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

On indulgence: Last night, the Queen set a record by eclipsing her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, and becoming Britain's longest-serving monarch. As of this morning Queen Elizabeth II has spent 63 years, seven months and four days on the throne. It is a long time, and the Queen has conducted herself with dignity and decency during this time. The Queen is the only ruling monarch to have visited Australia. Our national anthem until 1984, God Save the Queen, prayed for Queen Elizabeth 'long to reign over us' and that she has done.

During her reign she has witnessed the coming and going of 12 British prime ministers, 12 Australian Prime Ministers, and 12 American presidents. What she has not witnessed is an Australian head of state. She has witnessed 20 nations gaining independence from Britain, but Australia has not been one of them. To her great credit, the Queen has never denied this to us and after the last referendum on becoming a republic, in 1999, she said:

I have always made it clear that the future of the monarchy in Australia is an issue for you, the Australian people, and you alone, to decide by democratic and constitutional means.

One hundred years ago, when our constitutional and democratic means were being put in place, the British monarch was enshrined as our head of state, in a time when Australia was a very different nation. We were a colonial outpost in a country and in a region that we did not understand and we were not engaging with. Asian Australians who had migrated to Australia had no pathway to citizenship in the Australia of federation. Indigenous Australians, who were here for tens of thousands of years, were not even counted in our census.

For the white men who encompassed and comprised the federation parliament, who were required by law to be British subjects to be eligible to sit in that parliament and who joined together in the Melbourne Royal Exhibition Building for that very first sitting, the British monarchy may well have been, in the words of Henry Parkes, the 'crimson thread of kinship' that united them. But even then it did not unite them with Indigenous Australians. Even then it did not unite them with the already-large Chinese Australian community in Little Bourke Street, just five minutes walk away from where they met. It certainly does not unite the diverse, egalitarian nation that we have become today.

We should say this clearly in this House: the institution of monarchy is wrong. It is un-Australian. It is an affront to the democratic values that brought all of us to this place. It is an affront to the egalitarian values that our nation holds dear. It is exclusive by its very nature and it entrenches the kind of unearned privilege that we seek to roll back in all other aspects of our society. We know this instinctively. We know that the monarchy does not reflect modern Australia. We know this because when we sit at the cricket during the Ashes and the Barmy Army sings 'God save your gracious Queen' they know that it irritates us and they know that it does not reflect us. This is why they do it.

If Australians gathered here today to write their Constitution it would be unfathomable that we would chose a person from another country to be our head of state. We would demand that our head of state be Australian—one of us. We would demand that they be chosen in a way that reflected Australian values. It would be unfathomable to most Australians that we would impose a religious test on eligibility for the position or advantage one gender over another. Yet, only this year, parliament debated the farcical Succession to the Crown Bill 2015 which, among other things, allowed for a future Australian monarch to marry a Catholic and determined that role succession would be determined by birth and not by gender. Suitors of possible future Australian heads of state who are atheist, Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim are still left out in the cold. Australia should be a place where every young boy and girl can aspire to be their nation's head of state. We should be a country where we chose our head of state based on their character and qualifications and their ability to unite us and represent us as a nation, not based on who their parents happen to be.

The Queen is a benevolent head of state, and I am genuine in expressing my appreciation for the sacrifices that she has endured after being born into this life. But I am also struck with a feeling of 'what if?'. What if our head of state were one of us? I make no apologies for the pride that I feel in the nation that Australia has become. We are a multicultural, egalitarian and independent nation. We should embrace it and adopt constitutional arrangements that reflect it.

I congratulate the Queen on reaching this milestone; I wish her and her family good health and thank her for her service. But to put it in Australian terms, 'Well done, Liz, but we can take it from here.'

See this speech in context