ABC Radio National

Sunday Extra





Date/Time 07 Oct 2015 1:33:47pm
The republican cause continues to plead for a revision of the constitution to call Australia a republic and have a native-born president as head-0f-state.
So what is a republic?  
For more than 2500 years, a sovereign country in which a substantial body of citizens exercised  effective control of the government was called a republic.  History records many:  Rome from 510 to 55 BC,  Venice from the 7th century to 1797,  Novgorod from 1136 to 1478, among others. In the traditional meaning of the word,  Australia is already a de facto republic, called the Commonwealth of Australia.
 Since 1922, when Lenin and his Bolsheviks called the Soviet provinces they ruled, ‘republics’, without any hint of conformity with the traditional  meaning of the word, it seems that anybody can call their country a republic, for instance, North Korea and Syria. That is to say, the word ‘republic’ has lost its traditional meaning to become a title instead.
 However, the meaning given by the Australian Republican Movement:
 “A republic simply means having an Australian as our Head of State, not a hereditary monarch from another country.” is quite another slant on the word; Humpty Dumpty would be delighted.
Today, the real problems of our governance stem from the fact that we suffer under an archaic constitution, written the day before the dawn of a new age. Defining a head-of-state or choosing a new title for our nation are ineffectual window-dressing.
Our Constitution was created as an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, signed into law by the Queen of England in 1900. Since then, Australia has progressed from a collection of squabbling colonies to a federation of squabbling states. But during that period, it has also come to be recognized as an independent sovereign nation, initially at the Versailles Conference after the first world war, then by the League of Nations in 1920 and subsequently by the Statute of Westminster, which was promulgated in 1927 and ratified in 1931. It was finally adopted by the Australian government in 1942, thus giving it undisputed control over its armed forces. Since 1945 our independence has been confirmed by the United Nations. The process was virtually sealed by the Australia Act in 1986.
Any attempt by the Crown to impose its will on Australia would be emphatically rejected, as it was in 1931, when King George V unsuccessfully opposed the appointment of Sir Isaac Isaacs as Governor-General. The extent to which Australians see themselves as compromised by having a “foreign head of state” is a strong contrast to our  desire to have a protective relationship with a powerful foreign country. The ANZUS treaty is a far greater threat to our independence than the flimsy threads linking us to the Commonwealth of Nations and the Royals. Compared with following the Americans into disastrous wars in
