Resisting the republican push.(Letter to the editor)

SIR: David Flint's article "The Head of State Debate Resolved" (July-August 2008) prompts me to offer a couple of suggestions. One is on a point of policy or tactics apparently adopted by Australians for Constitutional Monarchy (at least by its National Convenor) which may be not entirely advantageous to its cause. The other relates to a view of the history of republicanism in this country which may do a disservice to the wholly commendable resistance to the republican push.

Professor Flint reasonably enough insists that the head-of-state debate is resolved, in the sense that legalistic victory lies indeed with Sir David Smith and himself; by adding the history of colonial responsible government it ought to be impossible to defy. It seems to me unlikely however that the republicans will abandon their mantra about "an Australian as head of state". They might well judge that the generality of people will be at least puzzled by the distinction drawn between the Queen as sovereign and the governor-general as head of state. The republican objective is simple and brutal: to "get rid of the Queen". If in the proposed plebiscites (if they happen, and which Professor Flint justly denounces) they believe that they can persuade voters to accept that the postulated distinction is precious and at odds with common parlance, they will do so, with much cant recitation of "foreign monarch" v. "one of us".

Paradoxically, to point out that Australia has "the first constitution in the British empire to provide that the governor-general should exercise the executive power" (an unnecessary provision as it happens, hardly boastworthy) might even give a handle to the republicans. If the Queen's functions are so far removed from those of the governor-general that the latter has no need of Letters Patent or Royal Instructions, the argument that she can be "got rid of" is made the more plausible though no less specious. It may therefore be unwise if monarchists refer to their preferred terminology too frequently or with too much vim.

Professor Flint further asserts that Australia has seen four republican movements. Only by straining the meaning of the word "movement" can the rampant republicanism in the era of the Bulletin (the 1880s and 1890s) be so described. It was anti-empire, democratically spiteful, self-referentially utopian. The two or three organisations it spawned were parochial, pusillanimous and short-lived. It never ...