An Australian republic is not a priority

In a recent On Line Opinion item Klaas Woldring called for the introduction of an Australian republic without delay. It was inevitable that the return to power of the Federal Labor Party under Kevin Rudd late last year would invite such calls. Having defeated the monarchist incumbent, Rudd fuelled speculation by refusing to swear allegiance to the Queen when he was sworn in as the new Prime Minister.

Republicanism is an article of faith for many in the Australian Labor Party. Some Labor supporters still recall with rage the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by the Queen’s representative in Australia, Governor-General Sir John Kerr, on Remembrance Day in 1975.

Paul Keating, of course, was known as an ardent proponent of removing the monarchy from Australia’s system of government. Rudd is also a republican who declared prior to being elected, he would again take the question to the Australian people in a plebiscite. “The time will come before too much longer”, Rudd forecast last July, “when we do have an Australian as our head of state”.

Although a majority of Australians - including the writer - are republicans of various stripes, the issue can hardly be said to excite much popular public passion. Indeed the arguments in favour of making the transition can seem quaintly anachronistic.

Removing the monarchy would finalise Australia’s formal constitutional separation from the United Kingdom, but would do little to further independence in a more practical sense.

Australia’s economic autonomy declined in common with the rest of the OECD world as domestic institutions were opened to globalisation, while in terms of foreign policy, Canberra orbits around Washington, rather than London. Under former Prime Minister John Howard, Australia’s flight path around United States’ interests became tighter than ever before.

Although the influence is some times exaggerated, there is also no doubt that it is now America that sets Australia’s cultural trends. Indeed, paradoxically, there is almost an odd sense in which republicanism acts as a kind of surrogate for discontent with American influence on Australian society.

Contemporary Australian defence and foreign policy reliance on the US is rightly seen as the successor to the dominion relationship with the UK prior to World War II, creating a context in which seeking “freedom” from the Queen can be read as implying frustration with ongoing dependence on America. Perhaps needless to say, there is an element of “fighting the last war” here: removing the monarchy will not displace the influence of Bush, Britney or Bernanke.

None of this is to say that the monarchy should be retained, but the Australian centre-left would do well to reflect on the broader meaning of republicanism, rather than being tempted to a simple preoccupation with removing the Queen.

Wider notions of republicanism emphasise the importance of the active and engaged participation of the citizen in government, giving rise to the creation of a true mandate. In contrast to the republican ideal, current Australian politics and society suffers from a malaise of civic detachment.

As former parliamentarian and diplomat John Langmore concluded in a recent appraisal of public life in Australia, “democracy is not healthy at present; nor is the quality of public life” and the “principal characteristic of contemporary Australian politics is voters’ disengagement”.

The membership of political parties is at record lows and there is widespread public cynicism at the motivation of elected representatives. Indeed rather ironically, one reason why the last republican referendum failed was that the model put to the vote was thought elitist by many electors because it proposed that the Parliament should choose the President as head of state.

Klaas Woldring argued that the removal of the Windsors might well be combined with laudable broader goals associated with improving the standards of Australian government and democracy, but the connection is not automatic.

Part of the predicament in Australian democracy has been cured by the removal of Howard, who had centralised power, ruthlessly quashed civil society groups and politicised public appointments, all to a hitherto unprecedented extent. However, the larger problem for Australian republicans (in the broad sense) was not solved by the Federal Election; namely what to do about the wider sense of disconnect between the electorate and their public institutions that in many countries is a product of the neo-liberal post-modern form of capitalism.

How to maintain a sense of communal belonging that is conducive of engaged citizenship when we are increasingly configured as self-maximising individuals who merely “consume” government “services” as we lead our disaggregated lives?

Ironically, vice-regal office is one of the few remaining Australian institutions that has not succumbed to the ideology of managerialism. Curiously then “republicanism”, in a narrow sense, may be antithetical in some ways to nurturing a recovery of the broader ideal of building an Australian republic.

Reflecting on the situation in the United Kingdom, historian David Starkey recently came up with a similar conclusion in the final part of his television series on the Windsors which screened in Britain in December. Starkey told interviewers that in the face of the “moral vacuum left by the sellout of the state to business interests” it might be the Crown that took the role of speaking for altruism, neighbourliness and public service. The Monarch, in other words, might become the custodian of those human values that transcend dry economic liberalism. In 2008, Starkey was in a sense saying, monarchy is the new republicanism.

The idea of the Royal Family, or their vice regal representatives, acting as a kind of protector of the public good has a certain appeal, but ultimately there is something deeply troubling about the notion of returning to the days of an unelected monarch becoming actively involved in articulating a vision of the good society.

Indeed Australia has had some recent and unsettling experiences of vice-regal officers attempting discursive intervention.

Former High Court Judge Sir William Deane was Governor-General of Australia between 1996 and 2001, during which time he tried to exercise a healing voice above politics in relation to the process of “reconciliation” with Aboriginal people.

Unfortunately, Deane’s vista of what was beyond politics was rather different to that of John Howard, who was elected a short time after the Governor-General had been appointed. The result was a Queen’s representative who enjoyed the admiration of many (including this writer) but the opprobrium of others, leading to widely expressed doubts about the legitimacy and appropriateness of an unelected figurehead becoming involved in contentious public matters.

Despite his republican beliefs, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has stressed the view that “kitchen table concerns”, including housing affordability, child care, health costs and industrial relations reform, are higher priorities for his government.

There are many reasons why Australian progressives should agree with the new Prime Minister that making the transition from the monarchy, though worth doing as a matter of principle, is not an immediate concern. In contemporary Australia, the transition to a republic does not bear upon the great questions that should animate the political centre left.

Whether Australia is a constitutional monarchy or a republic will have no impact on questions of socio-economic disparities, environmental sustainability or foreign policy.

Historically, monarchies may have represented tyranny, inequality and inherited privilege but in 21st century Australia these associations are purely symbolic. Entrenched advantage, far from being the province of any discourse of divine right of nobility is now a product of neo-liberal economics and globalisation, forces that are producing new dynasties of super-capitalists.

In Australia the wealth gap between the corporate elites and the rest of the population has increased exponentially over recent years. Economically blessed by the Chinese hunger for raw commodities, many Australians are doing very well, but some are doing obscenely better than others.

In a de-regulated neo-liberal world, singling out the Monarch as a representative of unfair disadvantage seems strikingly antiquated.