Dreary republicans, not monarchists, are the reason we’re not a republic today

Wednesday, 25th November 2009

Australians are snobs when it comes to the republic, and they are conservative about constitutional change — but there’s nothing wrong with that, says John Heard

Further, voters appear to feel that the Australian republic is, in the words of the Prime Minister, a ‘matter of time and due process’. This is a notion that has broad bipartisan support. In terms of process, then, the Prime Minister’s commitment to hold a series of public consultations is correct. Such a deliberate, considered procedure — a real effort to consult with the people, to talk with monarchists and others who are not immediately pro-republic — should go some way to convincing voters that the republican discussion is back on track, that whatever we are aiming for this time it is not the republic that was defeated in 1999.

There is also another way to begin to persuade the voters who rejected ‘the politicians’ republic’. In terms of time (the other ingredient Kevin Rudd mentioned), the intervening period should be used to rediscover Australian history, and to parse it with the best republican thinking. In the lead-up to, and in between, plebiscites, Australian thinkers and cultural leaders, citizens and students should delve into American, French and Roman republican classics. They should read and debate Cicero and Alexander Hamilton. They must become familiar with Samuel Adams, Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. They should even dabble in Gore Vidal’s self-consciously Ciceronian screeds, and temper any revolutionary zeal with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolutions in France. Not because American or French or Roman republicanism is perfect, but because these writers demonstrate how it is that a society discusses republican ideals. In their best work, thinkers such as Jefferson captured enduring insights about how a people governs itself, and they tried to ensure that republican thought would guard against mob rule and corruption.

Ten years after the republic referendum, then, Australian republicans must not fear the past. They must aim for an Australian republic that is truly an institution in that weird, Burkean sense: complex enough to absorb a great mass of contradictions (democratic) and yet solid enough to withstand social and cultural change (republican). Solid, not fast. The model must be, in other words, years in the making, until it seems as inevitable as the idea of an Australian republic itself. If only republicans focus, like Howard and Rudd, on timing and due process, the people will take care of the numbers.