|
CONSTITUTION - REPUBLIC AND THE ARTS |
| A
socialist’s republic The case for a republic anywhere is tied to social equality by challenging the monarchical doctrine that some people are born to rule over others. Because of Australia’s experience of colonisation, a republic is also part of our struggle for national independence, which aims at equality in the relations between peoples. Australia’s becoming a republic will clear a path in that direction. A republic, by jettisoning the hereditary principle behind the throne, will take a step towards social equality inside Australia. These aspects of the republic as expressions of social equality will be considered in turn. The
equality of nations One
advantage from breaking the formal ties with the British Crown will be
to clarify these lines of power between Australia and the rest of the
world. John Kerr’s position as the Queen’s man confused analysis of
his 1975 sacking of the Whitlam government. The significance of Kerr’s
life-long involvement with the US-dominated intelligence community was
thus harder to specify. Some Laborites even supposed that he had acted
to protect the Queen’s investments. Severing the open links between
the Australian state and its British counterpart will help us to resist
the covert flows of influence around Australian S I Service, Britain’s
MI-6 and the CIA-National Security Agency. The
change to a republic will also allow more attention to the economic
levers, whether from Frankfurt, Oosaka or Los Angeles. In short, a
republic will be worth while if it does no more than get rid of a source
of confusion about the power of non-British imperialisms in Australia.
Keating’s anti-British republicanism was a fig-leaf for his surrender
to speculators from around the planet. Compelled to pick between a
republic and re-regulation of our finance sector, I would pump for the
latter. My point is that they are not divisible. The mentality that
wants a British monarch at the top of Australia’s constitutional
system is the mind-set that nourishes Howard’s playing sheriff’s
deputy to those whom his idol, R. G. Menzies, called his ‘Great and
Powerful Friends’. Severing the link with the British monarchy will
fray the belief that we must subordinate our security to the needs of
the Pentagon, or accept the trading regimes that advantage corporations. The achievement of an Australian Republic will thereby contribute to the welfare of working people. Constitutional Monarchists allege that a republic will not create one more job or knock a dollar off the trade deficit. That view ignores the contribution that confidence makes to achievement. Australia’s constitution saps that enrichment in two ways. First, the fact that our head of state is also the head of state of the power that colonised Australia insinuates that no Australian is capable of filling the post. Until 1963, the cringers demanded that even the monarch’s representative as governor-general be a British aristocrat. Secondly, this presumption of inadequacy recurs when the Constitutional Monarchists allege that Australians cannot devise a system of government for ourselves, but must stick with the one approved by the Colonial Office in the 1890s. The
Australian Republican Movement’s ‘Yes’ case did not offer any kind
of republic but rather called for a nativist version of the existing
structure. As a nationalist in the sense of being an anti-imperialist, I
back Australia’s having one of our citizens as head of state. That
preference, however, has next-to-nothing to do with Australia’s
becoming a republic. If all we want is a resident for president, we
could install a home-grown royal family, whether the Packers or the
Joneses, and end up with no more than a koala for king. The UK has a
resident for its head of state and it ain’t no republic. Moreover,
the assumption that being born here, (or even choosing to become
naturalised), makes one a loyal Australian is untenable. Rupert Murdoch
traded his citizenship for television licences in the USA. The agents of
the UK and US empires in Australia have often been drawn from our oldest
families. As the Duke of Wellington remarked whenever his Irish
birthplace was mentioned: being born in a stable did not make you a
horse. Nativism and nationalism are far from the same. In an act of
solidarity with the oppressed, a real republican would rather vote for
an imprisoned foreign freedom fighter, such as Nelson Mandela or Xanana
Gusmao, as Australia’s president rather than for some native-born
lick-spittle. In
practice, we need a long-term resident as our head of state in order to
have someone familiar with our unwritten codes, as can be deduced from
the appointment of the Irishman Brian Kennedy to the National Gallery of
Australia. His selection struck me as inoffensive to our sense of
ourselves. Australians occupy leadership positions in art overseas, so
why should we not admit another skilled immigrant? I doubted that we
were ready for a Brit or a Yank, but someone from Ireland seemed
sufficiently off-center not to revive the colonised mentality. Aside
from all the other faults that Kennedy has revealed, he needed a couple
of years to comprehend that he was operating in a federation, not a
unitary state, such as the Republic of Eire. This example has wider
application. Hence, the appeal to republican virtue in choosing an
overseas rebel as our head of state must be subordinated to the everyday
requirements of the office. Preference for the local, however, is not
essential to being a republic. Republican
opponents of the ARM model risk losing track of the decisive question by
