The process of republicanisation in Australia

Having said that, many of Australia's greatest Australians were never Australian citizens, for example: all the AIF soldiers who fought and died in the World Wars, John Curtin, Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, Sir John Monash, Banjo Paterson, ordinary Mums & Dads & Daves etc. On the other hand, there have been numerous Australians who, citizens or not, lived overseas and always remained Australian, such as author Clive James, musician Peter Allen and Nobel Prize winner Howard Florey.

Australian citizenship did not exist in law until Australia Day 1949. Thus Australia Day is the annual birthday of Australian citizenship, something which Commonwealth Ministers of Home Affairs, rather than celebrating annually, seem puzzlingly determined to keep secret from the Australian population.

All British subjects in Australia who met the residency requirements (which included all aborigines) became Australian citizens in 1949, and concurrently remained British subjects until the passing of the Australia Acts in the 1980s. (Thus for example, Bob Hawke was an Australian citizen and British subject when first elected as Prime Minister, but was no longer a British subject when he left Parliament. Previously, he'd been born a British subject in Western Australia and gained Australian citizenship in 1949 along with everyone else.)

In this overall citizenship context, the facts that the monarch is not an Australian citizen, and does not ordinarily reside in Australia, are really not so compelling as drivers for the creation of a republic. Something more, surely, must be driving its adoption. What? The answer to this - whatever it is - is fundamental to any impetus for the creation of a constitutional convention, because each of the seven jurisdictions with the power to make it happen must be clearly convinced of these substantial reasons – and of their clear electoral support - sufficient indeed, to go to all the time and trouble of doing so.

If just one jurisdiction is not interested, republicanisation can't happen, at least without secession of the uninterested State.

A fundamental point though is that by ignoring the essential constitutional relevance of the States, the whole republican campaign, including the referendum, has been based on a misunderstanding of the Australian federation.
The current republican espousers do not understand the Australian federal legal structure, so they are objecting to a system which they don't understand. That's not a sound basis for proposing anything.

If Australia is to become a republic at some point in the future, a prerequisite will be to convince all six States and the Commonwealth unanimously to:

• firstly, convene a sound constitutional convention process;
• secondly, adopt a comprehensive scheme of legislation to give effect to republicanisation; and
• thirdly, be confident of opposition and general electoral support for the changes.

These prerequisites would all have to be underpinned by nationwide State and Commonwealth voter support to address real and substantial issues driving the choice for republicanisation, whatever those issues might turn out to be……