The magic we would lose by removing the Australian Crown

To return to my point - yes, we can remove the Crown. But either we replace it with an institution of equal dimension and equally above politics, or we design a new constitutional system for the states and the federation.

Obviously we should not replace the Crown with another politician. Nor can you replace the Governor-General with a functionary whose tenure depends on a prime ministerial whim. Nor, I suspect can you replace the Crown with a clever contraption or device - a moving feast of former Governors-General and Chief Justices. So after a good decade of debating and campaigning, a failed referendum and millions of dollars of taxpayers funds, republicans ought to concede that finding a substitute for the Crown is extremely difficult, if not impossible.

They are left with the difficult task of proposing a completely new constitution. Now there is one republican model which is tried and tested. It involves having three political institutions, the executive, the congress and the Supreme Court locked in perpetual adversarial combat - the American system. It wasn't intended to be like that but, the civil war excepted, it does work. Unfortunately, only in the United States. But it might possibly work on the soil of another country in which English, the rule of law, the common law and parliament are as entrenched as in the American colonies.

Without a general collapse of our institutions, and some terrible crisis, it is hard to see Australians wanting such a change.

One other factor came suddenly into the foreground in the Golden Jubilee year - what Bagehot called the "magic of monarchy".

Back in the referendum campaign, republicans tried to instruct the No case on how they should run their campaign.

They wanted to see the campaign dominated by a debate about the sovereign and her family. But as it was a constitutional referendum, so we ran it on constitutional issues. This was not to deny the magic of monarchy which became so obvious. So when Mike Carlton suggested in the Sydney Morning Herald that few would care about the Queen Mother's funeral except some bemused Japanese tourists, he had to eat his words. As did so many commentators here and Britain when the Commonwealth honoured their Queen on her Golden Jubilee.

Republicans are not immune, indeed they seem particularly affected by the magic of monarchy. If there is a royal occasion in Australia, expect to be elbowed out of the way by republicans. It happened on Diana's last visit. And on the formal occasions for each of the Queen's visit to Australia, the receptions have been filled with eager republicans.

We may certainly dispense with the magic of monarchy. It is after all but a bonus - and not the essence. And we may even remove the Crown from our constitution - if we know what we are doing and have something as good - or better to replace it.