Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I speak to the Succession to the Crown Bill 2015. This bill gives effect to decisions taken under the Labor government to implement in Australian law changes to the rules of succession to the British Crown. The changes were proposed by the government of Great Britain and supported by those Commonwealth nations still under the British Crown at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth in 2011. The British parliament passed the Succession to the Crown Act in 2013.

The member for Pearce, in his speech on the bill, notes that legislation in the British parliament must be supported by 'all 16 realms' of the Commonwealth to make sure that the royal succession operates in the same way in each nation which has the Queen as its head of state. That term 'realm' is important. A realm is a Commonwealth nations still under the British monarchy. We used to call some of these 'dominions', although that is now perhaps too much even for the staunchest Australian monarchist. There are 16 realms now, as the member for Pearce says, but the clear majority of the Commonwealth's 53 independent nations have left the monarchy. Under Labor, COAG agreed to implement Australia's support for the changes by the parliaments of the states requesting Commonwealth legislation to have effect nationally. With the notable exception of one jurisdiction, states participated productively in those negotiations. Federal Labor thanks the states for their cooperation in that process.

But I really must take issue with the description of this legislation by the member for Pearce. In his second reading speech on this bill, he said:

This modernisation of the laws of succession ensures the continued relevance of the monarchy to Australia and her people and reflects the commitment that all Australians have to equality and to nondiscrimination.

Evidently, the member for Pearce thinks that this bill is a landmark reform of our constitutional arrangements. I expect the member to go back to his electorate and explain to his constituents just how the measures in this bill accord with their values, their aspirations and their expectations of how the Australian government should be run. The member for Pearce is pleased that the abolition of male preference primogeniture by this bill affords some gender equality to the royal succession. I hope he can explain to his constituents the ongoing relevance to Australian life of a system where high office is inherited. I hope he can explain why we are concerned with birth order at all. I hope he explains to his constituents just what a victory it is for equality and tolerance that, while the Australian head of state may not by law be a Roman Catholic, he or she may now marry one. I hope he is able to explain why, in this country, where we have not established any religion and where the Constitution prohibits the federal parliament from doing so, the law states that our head of state must be a member of the Church of England. I certainly hope that the member for Pearce tells his constituents about the important reform to marriage law he has supported here in this chamber. Truly, the reform to the law of marriage which Australians are crying out for is the abolition in the United Kingdom of the Royal Marriages Act passed in the year 1772.

I do not mean to be flippant about this bill. As I said, each measure on its own has merit. For the British, where the monarchy clearly does have an ongoing place in national life, these measures perhaps represent a meaningful accommodation between tradition and modernity. But this is not Britain, and the reason that this bill does not ensure 'the continued relevance of the monarchy' to Australia in 2015 is because it is monarchy itself which is out of step with contemporary Australian life. The problem is not the specific set of rules by which a member of the royal family is selected to take the throne. It is the fact that the only candidates are British aristocrats with a necessarily limited understanding of Australian life. While the law dictates that an Australian may not be head of state, our constitutional arrangements will always jar, always ring a little false. As I said, Labor will support this legislation. We worked to progress it during the Labor government. On its own terms, it is a worthy piece of legislation. We are happy to work with our counterparts in Britain and in the other 15 Commonwealth jurisdictions involved to give effect to these changes.

The exception that I referred to earlier regarding the participation of the states in this legislation, some members might remember, was the LNP government in Queensland, a government very sensibly dispatched by the people of Queensland after just one term. The LNP government and its Attorney-General, Jarrod Bleijie, flew in the face of the expert constitutional advice provided to all Australian governments that the appropriate path forward was for each state to request Commonwealth legislation under section 51(xxxviii) of the Constitution. The Queensland LNP, ever parochial, wanted to legislate themselves. We were expected to accept that Queensland should have its own law of royal succession. I said at the time that this suggestion had shades of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's hare-brained scheme to create a separate Queensland sovereignty—a Queen of Queensland—which was emphatically ruled out by the High Court in 1974. We should all be thankful that the revival of the politics of Bjelke-Petersen was cut short by the people of Queensland in January this year.

Notwithstanding the initial recalcitrance by Queensland, the parliament of each state has now legislated a request for Commonwealth legislation. Accordingly, this bill will now implement the changes to the succession into Australian law. To be clear about it the bill makes three key changes to current arrangements. The bill abolishes the rule of succession, under which a man precedes his sister in succession to the throne even if she is the elder sibling. The bill removes the rule disqualifying a person from the succession if that person marries a Roman Catholic. The rule established in the Act of Settlement that the monarch must be an Anglican is maintained. The bill abolishes the Royal Marriages Act 1772. That legislation required the consent of the monarch to the marriages of the descendants of King George II, a category that now includes hundreds of people in Britain. The bill repeals that act and provides that the monarch's consent is only required for the first six people in line to the throne. Though a lack of the required consent will remove a person from the royal succession it will not, as under the Royal Marriages Act, invalidate the marriage itself.

Labor welcomes these changes to the law of succession. The bill aligns some aspects of the British monarchy with modern expectations. We congratulate the British government on this reform to its arrangements. We were happy to assist our British friends with this reform while we were in government and we remain happy to support this legislation from opposition. Echoing the sentiments already expressed today by the Leader of the Opposition, I hope that the next time this parliament considers a bill which concerns itself with the British monarchy it is a bill for an amendment to the Australian Constitution. I said in my maiden speech in this place that I hoped to one day vote here for an Australian republic, and that remains my hope today.

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