Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to congratulate Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, who yesterday became the longest-serving British monarch ever. I am a republican, but I never want to overshadow how important the Queen is to the British or how important it is for people who share my beliefs to not be glib or rude about the role of the monarchy. Queen Elizabeth is a public servant; she has lived her entire life in service to her country, and I respect that. Britain is a country that faces many challenges and, frankly, great division. Queen Elizabeth has been a constant, a comfort, a fixture for her people in a very fast-changing world.

We are a very young democracy and today we acknowledge that the Queen has been our head of state for 63 years—that is more than half of our life as a federated nation. She is part of our history, and she is always going to be so. But part of our history is where I believe the monarchy should remain. In 1952, when the Queen became our head of state, Australia was a completely different country. We were a monocultural nation where it was deemed perfectly acceptable that we determine our immigration policies based on people's race. New Australians, as they were called, were expected to quickly assimilate into our way of doing things. Our First Australians were, at the time, subject to an extraordinary range of discriminatory policies. In those days a woman's place was in the home, and of all the people who had ever been elected to federal parliament just three of them were women. It was a nation where it made perfect sense that we thought of ourselves as being part of the British Empire. Menzies said that we were, 'British to the bootstraps,' and at the time almost all Australians agreed with him except a ragtag group of radical republicans, of which my grandfather was one.

As a smaller and younger democracy, things here change very quickly—much faster than where our Queen lives, over 17,000 kilometres away. Today I represent an electorate where most of the people in it come from migrant families. Almost half of my constituents were born overseas. They come from more than 150 different countries and cultures around the world and for most of them Britain, the Queen and the monarchy have nothing to do with their fiercely Australian identity. The reason for this is very simple and very straightforward—that is, the values that the incredible people that I represent espouse as Australians have nothing to do with the values that are espoused by the monarchy. The fundamental principle of the monarchy is that power should come from birthright. The monarchy is a sexist institution because the Queen would never have even been the Queen had she had a brother who, just by virtue of being male, would have taken precedence over her right to the throne. In recent years, we have done an incredibly modern thing and updated the laws of succession to allow the eldest child of the royal family to become the king or queen. But discrimination still remains because when Charles becomes king then Camilla will become the queen, but the husband of a future queen will never be a king. The reason for that is very simple: a king is always considered to be more powerful than a queen simply because she is a woman.

It does not stop there. To become a member of parliament I am not required to join or to be prevented from joining any religious group. Our Constitution declares that there should be no religious test to office and all of us in the chamber would surely agree that the idea of this would be practically and fundamentally ridiculous. It is one of the most basic principles of a secular democracy. But for our head of state, the person who governs over our country, the opposite applies. Due to a recent change, the head of state is, again in an amazing step forward, allowed to marry a Catholic, but they are forbidden from being a Catholic themselves. Within my electorate alone Catholics make up the largest faith community. So 35,000 people that I represent align themselves with that religion, yet that religion is seen by the rules of succession as being so threatening that it would rule any future monarch ineligible. In Hotham there are almost as many Buddhists as there are Anglicans, and non-religious people outnumber Anglicans twofold, but while the recent changes allow a monarch to marry a Catholic when they are crowned, they must still declare that they are a faithful Protestant and in communion with the Church of England. So I say that not only is our head of state and the monarchy unrepresentative of our nation—one of the most multicultural in the world—but that they also actively discriminate against a large group of people by continuing to preference one religion over another, and one gender over another.

I believe that we simply cannot be the best version of ourselves as Australians until this fundamental building block of our political system is removed. Today, the foundations of our system do not merely fail to reflect who we are as Australians, they reflect values that are anathema to us as Australians: values of hereditary privilege, of discrimination and of exclusion. The notion that this institution is appropriate to preside over this incredible, multicultural, outward looking country, one of the most peaceful and diverse democracies in the world, is wrong. We are big enough to stand on our own two feet and we will be a lot better off for it. Australia is the complete opposite of everything the monarchy represents: we are a young nation, strong, friendly, informal, kind, open and we find titles and pomp and ceremony amusing—something to poke a bit of fun at, not to revere. We love our neighbours no matter what religion, what gender or what sexuality they are. That is what it is to be Australian. Our head of state should be one of us; it is really that simple. We are one Australian people from many different backgrounds and what brings us together, unlike the British, has nothing to do with someone who has visited our country just 16 times over their 60-year reign over us as a people.

I want to congratulate the Queen, I really do. She has devoted her life to her kingdom and she will be forever part of our history as Australians, but I do not believe that she should form any part in our future.

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