They have England’s Queen as its head of state in symbolic role but should Australia keep Queen?
Treasurer Wayne Swan and senior opposition figure Malcolm Turnbull, who once was Australia’s Republican Movement president, came together in the capital Canberra on Monday to launch a book of essays called ‘Project Republic: Plans and Arguments for a New Australia’.
Mr Turnbull, who sits on the front bench for the conservative opposition, described this latest push as “simply, purely patriotic” and called for an ‘interactive plebiscite’ to use cyberspace to better inform Australians of the issues surrounding constitutional change.
“Many argue that the sexy celebrity status of William and Kate will sweep all before it and their star quality will revive the monarchy in Australia. I don’t think so,” he writes. “They will certainly be far more interesting and telegenic than Charles and Camilla – but I am not convinced that will translate into enhanced support for William (or indeed Charles) remaining our head of state.”
Also in his journal The Currency Lad, first published in Sydney in 1832, pastoralist Horatio Wills was the first Australian to openly espouse republicanism:
Born to a convict father, Wills was devoted to the emancipist cause and called for Australia to be an independent nation like the United States. His son Tom Wills was a founder of Australian rules football.
Some leaders and participants of the revolt at the Eureka Stockade in 1854 held republican views and the incident has been used to encourage republicanism in subsequent years, the Eureka Flag appearing in connection with some republican groups. The Australian Republican Association (ARA) was founded in response, advocating the abolition of governors and their titles; the revision of the penal code; payment of members of parliament; nationalisation of land; and an independent federal Australian republic outside of the British Empire. At the same time, a movement emerged in favour of a “White Australia” policy; however British authorities in Whitehall were opposed to segregational laws. To circumvent Westminster, those in favour of the discriminatory policies backed the proposed secession from the Empire as a republic. One attendee of the ARA meetings was the Australian-born poet Henry Lawson, who wrote his first poem, entitled A Song of the Republic, in The Republican journal.
“Banish from under your bonny skies
Those old-world errors and wrongs and lies”
— Henry Lawson, A Song of the Republic
When the Republican League disrupted the Sydney centenary in 1888 Anniversary Day, one visiting British statesman said “Thank God there is an English fleet in harbour”.
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