focusing on the direct election of a president. That procedure is
desirable because it is the manifestation of a republican vision based
on a democratic polity and a socially equalitarian economy. Real
republicans will continue to vote ‘No’ if the directly elected
President retains the existing reserve (monarchical) powers of the
governor-general. The
business executives and consultants who formed Conservatives for an
Australian Head of State favoured the minimalist position on the grounds
that it was unwise to go too far too quickly. For this stance, they
claimed to represent ‘a lot of cautious conventionally minded people
– millions of them’. Yet these same managers are not in the least
conservative about their other policies. Caution plays no part in their
attitude towards the economy where deregulation, privatisation,
down-sizing and restructuring can never go fast or far enough. They
blame market failure on the remnants of schemes designed to protect us
from the outrages inflicted by a self-regulated market. At their day
jobs, the Conservatives for an Australian Head of State argue that if
only all award wages and conditions were abolished, unemployment would
disappear. These political conservatives are maximalists in their
economic correctness. The
expression ‘minimalist’ gained currency from attempts by ARM to win
support by making the smallest number of changes possible to the
existing constitution. The ARM’s ‘minimalist’ model would have
left Australians with a political system inherited from the late
nineteenth century. Hence, ‘minimalist’ is deceptive. ARM adopted a
maximalist position in terms of retaining the anti-democratic structure
hammered out in the 1890s. After
the 1975 dismissal, republicans campaigned for a constitution which
would give supremacy to the people’s house and protect a majority
there from gubernatorial ambush. In short, Australia would have caught
up with the United Kingdom where the House of Lords had been stripped of
those powers by the 1950, and where the Queen would not be game to sack
a prime minister who retained the confidence of the House of Commons. In
the 1999 referendum, ARM abandoned that post-Kerr agenda of reforms to
champion a resident for president. By that criterion, Kerr’s
deviousness would have been acceptable. The
‘No’ majority in the October 1999 referendum was necessary for
Australians to establish a republic. Rejection of the ARM’s monarchist
model gives us the chance to move forward. Because the ALP, the
Democrats, Greens and both contenders for the Liberal leadership all
want to write themselves into the history books as the achievers of a
republic, another referendum will be held in the near future. Leadership
of the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) responded to the ‘No’
vote in the manner that Bertolt Brecht attributed to the Communist Party
bosses in East Germany after the workers’ rebellion of 1953:
…. would it
Not be simpler if the
government dissolved the people
And elected another? Typical
of this arrogance, Phillip Adams on Late Night Live referred to
Direct-Election Republican Phil Cleary as ‘Fool’ Cleary, oblivious
to that insult’s application to Adams’s own given name. The ARM case
lost because its mouthpieces declared that they did not trust
Australians to select our own president. Half the pro-Republic
supporters responded with a ‘No’ vote which was our way of saying
‘Thanks for letting us know how much you fear and despise us. We now
know better than to trust you’. That resentment was also widespread
among many who nonetheless voted ‘Yes’. A
pro-republican critic of the ARM’s model, Richard McGarvie, (an
ALP-appointed erstwhile Governor of Victoria), voiced the social
prejudices behind the ARM’s minimalism, which he thought too extreme.
The distinguished and the genteel, McGarvie lamented, would not even
submit themselves even to election by a joint parliamentary sitting
since rejection would be an affront to the nobility of their motives for
public service. New
South Wales ALP Premier, Bob Carr, threatened that if ARM’s minimalist
model were defeated he would campaign against a direct-election version.
Republicans should be grateful for Carr’s lesson in executive
dominance. Throughout the last 100 years constitutional arrangements at
both State and Federal levels have slid towards increasing the power of
the executive (the prime minister, the cabinet, the bureaucracy) and
away from the legislative branch. This slippage was blatant when the
Hawke-Keating administrations overturned policies on which they were
elected - whether privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank or land rights
against States Rights. The alarm among the executive branch that a
directly elected president will upset that imbalance of powers is
justified. Indeed, that disturbance is one reason why such a change
should be made. A popularly chosen president will tilt the system away
from executive domination. Stripped of the reserve powers, a president
will rely on the authority of the republican virtues that secured her
election. Although
democratising the top-end of government is worth doing for its symbolism
alone, the aim should be to spread those principles of social equality
through every aspect of public policy. Social
equality The
latest Royal sojourn revived the claim that the Queen is above politics.
That comment is true in only the most restricted sense of her not being
openly pro- or anti- either of the major party machines. Her minders are
smart enough to know that the difference between them, both here and in
the United Kingdom, is so infinitesimal as not to affect her interests.
