Australia isn’t going to become a republic
It’s Australia Day, a moment of national celebration which inevitably brings thoughts as to my country’s future, including whether it should become a republic. But it’s not going to happen. At least, not anytime soon. Given recent developments, such an event would be decades, not years away.
The collapse of political momentum for an Australian republic stems directly from the comprehensive defeat of the “Voice” constitutional referendum last October. Less than 40 per cent supported it. It lost in every state. While Australians continue to debate the reasons for its failure – the vagueness of the proposal, legitimate concerns about formalising a racial division in the constitution, the hectoring tone of so many “Yes” advocates – there is little disagreement over its political consequences.
The Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese invested huge political capital in the referendum, which has now been squandered. The government’s long honeymoon has come to an abrupt end. Australians judged that, in the middle of a cost of living crisis, the government’s priorities were not theirs. Polling indicates Albanese’s vision of a long-term Labor government is looking shaky.
It has since announced it would rescind its promise to hold, if reelected for a second term, a referendum on whether Australia should become a republic. The junior minister who had been designated, among other roles, as assistant minister for the republic, has been told to get on with other things. While Australian Labor remains formally committed to a republic, the chastening experience of the failure of the “Voice” has eliminated appetite for another referendum anytime soon.
Earlier this month, in an important further development, the final nail was hammered into the republican coffin by the Australian Republic Movement itself. The newly-appointed head of the ARM, Nova Peris, an indigenous woman from the Northern Territory who served as a Labor senator but is better known as a former champion Olympic athlete, conceded that there should not be a referendum until it had bipartisan support. This is a different stance to Albanese, who has just kicked the issue into the long grass.
Peris’s sensible caution – which attracted predictable criticism from some other republican advocates – has taken whatever wind was left out of the sails of republicanism. Labor’s support for a republic might be a given, but on the other side of politics the position isn’t as simple. The centre-right parties in Australia are a coalition of the Liberal Party (analogous to the Conservative Party) and the National Party, which represents rural and regional interests.
Like the Tories, the Australian Liberals embrace a spectrum of views: the last time Australia had a referendum on becoming a republic, in 1999, liberal moderate Malcolm Turnbull led the Yes campaign and his Right-wing predecessor Tony Abbott led the successful No campaign. Recognising these divisions, the government did not take a formal position on the referendum, though the former prime minister John Howard himself strongly opposed it. The much more conservative National Party, meanwhile, remains overwhelmingly anti-republican.
Which means that bipartisanship on the issue is unlikely ever to occur. At best for republicans, as was the case in 1999, there would be a split between Labor and pro-republican Liberals on the one side, and anti-republican Liberals and almost all Nationals on the other. No referendum proposal put forward against the backdrop of such partisan division has ever succeeded.
Recognition of that reality means that neither side of Australian politics is going to promote a republic referendum for the foreseeable future. Labor will remain committed to the cause, emotionally and philosophically, but it will not let its republican heart rule its pragmatic head. On the other side, I foresee no circumstances in which a future Liberal-national government would promote the issue. Even those Liberals who favour a republic (and there are many) would see that it would be too divisive on the conservative side of politics. Given that division, it would fail anyway. Just as for Labor, though for different reasons, they would calculate that it was not worth the political risk.
Later this year Charles III will make his 18th visit to my homeland, but his first as King of Australia. In decades to come, I expect we will welcome, in the same capacity, William V and, in all likelihood, George VII as well.