First came the death of Diana, which prompted a short-term upward leap in republicanism, followed immediately by a steep fall, as the implications of this awesomely symbolic event began to sink in. Then came the fiasco of last February's Constitutional Convention (Con-Con) in Canberra, where the official ARM Republicans went to great lengths to force through their own parliamentary presidential model over the objections of the so-called Real Republicans, who want a directly elected president. The Con-Con closed with the Republican movement openly split and in disarray.
After that was Monicagate, with America's directly elected president making the British royal family look like utter amateurs in the immorality business. The excesses of Clinton's Republican opponents also put a very favourable light on the British monarchy's supposed status above (or at least outside of) party politics.
Next came the Anglo-American air raids against Iraq, with the resulting international opprobrium against the Australian Richard Butler, Executive Chairman of the UN Special Commission on Iraq. Butler, as it turns out, is one of the Republicans' high-profile sympathisers. He had been very visibly feted by them on a visit to Sydney earlier this year only a few months before spectacularly losing his status as a prestigious well-wisher.
The final nail in the Republicans' coffin has been the disgracing of the International Olympic Committee. Ever since Sydney was chosen to host the Olympic Games of 2000 the idea that it would be unacceptable for these very big deal games to be opened by embarrassing Queen Elizabeth has been a favourite theme of Republicans. Weighty issues of constitutional law have been swept under the carpet in ARM's haste to get the November constitutional referendum over so that the Queen can be got safely out of the way before the great day next year when the world comes to Sydney. Now it turns out that behind all this fuss has been nothing more than a cabal of rather dubious wheeler-dealers whose good opinion has nevertheless been deemed to count for more than the entire tradition of Westminster democracy since the Magna Carta.
The great grievance which is said to underlie ARM's determination to sever the link with the British monarchy is the 1975 dismissal of the Labor government of Gough Whitlam by the Queens representative in Australia, the then Governor General Sir John Kerr. But the Whitlam government was brought down when the opposition parties in the Senate, which like the American Senate is supposed to represent the interests not of parties but of the member states of the Federation, gained the numbers to cut off the money supply to the government. The Governor General, acting as has become customary without consulting the Queen, intervened to break the deadlock and call elections, at which the Labor government was trounced.
Much was said at the time of Kerr's links to Marshall Green, the then American ambassador in Australia and a reputed CIA operative. All of this was irrelevant to the British monarchy's role in the events. As after the 1987 military coup in Fiji, Queen Elizabeth simply refused to receive representatives of the injured parties. She had not been consulted before and she did not intervene after. The real point about Australia's constitutional crisis of 1975 was the same (at least so far as the Senate is involved) as the current stand-off in the US between the President and Congress. It has to do with the constitutional role of the Upper House, which is/was not doing what it is supposed to, i.e. defending the interests of the states - and instead is hostage to low-level party politics.
Nowadays Australia's Senate, whose members are elected by proportional representation, has become the small parties' house: the refuge for Greens, Australian Democrats and others who stand no chance of being elected under the preferential voting system applied in elections to the House of Representatives. Many of the Senate's most vigorous supporters today come from exactly the political circles that in 1975 were calling for the Senate's abolition. They have, in the most precise sense of the term, been bought off. Their subornation has contributed to moving the Senate even further away from its original purpose.
It has also enabled the Australian Republicans to redirect the hostility which in 1975 had been concentrated (apart from the nationalist outbursts against the Americans, the CIA, etc.) on the Senate and the Liberal-National parties who had made it their instrument. Instead of focusing constitutional reform on the Senate, the Republicans turned their guns on the monarchy.
The Liberal-National government which succeeded Whitlam lasted until 1983, when Labor under Bob Hawke returned to power and embarked on thoroughly Thatcherite policies of privatisation and denationalisation. Chief architect of Labor's economic programme was the Treasurer Paul Keating, a very pure specimen of the traditional Australian Irish-Catholic politician who in 1991, as Hawke's successor, played a pivotal role in bringing republicanism back onto the agenda.
The official Republicans are now trying desperately to persuade the schismatic Real Republicans (who have said they will vote NO) that ARM's parliamentary republic can be the first step towards the directly elected presidential model which only a year ago they were denouncing as misguided and dangerous. What remains to be seen is whether after their almost certain defeat at the November referendum they will console themselves with ruminations on the conservatism of Australians, or whether they will face up to the inadequacy, and quite often also dishonesty, of their own ideas. Australia's problem is not that, unlike in republics, the people are not sovereign. It is that, like everywhere, the state is not sovereign. Queen Elizabeth's dutiful adherence to the forms of constitutional monarchy is on its own assumptions extremely admirable. But it is also useless. Australia is run by politicians who have little loyalty either to electorates or - as what under other circumstances might be called scandalously obvious - to the sovereign to whom they swear allegiance before taking their seats in parliament.
Voting for the Queen in November will not mean that Australians are behind the times. It will mean that the most elaborate and single-minded network of collusion between Australian politicians and the international media is not yet capable of persuading an educated and still relatively prosperous and confident people to jump out of the frying pan into the fire.
HTMLized for Mr Hall by Stephen Souter.
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