The game of parliamentary ins and outs is the least important element in
the distribution of power. In vital areas, the monarchical principle is
ideologically pro-capitalist. This bias has nothing to do with the
Queen’s rating as one of the richest people in the world. The royal
fortune epitomises the unearned income of how the capitalist as rentier,
and of all capitalists live off the labour of others. As a symbol of how
a minority should flourish without working, hereditary rule validates
that class system. Academic apologists for capitalism have never been
able to explain why the children of capitalists should inherit wealth
that they have done nothing to earn. The
Windsors have learnt not to flaunt their wealth. Throughout the 1950s,
the Queen appeared on our postage stamps dripping with diamonds. Since
the 1970s, she has been turned up in coloured street frocks,
indistinguishable from any well-heeled matron. Glamour is the most that
the royals now dare parade. That discretion reduces any purchase that
they have on majesty. Majesty was never a personal attribute but always
the product of pomp and circumstance, a masquerade now reduced to the
pomposities of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy. Snobbery
remains a potent weapon in the monarchists’ armory. Curtseying bestows
on the servile a sense of superiority over those of us who, as Henry
Lawson said, ‘call no biped lord or ‘sir’, And touch their hats to
no man!’ Although talk of blue blood has disappeared, the myth that
the royals are innately superior lingers and lends support to the notion
that some people are born to rule over the rest of us. Elizabeth Windsor
is the Queen of Australia because of her birth, not any achievement.
Thus, we have a model of public life which proclaims inheritance to be
more meritorious than effort. The prime argument for dumping the current
constitutional arrangement is to be rid of such anti-democratic
assumptions. A monarchical system requires a subordinate people as much
as it elevates the privileged few. Because Australians have created ways
of life remote from the excesses of pre-capitalist social order, we can
lose sight of the inequalitarian structures on which every monarchy
rests, whether the modest Scandinavian versions or the Tongan autocracy. The
point at issue is highlighted by the Japanese imperial household, even
after its surrender of pretensions to the divine and General
MacArthur’s relegation of the emperor to being the symbol of the
state, not even its nominal head. The Japanese people refer to their
current emperor as a salary-man, that is, as a totally undistinguished
character. Yet his office remains the pinnacle of the Shinto cult of
cleanliness. This absolute purity requires the positing of its opposite
in total filth, a burden allotted to the two or three million
untouchables (Burakuin)
descendants of those who did the dirty work of tanning and handling the
dead. Corporations maintain registers of Burakuin
names to block their employment. The liberation of those at the bottom
of the social heap can never be complete for as long as Japan’s public
culture retains their antithesis as its symbolic head. Australia has
never had a social order as discriminatory as the Japanese. Nonetheless,
that presumption about superiors-inferiors infects every hereditary
arrangement. Only
5 percent of Australians believe that a monarchical system is good in
itself. Supporters of the divine right of kings are even fewer than the
number of royals sponging on the public purse. The Constitutional
Monarchists abandoned all pretence that monarchy in preferable on
principle. Instead, they aimed their attack on the republican model on
offer, an easy target because it was so remote from republican values. The
Constitutional Monarchists were also too canny to argue that hereditary
bestowed any grace on the individual royals, which would have been
difficult to maintain in light their behaviour towards each other. What
the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (also known as Windsor) has inherited are
dysfunctional children from a succession of thuggish fathers across 200
years. The Constitutional Monarchists reply that their system is not
responsible for individual indiscretions, or even for collective
misdemeanours and cruelties. Yet, if the Windsors do not possess the
qualities to make even themselves happy and glorious, by what right do
they reign over the rest of us? The case for any monarchy must be the
inheritance of intrinsic worth, or it is a nothing. In the middle of the referendum campaign in October 1999, the chair of Australian for Constitutional Monarchy Professor Flint, so forgot the proprieties of his public office as head of the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) that he allowed himself to be interviewed about the republic by John Laws, then subject to an ABA investigation. This instance exposed how monarchists conceive themselves to be superior to the rules that apply to the mob. Flint’s breech of decorum was nothing compared with the affront delivered to republican virtue by the stream of minimalists who accepted the largesse of Rupert Murdoch to relaunch John Laws’s reputation for Foxtel in March 2000. The Whitlams, Bob Carr, and Democrat Senator Stott Despoja attended, while the Victorian and Queensland ALP premiers sent video testimonials. Guest of honour Germaine Greer’s excuse that she had blown in only for the money highlights that the battle in front of republicans and socialists alike is against plutocracy. Murdoch
& Holmes a court in favour of hereditary Maximalises
the ability to let money rule Humphrey
McQueen is a Canberra-based freelance historian who was Republican of
the Year in 1987. His most recent book is Temper
Democratic, How exceptional is Australia? (Wakefield Press). Early
in 2000, Hodder-Headline will publish his Marxist history of Coca-Cola, The
Essence of Capitalism. |