy,” Anatolitis says.

Yet despite all its democratic innovation and cultural diversity, Australia remains bound to the “outdated, undemocratic” institution of the monarchy.

“So our elected prime minister has to go to the other side of the world, to meet some … work-from-home, job-share head of state. And bow to a person from another country in their castle,” she says.

“That is just completely out of step with contemporary Australia.”

It is more than a symbolic embarrassment, as was proved on November 11, 1975, when the then governor-general, Sir John Kerr, exercised the reserve powers conferred by his position as the monarch’s representative to remove Gough Whitlam’s government.

When Anatolitis’ book was conceived about a year ago, as a means of reviving debate about the republic issue, it was timed for release a month ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Dismissal. Albanese’s display of deference to the king and to the status quo kicked things along somewhat.

Perhaps various events planned to commemorate Kerr’s coup will also bring more public attention to the “absurd” constitutional situation.

“The more conversations we open up about it, the more people say, ‘Well, of course, that makes no sense. Of course, Australians don’t believe anyone was born to rule. Of course, in a democracy, every role should be democratically elected,’ ” she says.

The challenge is “fostering understanding of how Australian democracy and Australian politics actually work – the fact that in the Constitution it says that, basically, Australia as a nation state exists at the monarch’s pleasure, the fact that the governor-general can convene parliament whenever they like. The fact that the prime minister doesn’t even rate a mention and the word democracy is not even mentioned,” says Anatolitis.

It’s an uphill battle, suggests Jenny Hocking, who wrote the definitive, two-volume biography of Gough Whitlam and has done more than any other to detail the perfidious goings-on of 1975.

Hocking battled for 10 years for access to correspondence between Buckingham Palace and Kerr, leading up to the Dismissal, before the High Court ordered the release of more than 200 so-called “palace letters” in May 2020.

“We were told for decades that the queen had no part to play in Kerr’s decision,” says Hocking, who is emeritus professor of history at Monash University. “Well, she was discussing that possibility with him for two months before he dismissed the government. The use of the reserve powers is a clear part of the palace letters …

“The Dismissal was developed in secrecy, and it was essential that Kerr maintained the secrecy around it. He himself acknowledged that … [and High Court Justice Anthony] Mason warned him he would be seen as deceptive if he didn’t warn Whitlam and discuss it with him or discuss his options, which of course, Kerr did not do.”

That secrecy, she says, “flowed into the history that followed”.

If the Dismissal itself was not sufficient to spur constitutional change, nor the revelation that the monarchy was itself deeply involved in the planning, it is hard to see it happening now. Clearly, says Hocking, Anthony Albanese – an astute if timid reader of the public mood – sees it as a losing proposition.

Of the prime minister’s comments to Insiders on Sunday, she says: “I think it’s very disappointing, but it’s entirely understandable. There’s one lesson out of the result of the Voice referendum – and the particularly, I thought, nasty elements to the campaign around it – a lot of misinformation and sort of currying of fear needlessly.”

Also, she concedes, the ARM is not the force it once was.

“It is going through a lull. I was on the national committee some years ago when it had a reasonably high profile, because Peter FitzSimons was involved in it as the chair. He was a very strong fundraiser for ARM, and a very strong media presence.”

She means no disrespect to the current leadership of the movement, “but while there isn’t a political support base, it’s a tremendous struggle”.

Ironically, says Hocking, the republic movement in the UK now is probably more visible than it is here.

“They’ve created that very powerful ‘Not my king’ message. They were present, you know, in quite significant numbers at the coronation, protesting the cost.”

Maintaining the monarchy, including staffing and securing two dozen homes, the use of helicopters and private or RAF jets, unpaid taxes and other costs, is very expensive – a whopping £510 million a year, according to the UK campaigning group Republic. On the other hand, some estimates suggest the royals are worth several times more to the UK economy in tourist spending alone. Australia’s representatives of the monarchy, the governor-general and the various state governors bring no such economic boon.

They also cost a lot less, though it’s not nothing. One member of the ARM board, academic Peter Botsman, calculates that scrapping all the vice-regal positions would save Australia some $1 billion over a decade.

