Australia is paving its way to becoming a republic

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "The risk," warned Tony Abbott, ex-director of Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy, "is that we will destroy the legitimacy of the existing Constitution without producing an acceptable alternative, and end up like Canada, which has been left fractured by two decades of constitutional navel-gazing."

But it's too late for hesitations: Australia is going to become a republic.

It isn't clear yet exactly what kind of republic, and there still has to be a referendum, but basically it is a done deal. In a series of statements over the past week, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard has made it clear that next February's Constitutional Convention will have the task of formulating a concrete proposal for a republic that will then be put to Australians in a referendum.

Many people had doubts about Howard's true intentions, for he opposed a republic when Labor leader Paul Keating floated the idea before the 1993 election. When Howard instead promised a constitutional convention before his Liberal-led coalition won the 1996 election, he was widely suspected of trying to bury the issue.

Suspicions deepened when Howard announced that he would pick half of the convention 152 delegates himself -- but the people Howard has nominated are unanimously conceded to be a fair cross- section of Australian society and opinion. A postal ballot will elect the other half of the delegates by Dec. 9, and Howard has now given the convention a precise task and promised a referendum on the outcome. Why?

The world is full of people who would be surprised to learn that the Queen of England (and Scotland, and Northern Ireland, and New Zealand, and even Canada) is also Queen of Australia. Indeed, it has always been a contentious issue in Australia itself, since so many of the country's early settlers were Irish and convicts -- the two categories were not fully interchangeable -- who loathed the British monarchy and all its works.

The issue stayed on a back burner for so long because it was too divisive to bring out into the open -- and because it has been a long time now since the British monarch had any real say in Australia. As Howard puts it, Australia is a "crowned republic": its real head of state is the governor-general, appointed by the Queen on the recommendation of the Australian government, and that person has always been an Australian since 1965.

The symbolism still grates on many Australians, however, and the approaching centenary of Australian federation on New Year's Day, 2001 has put the issue on the front burner. Image-conscious Australian republicans are especially anxious to avoid having the 'British Queen' open the 2000 Sydney Olympics. But it was the Queen herself, or rather her dysfunctional family, that finally tipped the balance against the monarchy.

In September, right after Diana's death, opinion polls for the first time in Australian history showed a clear majority of voters committed to a republic: 54 percent for, 30 percent against, and 16 percent undecided. Diana died a monarchist, but she has proven to be the greatest force for republicanism in several generations.

Two months of feverish debate in Australia about the monarchy since her death has scarcely shifted the September numbers at all.

If the 'undecided' split in the same proportion, then the actual anti-monarchy majority, come the referendum, could be as great as two-to-one. And that is why John Howard is going with the flow.

As he himself said on Nov. 11, "an Australian republic would deliver not one extra job, not one extra hospital bed, not one extra policeman on the beat, not one extra cent paid off the national debt." It's hard to imagine a more purely symbolic issue. But Howard is in enough trouble with the electorate on other issues that he can see the benefits of a harmless diversion that uses up about a year's political time.

So Australia will be a republic before the millennium, and the question is whether other countries will follow. New Zealand's new prime minister, Jenny Shipley, says that she has no intention of bringing the issue up, but she may find it hard to resist once Australia's intentions become clear.

New Zealand has its Irish population too, plus many non- British immigrants and over 15 percent Maoris and Pacific Islanders -- all people who have no particular reason to love the British Queen. And if New Zealand can do it, what about Canada, where over a quarter of the population speaks French and around 40 percent are of neither British nor French origin?

It is a matter of permanent astonishment that Canada has not offered the olive branch of a republic to its non-British majority.

It would cost nothing, it would salve wounds left open by the endless constitutional wars, and no significant group would oppose it. Even younger-generation Canadians of British or part- British descent don't give a fig for the monarchy.

Walter Bagehot, who articulated the idea of a constitutional monarchy as 19th-century Britain gradually moved towards mass democracy, was a cynical man. A monarchy, he observed, concentrated the attention of the nation "on one person doing interesting thing", whereas a republic was "a government in which the attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions."

Bagehot therefore argued that democracy would work better if the monarchy "acts as a disguise" which the mob can cheer for, even if it means that "the real (elected) rulers are secreted in second-class carriages." But that was before mass media and mass education gave most people the ability to make their own political choices.

Bagehot was in the business of rationalizing the status quo, and he was probably always wrong. He's certainly wrong now: even in Britain the monarchy will only survive if it greatly scales down its pretensions. Its chances of surviving elsewhere are close to zero, and it is the Australians who have started the landslide.