One of them is routinely and uncontentiously associated with the business and ceremony of government: to open the parliament, to administer oaths, to give assent to legislation, and so forth. Such actions will often call for the exercise of a degree of personal judgement, but only in the dimension of what might be called facilitation. There is no serious decision-making to be done, about whether the task that has been routinely set by tradition and the democratic process shall be performed at all, or shall be performed in a way that is sure to be provoke the rancour of those who believe themselves to be disadvantaged by it.
The other function, most strikingly exercised at present under the concept of "reserve powers," is that of resolving such conflicts as the democratic process has been unable to negotiate, seriously impeding the productive workings of government or the welfare of society. The head of state is very rarely required--we may recall 1975--to make decisions of a significant kind.
Naturally enough, people generally wish that the head of state should be a person who is dispositionally or ideologically inclined to settle questions--of whatever degree of significance--in a congenial way. Conservatives will naturally feel reassured by a conservative head of state; radicals will look for more progressive signs in a candidate. We see the point clearly enough whenever there is discussion of the appointment of a new judge to the high court.
The underlying principles of preference in relation to a head of state are somewhat disguised by the fiction that the head of state plays no political role and is above the battle. They are also distorted by the terms of the current debate in which the options presented to us are, on the one hand, an English monarchical hereditary principle, and on the other a choice constrained simply by Australian citizenship and an election procedure.
All of the evasions and misdirections in play can be uncovered and removed if we abandon our fixation with the idea that a capacity to exercise the two distinguishable functions of the head of state must co-habit in a single person.
It is my suggestion that just as these functions are logically distinct, so may they be differentially embodied. Decision-making by any person is inevitably ideologically contaminated, or is seen to be so by whoever finds the outcome distasteful. And since the satisfied and the dissatisfied parties are likely to be of a similar weight and passion (or else the democratic process would have resolved the question through the exercise of its own ingenuities) it would be a thoroughly Australian manoeuvre to arrange for otherwise unsettlable questions to be settled by spinning a coin. The outcome of such a decision-making procedure--as will be understood by participants, and hence may productively delay the action--is certain to disappoint one party or another. But disappointments of this kind cannot possibly fuel the rancour of those who will otherwise feel sure that they had been cheated by the machinations of an ideologically biased person or process. The process is manifestly neutral.
I do not recommend the use of a coin in the solemn context of affairs of state because of its monetary and sporting symbolism, but rather the use of a special ceremonial token, having a plain side and a marked side. It is my suggestion that the Australian head of state would be a composite entity comprised of the token itself, taken together with a human functionary who might be called the keeper of the token. The keeper would spin the token whenever--and on an optimistic view, very rarely--a decision challenging the resourcefulness of the democratic process must be taken.
The keeper of the token would have routine duties similar to those of our present Governor General. She or he would desirably be an Australian person held in considerable respect and appointed for a definite term by some process of election. But it should be clear beyond question that this person is not the head of state. The head of state is an abstraction comprising the token and its keeper.
In a monarchical system the logical distinction between the crown and the monarch is systematically blurred. In the system here proposed the distinction is lucid and uncontaminated by psychology or ideology. We might say that in adopting it we put ourselves, ultimately, in the hands of fate; and to say this will be salutory. It will spur those of us who put no more trust in the beneficence of fate than we do in the wisdom of the crown to redouble our effort to ensure that the keeper will seldom or never be called upon ceremonially to exercise the token.
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