CELEBRATING FEDERATION.(Australia)

THE CELEBRATIONS of the centenary of the formation of Australia as a nation were quite rightly dominated by a sense of pride and achievement. At the same time there were the usual voices of hate--self-hate, hatred of Australia, hatred of the Australian people, hatred of free society and markets, without which individual liberty cannot exist--who reminded us of all the failures of the past, chief of them being the harm done to the Aborigines of this land, in order to attempt to make us ashamed of the genuine achievements.

And there was the usual chorus of bores, using the occasion to peddle their own versions of what is lacking from the federal constitution and how it should be revised over the coming century. Chief amongst these were the republicans of the authoritarian persuasion, who are still bemoaning the failure of the Australian people to live up to the vision of the arrogant political elites. This is an issue of such stunning triviality that it has obscured any serious thinking about the possible reconstruction of our constitution or nation.

There is to be a conference at Corowa devoted to the nonproblem of the head of state, with the same dogs returning to their vomit. The nominal organiser, the Corowa Shire Council, seems to have been conned into another bully republic enterprise. Another set of academic/legal bores want to use the occasion to insist on the entrenchment of human rights in the constitution. While there is a case for a bill of rights, what they really want is the entrenchment of their own ideological fads for all time.

"The gay Mardi Gras with its clothes on", was one comment on the Federation Parade in Sydney. At least it did not end with a sleaze party with its accompanying orgies, nor with the disorderly official drinking bout of a hundred years ago. Overall the day went pretty well, and the best thing about it was the clear enthusiasm amongst so many young people, despite the best efforts of their baby-boomer elders to drown it in cliches. The absence of the Aborigines from the first federation parade was referred to ad nauseam by the gaggle of ABC hacks who commented upon the broadcast, while this time a group of Aborigines took pride of place. A hundred years from now the bicentenary federation celebrations will surely have a different group in pride of place--we cannot imagine right now who it will be. We are no better in our prejudices or our foresight than were the Founding Fathers--if anything, the dominant ethos of the political class is even more obsessive and lacking in historical perspective than a hundred years ago.

Whether there will be a bicentenary of federation is something of which we can never be certain. It was unimaginable at the birth of federal Australia that we would be embroiled in a world war only half a generation later; or that there would seem by the early forties a strong possibility that we would not survive the half-century. Australia will not be the same in a century--and may not even be identical in citizenry and area to the Australia we have now. The only certainty is that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren who are present will have a totally different set of concerns from ours. Perhaps they will be a lot saner. None of the current "great issues" will seem to them anything other than quaint or misguided.

The "vision" which is always being called for will appear as the vapourings of ageing republicans trying to leave their stamp on a world they could not understand. We will probably be a republic by then--but who knows? It might have been discovered that the hereditary principle is as good as any other random method of selecting a head of state. Whether or not the Queen or the governor-general is the "head of state" of Australia was one of the sillier issues of the republican controversy--it is clear that at present the governor-general performs all the functions of a head of state and the Queen is, at best, a kind of honorary consultant and nominal veil for the actual appointment of the governor-general by the prime minister of the day. At most one can say there is a sharing of the honours but not of the authority--which is firmly in the hands of Australians.

The important question will be not the survival of the British monarchy but of the British union. It is likely that a hundred years from now Britain as we know it today will be defunct, and England will be a constituent state of the European Union--a small, overpopulated offshore state peripheral to the affairs of the world. Just about where it started out five hundred years ago, in fact. England may or may not have retained a monarchy, and may or may not have bestowed it on a family other than the Windsors (or whatever they are calling themselves then).