Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

It is with pleasure that I rise to support the Succession to the Crown Bill 2015, and in the process take the opportunity to give my views to this House about our future constitutional arrangements. In respect of the bill itself, of course I echo the sentiments of others on this side of the House and indeed of those across the parliament: that we do support a change to royal succession so that it is determined by birth and not by gender. We also support removing the bar on succession of an heir of a sovereign who marries a Catholic. These are utterly anachronistic measures which date from a different time and should be changed, and so the substance of this bill of course should be supported.

But the bill does squarely raise the question of Australia's constitutional arrangements and our future identity, and in that, Mr Deputy Speaker, I stand before you as somebody who is passionately of the view that Australia ought to become a republic. In this day and age, it is utterly inconceivable that we see ourselves as anything other than a confident nation which can have its own institutions, and we should present to the world as a confident nation with our own head of state. That is obviously what a modern country should be about, and indeed the country from which our head of state currently comes would never put itself in a situation of imagining that it would have a head of state who was a citizen of anywhere else other than Great Britain.

None of that is to deny the importance of British heritage within our national story. It is obviously critically important, and many Australians trace their heritage back to Great Britain and indeed to the British Isles. But today, so many more Australians have heritage from parts all over world. Critically, we need to ensure that our first Australians, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, are given their place in our national story, and are given their special place and acknowledged in our constitutional arrangements.

For me though this is an incident, albeit perhaps the most important incident, of a bigger issue, and that is having a growth in the sense of our national identity: what we have been, where we have come from and how we stand in the community of nations today. From all of that, most importantly, we learn where we are going in the future. There are obvious components to our national identity that we could state, and many have in the context of this debate: we are an optimistic, proud country; we are democratic; we are free.

But I believe that there are other aspects to our national identity that merit discussion, merit exploration and need to be thought through. In my first speech in this parliament, I spoke a fair bit about the question of Australia's national identity. I made an argument at that time, one that I would maintain, that there has been throughout Australian history, from the time of European settlement, a tension between two issues. One is a wonderful sense of mateship borne out by one of the most egalitarian societies in the world. That can be seen in the way Charles Bean described the way the Anzacs, the Diggers, related to each other in the First World War. It can be seen in so many other ways in which we go about supporting our passions in Australia. The idea that you can be on the shop floor at LinFox, or that you can be Lindsay Fox, and on Monday, after the weekend, the thing you are most concerned about is what happened in the footy the Saturday before. We are a remarkably classless society, and that sense of mateship is really very much at the heart of that.

But I also argued that you can trace through our history, in my view, a more negative trait, and one that we need to confront and deal with. That is essentially a trait borne of fear—a fear of having established a colony back in 1788 about as far away from what was then the motherland as it was possible to be. David Day, one of Australia's most eminent historians, describes this idea as well with a sense of what that first community must have been like—and it must have been utterly terrifying. Indeed, mateship must have been critical for that community to survive. Being so far away from England, being in a completely different part of the world and having a fear of the Indigenous population at the time was part of what defined Australians then.

That perhaps is an important point to think about now, because the reasons for our fear then—which I think does rear its head at times in debates now, when we see the worst of ourselves—have well and truly gone. We need to be reconciling with our Indigenous population. So much of the wonderful discussion that we have seen with the national apology has been about attempting to walk down that path, and that is predated by the 1967 referendum. Ultimately, finding an appropriate and proper constitutional recognition of our first peoples in our Constitution is a critical part of reconciling what has been a difficult part of our history, borne of the early fear of the very first settlement that was here. The reasons for that fear simply do not exist today. They are just my views on some of the traits that go to the make-up of the history of Australia's identity, but I think what is really important is that we have a discussion about it.

I will make one other point, in terms of an observation that I have made since my first speech and having had the opportunity of campaigning for Australia for a seat on the UN Security Council, which was an incredible privilege—to, in a sense, speak to the world about the kind of Australia that exists today and what role we might play on what is really the most powerful forum in the world. What became clear to me in that process was that for Australia, as a confident and as an activist middle power, playing an appropriate role of leadership—not beyond what is our ability but very much within our ability—is what we should be about, but it is absolutely welcomed by the rest of the world. All of these, I think, are traits of what Australia has been, part of what our make-up is and where we should go. But if there is a point I really want to make in identifying all of that it is that we need to have a discussion about our national identity, because if you look back at our history we have never really had it.

That goes in part to the way in which Australia was founded. If we think about the day on which Australia first became Australia, we would imagine that as being 1 January 1901. But no-one on that day imagined that they were creating a new nation. People on that day imagined that they were amalgamating six colonies into one colony. People very much believed, at that moment in time, that we were still part of Britain. There were the constitutional conventions in the lead-up to 1901, which talked a lot about how we were going to frame the governance of this region. In terms of a national discussion about what our identity is—where we have come from and what we would be—those discussions did not happen. Yet you do find those discussions in the histories of other countries, and you only need to look at the kinds of debates that were occurring in the United States in the lead-up to 4 July 1776 to get a real sense that it was a country that was absolutely going about the business of trying to determine what they were about, why they wanted not to be a part of a greater British Empire, how they saw themselves going forward, the role they saw themselves playing in the world and what values they stood for. That was an utterly critical discussion that has set the US up, I think, in terms of the way in which it has played its role ever since, both domestically and going forward. It is a discussion that in my view we need to have, and it is something that I called for in my first speech and that I call for again today.

The reason for raising these thoughts in the context of this bill, in talking about the importance of the republic, is something that the Leader of the Opposition said this morning in his contribution to this. He said:

The Republic debate, and becoming a Republic would signal a constitutional renaissance, it would provide blood energy to the nation.

Hear, hear! The becoming of a republic is critically important in itself, in my view. It is critically important as an incident of a confident, optimistic nation going forward, but it provides the perfect opportunity to have the kind of national discussion, to have a growth in our national identity, to develop some kind of national consensus about who we are and where we are going in a way that we have not actually had. There is no independence day in Australia, when you think it through. We have never had that discussion that led to us being an independent nation, and this is the perfect opportunity to do it. So, I think the Leader of the Opposition was right this morning when he said that the time is right to reinvigorate the debate around the republic, and I think this is a very appropriate point to make in the context of supporting this bill.

So, I very much hope that what we see from this is the first step down a path of becoming an Australian republic and beginning the discussion around that and, I hope, beginning a really deep discussion about who we are as a nation. In saying that, obviously I reiterate that of course we support the specifics of this bill. They themselves are a step that Great Britain should be taking in relation to its monarchy, and that they remain our monarchy is a step that should be taken by us in respect of that monarchy as well. But really, now, in 2015, the time is absolutely right to move down a different path and take Australia towards a republic.

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