Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I feel a familiar sense of embarrassment as I rise to speak on this bill today, the Succession to the Crown Bill 2015. It is an embarrassment that many Australians will have felt, perhaps while they were sitting in the outer watching an Ashes test match and listening to the Barmy Army sing, 'God save your Queen.' Why does this so stick in our craw? Why does the Barmy Army know that it sticks in our craw? Because today, 227 years after the First Fleet and 115 years after Federation, Australia's head of state does not represent us. It is not simply that it is an anachronism; it is that the institution of the British monarchy offends the very things that we are most proud of about Australia. It is utterly out of step with the values and expectations of modern Australia—values like a fair go, egalitarianism and mateship. The British monarchy is an elitist and exclusive institution. There is no way around this. It is an institution that looks backwards to who someone's parents happen to be when determining whether someone is qualified to be a head of state. It is an institution that excludes the millions of Australians whose families, like my own, have come to this country from nations outside the British Empire. It is an institution that, as we see in the bill before us today, continues to discriminate on the basis of gender and religion.

I have no doubt that the individuals, the human beings who are trapped within these institutions, are generally good and decent people like the rest of us. But we can do better as a nation than the British monarchy. Indeed, we have already built something better in this country. That is why the Barmy Army mocks us, because even they can see the incongruity between the nation that we have made for ourselves and the outdated and unrepresentative head of state at the apex of our system of government.

I have heard some members in this place lament that this bill is a waste of time and that the parliament has more important, more substantive things to deal with. I could not disagree more. Symbols matter, and national symbols matter a great deal. Our national symbols matter to the sense of connection that Australian citizens feel with other Australians, with their nation and with the government. It matters whether Australians feel like they share a common stake in the hopes and achievements of their fellow citizens and that we are all in the same boat. We on this side of the House believe in the potential for what we can achieve together and the power of collective action. Too often, progressives discount the important role that a sense of unified national identity can play as an enabler of collective action. Think of the things that we have built in this nation through this sense of shared endeavour. As Tim Soutphommasane has argued in his book Reclaiming Patriotism, progressives, people who believe in collective action, should readily embrace the label of patriot. Soutphommasane argues that a love of country also includes an obligation to improve your country in any way possible. To do so, we must engage in nation building. It is progressives who have been the instigators of the major nation-building initiatives that have made our country great. They have been the ones pushing the nation building reforms such as the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, Medicare and Australia's superannuation savings schemes.

But we must also engage in the building of national identity on the symbolic level. Edmund Barton may have said that 'we have a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation', but we are not defined by our landmass. We define ourselves through the national culture, values and symbols that we build together as a people. National identity is politically constructed, and it is up to all of us, MPs and citizens alike, to build it. We do this every day.

Conservatives and reactionaries like our current Prime Minister like to suggest that Australian identity is somehow immutable and that the concept of what an Australian is is somehow set in stone. To see how this national identity is politically constructed, consider how just a few of our national symbols have evolved since Federation. Our flag is a powerful symbol of Australian identity. Its place in the Australian consciousness is now so strong that to many it feels like an unchangeable part of our national identity. But, if you look at Tom Roberts's iconic big-picture portrait of the opening of the first Australian parliament, in Melbourne in 1901, you will see three flags in use: the Union Jack, the red ensign and the blue ensign that we today recognise as the Australian flag. Through the early years of our nation, there was confusion over who was permitted to fly which flag and when they were able to do so. As a result, the Australian red ensign was commonly flown by Australians until 1953, when Prime Minister Menzies passed the Flags Act and made the blue ensign the national standard. It is notable that our conception of something as seemingly unchanging and fundamental as Australia's flag has actually changed substantially over the last 100 years of our nation's history.

The concept of citizenship—the right to be a full participant in our community and our democracy—has also changed significantly over time. In 1901, down the road from the opening of the Federation parliament in Melbourne's Exhibition Building, in Little Bourke Street's Chinatown, there was a celebration to mark the presence of the Duke and Duchess of York in Australia for the opening of the Federation parliament. The Chinese traders of Little Bourke Street decorated Swanston Street with flags and lanterns and a Chinese arch with two pagoda-style towers adorned with a banner for the royal party that read, 'Welcome by the Chinese citizens.'

Unfortunately, despite their obvious civic pride, this banner was erected more in hope than in truth, as at the time the vast majority of Chinese Australians were not Australian citizens. Before Federation most Australian colonies passed laws banning Asians from being naturalised in Australia, and despite the presence of this civic-minded Australian community at the opening of parliament, just nine sitting days after the opening, the Immigration Restriction Act, better known as the White Australia policy, was introduced into the parliament. As Timothy Kendall has written in an excellent monograph on this period:

Federation was a moment of self-determination which presented the new nation with a unique opportunity to reflect upon matters of identity, citizenship and nationhood. … the first Parliament of Australia drew upon this opportunity—this moment of sovereignty—to construct deliberately discriminatory and racially exclusive legislation.

No-one in this place today would deny that Chinese Australians deserve the right to be recognised as equal Australian citizens, yet it was not until 1949 that a legal mechanism to do so was introduced to this country.

