Why the role of our Head of State is important

Why an Australian Head of State? Because an Australia that defines itself with reference to another nation cannot be an enabler of Australian rights, interests or endeavour. It will foreigners of patriots and aliens of Australians, even those here for the longest time.

Recently, the Government received advice from the Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Constitutional recognition of our original Australians is well overdue. But just as we changed in 1967 with a successful referendum on racially discriminatory aspects of the Constitution, we can move forward on this issue. And we can move forward on an Australian republic. But this is a debate that will only be won with leadership.

As Sir Henry Parkes led the federation movement in 1889, so we need leadership to light the republican movement in 2012. Deakin inherited a polity deeply entrenched in the British monarchy. He led with the regulation of working conditions, just as Fisher later enshrined the minimum wage. That kind of leadership helped begin the definition of Australia, leaving behind the British class system and creating a nation based on egalitarianism and the fair go.

But it took a brave Prime Minister to push forward on an Australian republic. In a recent transcription of handwritten notes taken after meeting in 1993 with Her Majesty the Queen at Balmoral Castle, he wrote:

I had come from Australia on the unpleasant errand to tell her, in all conscientiousness, that we did not need her any more. (Keating 2011)

He went on to write:

I wanted her to understand how and why Australia had changed, how it was different now than the way she might have found it in 1954 when she first visited.

... That we live in the East Asian hemisphere and that for 50 years we had had an ambitious migration program which had changed our character; I told her the monoculture was a thing of the past. (Keating 2011)

This Australian leader wrote of making our place in the world, a task:

... made more difficult when we appeared uncertain as to who we are; when our Head of State was not one of us, when we go to the region as the Australian nation with all of our hopes and aspirations yet go with the monarch of another country. (Keating 2011)

That brave man was of course Paul Keating: the only Australian leader to tell the Queen her service to Australia was no longer relevant. He had a vision for Australia to define itself according to the values and makeup of its people. Like many Australians of mixed heritage, I identify with the aspiration of Australians being represented by one of their own.

In 2011, the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, announced the creation of a white paper on Australia in the Asian Century. If the nineteenth century was the European century, and the twentieth the American century, this century is most assuredly to be the Asian century.