The major argument for a republic, of course, is not economic but democratic.

It is about becoming “a fully independent nation”, says Hocking, free of “the last vestiges of colonisation”.

“Whitlam called them colonial relics, but those relics proved to be extremely powerful.”

The reserve powers that Kerr used to sack a legitimate government, and install another that did not have the support of a majority in the House of Representatives, she says, had not been used in Britain for close to 200 years.

“They were presumed to have been overtaken by the democratic structures and forces that infused our parliamentary system,” she says.

“The resonances of the Dismissal are enormous. It’s not for nothing that we’re still talking about it.”

Not acting, though.

One of the glibly effective arguments against the Voice – “If you don’t know, vote no” – was also mounted against the republic referendum in 1999.

It is an argument, says Anatolitis, that elevates ignorance as a quality of citizenship, “and that is a campaign approach to be ashamed of”.

The only way to really combat it is through lifting Australia’s “abysmal” level of civic education. Both women agree on that, and the educative process takes time.

The fact is that a great majority of Australians were not even born when the Dismissal happened.

“I’m used to my students for the last 20 years telling me that,” says Hocking.

Even among those who know the history, other issues loom much larger, as Albanese implicitly acknowledged in his ABC interview. His focus, he said, was “on cost of living and on making a real, practical difference to people’s lives”.

Moreover, there is no need to worry about our current governor-general, Sam Mostyn, doing a Kerr. She is clearly well aware she has no political mandate. When she speaks, here or in international settings, notes Hocking, “she has clearly done so on the advice of and operating through the department of either Prime Minister and Cabinet or Foreign Affairs.”

Perhaps, though, the biggest hurdle to moving to a republic is not a lack of civic education or complacency engendered by the exemplary behaviour of the incumbent.

It is the question of what an alternative would look like. This, says Hocking, is a “huge problem” that has had republic advocates “tying themselves in knots” for years.

In 1999, she says, John Howard, cunning political operator that he was, exploited divisions over the model for an Australian head of state, “most effectively, from his point of view”.

Those divisions remain.

The ARM’s preference would see Australia’s various parliaments nominate potential heads of state, from which the voters would choose one to serve a five-year term. As co-chair of ARM, Anatolitis endorses this model.

But even among ARM’s executive there are other views. Botsman, for example, proposes much more radical change.

“My argument is that we can’t be talking about minimalist changes, where we just change the governor-general to become a president, either an elected president or an appointed president,” he says.

Botsman would replace the vice-regal system with an electoral council comprising the prime minister and the leaders of the various states and territories, who would not only carry out all the functions currently performed by the governor-general and state governors but also would meet on a monthly basis to coordinate their actions to address all of “what’s not working in our whole system of government”.

The Botsman plan would be like a supercharged national cabinet. All representatives at local, state and federal level would be elected every four years on a single day.

Call it the maximalist position.

In contrast, Jenny Hocking advocates the bare minimum change, such as would stop any future head of state from meddling. She opposes the idea of a directly elected head of state, although she concedes there is a strong push for one.

There are strong arguments for her position. Elections inevitably bring political partisanship and invite candidates to adopt positions on policy, which may not accord with the government of the day. An elected head of state, she argues, would become an alternative power.

One only has to look to the current state of America to see the consequences of a president at odds with the legislature.

“I think that anything that suggests a mandate in terms of a direct election of a governor-general is incompatible completely with our system of government,” she says.

Her proposal, she says, avoids the whole problem of “grappling with the almost impossible, impenetrable question of what the powers of an Australian head of state should be”.

Instead, it should be clear what power they don’t have: to remove a government.

“The other powers are really subsidiary to that, in the sense that they are either acting on the advice of responsible ministers, or they’re much more clearly established constitutionally.

“A head of state would not have power over the formation of government. That would be quite explicitly determined by the House of Representatives.”

Simple, really. And yet, 50 years after the dismissal of the Whitlam government, it’s still stuck in the too-hard basket.