The ethnically and culturally diverse Australia of today is very different from the official White Australia of the era of Federation. Is there anyone among us who would say this is not for the better—that the Australia of the start of the 21st century is not a far greater nation than the Australia of the start of the 20th century? Is there anyone among us who would not be proud of how far we have come as a country since the days of Edmund Barton? If we can recognise that our nation has changed and changed for the better, we should also recognise that the symbols of our nation that have become outdated as a result of this change should also change. It is time to reprise the words of Mr Kendall, reflect again upon 'matters of identity, citizenship and nationhood' and embrace a system of government that gives everyone in our nation a stake in the symbols of Australia.

The British monarch is no longer the single thread that unites us as a nation. It is at best an irrelevance and at worst a symbol of our inability as a nation to recognise who we really are and who we have become. This is why I welcome the leadership being shown by the Leader of the Opposition on this issue. His efforts to put an Australian republic back on the national political agenda are timely and will reinvigorate the campaign for an Australian republic within the community. Recent years have been difficult times for the republican movement. We have had a Prime Minister and a federal government who are slavishly devoted to the monarchy and anachronistic symbols of it like knights and dames. We have a media that are obsessed with the celebrity of Wills and Kate and baby George and baby No. 2, devoting almost 100 articles in Australian print media to it in the month leading up to the announcement of the Duchess of Cambridge's pregnancy. Finally, we have a growing group of young Australians who are too young to remember the republican movement of the 1990s and so are not even aware of the possibility of change in our community. Support for the republic amongst this group of young Australians is at an all-time low.

In this context, it may seem an odd moment to argue that we must begin the republican debate anew, but it is important to remember that a similarly desolate situation faced young republicans back in the late 1980s. There was a similarly popular young prince, a princess and two little princes who were gaining huge media attention. There was also lukewarm support throughout Australia for the republic. Opinion polls found that support for a republic in the late 1980s hovered around 40 to 41 per cent. In fact, a commission established to review the Constitution in time for Australia's bicentenary in 1988 concluded that there was no republican movement in Australia. It argued that a referendum could not be held because:

… on the evidence available to it, and regardless of the merits of the arguments, there was no prospect … of a change in public opinion in the near future which would result in there being majority support for a republic.

In fact, it believed that the Australian people favoured the monarchy so overwhelmingly it was not worth including a recommendation to hold a referendum, as it would detract from other elements of the report. Just 10 years later, we were heading into a referendum, with the majority of Australians supporting some sort of constitutional model removing the Queen as our head of state.

How did this happen? It was republican activists that put the question back on the agenda. In 1991, we saw the Constitutional Centenary Conference, convened by legal experts from around the country. The conference aimed for a full and frank discussion of the parts of Australia's constitution that needed to change and be updated. Its discussion of the constitutional mechanics needed to put a republic in place raised awareness of the republican cause. The conference also led to the creation of the Constitutional Centenary Foundation, an invaluable source of impartial legal advice on the republic as the debate gained momentum. Nineteen ninety one also saw the creation of the Australian Republican Movement. The activists of the ARM were able to work with the Keating government to further awareness of the need for a republic. By February 1993, Prime Minister Keating was ready to announce the formation of a committee to analyse potential forms that an Australian republic might take.

It was a long journey, however, from this moment to counting the votes on referendum day. The formal process to determine whether Australians wanted to become a republic at that time was complex. It started with the investigation and report of the Republican Advisory Committee into potential options for a republic in 1993. In 1995, we saw a commitment by the Keating government to a republic by the Centenary of Federation in 2001, but it took until 1997 to pass the legislation establishing the Constitutional Convention and another year to hold the convention. Finally, in November 1999 the referendum was held. Yet, throughout this period, republican activists were working hard to find grassroots support and they were succeeding. During this period, support for the republic shot up from the 40 per cent of the late 1980s to 60 per cent in 1994 and 66 per cent in 1996, where it remained until the referendum. Of course, this process was not perfect, to say the least, and there were many disappointed republicans on referendum night. I remember it well. It was also the night of the Holt by-election and the election of the current member for Holt, so there was some consolation for Labor supporters in Victoria. Let's not forget, though, that support for a republic survived the referendum and, even in 2004, in the depths of the Howard years, it stood at a strong 57 per cent.

We can take away from this experience two important things. First, it was republican activists that spurred the debate. Activists needed to engage with Australians to convince them of the need for the republic, not the other way around. As I said earlier, national identity is politically constructed; it does not happen by accident. Second, the time frames for referenda of this significance are long. It took almost a decade to cover all the legal and political considerations of such an important constitutional change and to build support.

This brings me to my second point: why the time for the republic conversation to begin anew is now. We know that the movement will take years to result in any lasting change and we also know that it takes republican activists to drive support for the movement, and that sort of awareness does not happen overnight, considering significant constitutional and political change requires long-term planning, which should not be affected by transient political circumstances or moods. The weather at the bottom of the mountain should not stop you from starting your journey to the summit.

All of this being said, I will attempt to engage with the substance of the bill before the House. To begin, I will relay some of the embarrassing content of this bill. This 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, however, maintained. There are also a range of bizarre provisions about approval from the monarch of the marriages of junior royals in which I am frankly and utterly uninterested and will not engage with. The bill, as a total, is a nonsense. I commend the bill to the House, but I hope that MPs who follow me in this place do not have to engage with similar absurdities in the future.

See this speech in context