Mr Rudd puts his foot in it

This may be because Labor has inexplicably outsourced its republican policy to the Australian Republican Movement (ARM), a body which was described as “near comatose” by David Marr. This is even more extraordinary given that the ARM leader, Ted O’Brien, is an endorsed Liberal candidate. The result is that Labor is locked into a convoluted, expensive and distracting process. This is actually designed to bring the people to the hustings three times, where they are likely to tell the government what they think of them. In his wisdom, Mark Latham came up with a suicidal plan to have one vote on this each year of his first term.

The final straw is that Rudd has given Labor’s opponents another weapon to argue that wall-to-wall Labor would be too risky. Hitherto the only danger seemed to be that they could increase the GST, just as Keating did with sales tax immediately after winning the 1993 election when he promised no GST. It will now be argued that Labor will be able to change our constitutional system any way it wants through the back door.

This all comes from an obscure section in the Australia Acts, 1986. Under this our seven parliaments acting collectively can amend the Statute of Westminster and the Australia Acts. So can they amend the Constitution without a referendum? Unfortunately for Rudd, the politicians have already shown how they can ignore or circumvent a referendum. They did it once in Queensland in abolishing the Legislative Council. More recently, contemptuously assuming the public would vote “Yes”, legislation was rushed through all parliaments just before the 1999 poll to amend the Australia Acts to make it easier for the states to become republics.

So can the backdoor be used to achieve other things on the agenda - or not on it - bearing in mind the Platform from the April Conference is still under wraps? So could the Australia Acts be used not only to create a republic, but also abolish the Senate, extend parliamentary terms, abolish the states, and so on? Only the High Court could decide that.

But disturbing revelations about political activism in the judiciary, and the ruling in the WorkChoice case that the peoples’ views in referenda are of no use in interpreting the Constitution may have reduced confidence in the Court. Consequently the electorate may be increasingly susceptible to warnings about the dangers of becoming a one-party state.

If so, Mr Rudd will only have himself to blame. Until he put it on the agenda, republicanism was on “life support”, as Lenore Taylor put it. It will come back to haunt him.