Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying, the head of the Australian Republican Movement, David Morris, is someone I met in 2013 when I was chairing a panel on the Australian republic at a Progressive Australia conference conducted by the Chifley Research Centre—which, might I say, was an excellent conference. The panel talked a lot about the importance of a republic when it comes to talking about our national identity and our place in the world, particularly our place in the world in the Asian century. The point was made then that it is difficult for someone to understand why Australia—a modern country with important relationships with Asian nations as well as Western nations—would want to have a foreign head of state. As I was saying, David himself is someone who is a very strong advocate for talking about the national identity and what it means to be Australian in the context of thinking about how to have an Australian head of state and whether it is appropriate to have an Australian head of state. And, as I said, I think when you talk about the idea of becoming a republic and of standing on our own two feet you have to think about that in the context about what it really means to be Australian in the 21st century. As you well know, Mr Deputy Speaker Goodenough, we are a multicultural society; we are a society of mixed heritages; we are a society that recognises the contributions made by the first peoples of this country—the first nations people; we are a society that has valued immigration and the contribution that immigrants have made to our nation, particularly in recent decades and since the Second World War.

And I want to mention that our Indigenous culture rightfully has a central place in our understanding of what it means to be Australian and in the international understanding of what it means to be Australian. In fact, Indigenous art is as much a symbol of our national identity as is the kangaroo and vegemite. When one travels overseas all of those things—as well as platypi, for example—get raised, about what it means to be Australian and the images and symbols and emblems and ideas of Australianism that come from our national environment and from our peoples and from our culture that we have developed here. So, I did want to mention the struggles of the first peoples to overcome the adverse effects of the dispossession that arose during British colonisation. It is something that informs our national values as a modern nation state. But, as I said earlier, we still have not recognised those first peoples of this country in our Constitution. And, like many people in this place—hopefully everyone in this place—I believe it is something we should do.

When you are talking about the nature of the head of state of Australia and when you are talking about this bill, which is really about the way lines of succession work—whether a man or a woman gets to be first in place in the race for the British throne or whether an heir to a king or a queen can marry a Catholic—it is, as I said earlier, really a reminder that we should not be talking about a foreign monarch; we should be talking about an Australian head of state, a home-grown head of state. And, as I said earlier, that has to be informed by our values, and one of the fundamental Australian values of course is the idea of a fair go. It is that idea that led to the Freedom Ride of 1965, and it is that idea that leads to overwhelming support for the reconciliation movement, including the apology to the Stolen Generation that my predecessor as the member for Griffith, the Honourable Kevin Rudd, made in this place.

I mentioned earlier David Morris, who, as I said, is someone who speaks a lot about Australian identity in his work leading the Australian Republican Movement. As he said, an Australian republic is an opportunity to 'unite Australians, in our diversity, around an identity that can also strengthen our identity in the world, an identity that is not simply rooted in being comfortable with the past, but one that actively embraces our present and future'.

In the Asian century, the region and the world can better understand Australia if we stand on our own two feet. If instead of having a foreign monarch as our head of state we have an Australian as our head of state, we can better understand ourselves—in the stories that we tell ourselves about what it means to be Australian today, in the way that we understand our values, in the way that we articulate what it means to be a mate, to be courageous, to be bold, to be enterprising, to be caring, to love community, in all of those things, and in forming our identity, in acknowledging our history, good and bad, in acknowledging our diversity, in working towards a particularly Australian multiculturalism which is a spectacularly successful form of multiculturalism, one of the best examples of multiculturalism in the world, where we underpin our respect for each other's cultures and values with our fundamental respect for the rights, liberties and freedoms of an Australian living under the Australian Constitution with respect for democracy and the rule of law. When you put all those rights and values together, when you put all of those shared ideas and values together, it is really one way of giving expression to the fact that we do stand on our own feet, that we do have our own identity, that we are a modern adult nation, a mature nation, no longer hanging from the apron strings of a mother country, no longer dependent on a monocultural past based around a British throne, those things really do lend themselves to becoming an Australian republic.

I of course acknowledge, as I did earlier in the course of this debate, the contribution that the British monarch, the Queen herself and the Governors-General of Australia, have made to our nation. I do say that it would be wonderful if instead of debating a bill about the way succession to the British throne works we were debating a bill to become an Australian republic.

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