Radio Australia Today Editorial

A Republic. Maybe.

21 April 2008

Australia’s super think-tank, the 2020 summit, is over and a lot of people did a lot of thinking of ideas for where the country should be in 12 years.

Now the prime minister Kevin Rudd has to sort through all the ideas, decide which ones are worth anything, decide whether he likes them, decide which ones the public will not throw him our of office for, and then figure out how to put them in place.

The summit issue that has caught the eye of the media and the public was the push for Australia to become a republic.

At the moment Australia’s head of State is the Queen. The closest we have come to being completely autonomous was when Gough Whitlam, as prime mininster in the 1970s, declared that Queen Elizabeth was now formally the Queen of Australia.

It satisfied the republications for about four minutes.

A few years ago John Howard put the republic idea to a public referendum, grudgingly, and then fought really hard against it. Of course it failed. No referendum proposal has ever passed in Australia if one side of politics was against it.

This time.. with the summit backing it.. and the PM and the Opposition both quite happy for a republic.. it might actually happen.

The big question is what kind of republic. The governor-general is the Queen’s representative. The actions of the governor-general are dictated mostly not by law, but by convention. The governor-general, if she/he so desired could run the military, refuse to grant elections, and deny laws that have passed through parliament. These powers were shown in 1975 when Sir John Kerr used his reserve powers as governor-general to sack Gough Whitlam.

Who can forget this image of Gough Whitlam standing behind David Smith who was reading the governor-general’s proclamation that ending Whitlam’s prime ministership.

It was an extraordinary day for Australia, and a day that split Australia for many years.

So then, if we replace the governor-general by a president of the republic, what would happen to these reserve powers? The fear of monarchists is that if the president is elected, he or she might have the belief that they can use some of these reserve powers. After all, the president would have been elected by the people, just like the prime minister.

This is obviously one of the things that Kevin Rudd will be mulling, while he’s thinking about inflation.

And interest rates.

And climate change

And education.

And immigration.

And international alliances.

Yeah. You get the picture.