Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to take this opportunity to speak about recent events in the ongoing movement towards an Australian republic. On Sunday, 18 November, I was fortunate to attend the launch of the Our Identity campaign being run by the Australian Republican Movement. The launch was held at the remarkable Museum of Old and New Art, MONA, which is transforming the way Tasmania is perceived. We heard from speakers like comedian Julian Morrow, journalist Lisa Pryor, former Premier Geoff Gallop and retired Major General and immediate past chairperson of the ARM, Mike Keating.

It was an incredible night of Australian culture, produce and humour and each of the speeches and statements conveyed a belief in an Australia that has grown into a confident, socially coherent multicultural nation with a world of opportunity at our doorstep.

There is no doubt that under the leadership of David Morris and his team of state and territory convenors the Our Identity campaign will cause a stir. Our Identity will succeed because it resonates with the Australia of 2012. Australians are now not only willing to talk about our country, our people and our future, they are eager to do so. Our Identity recognises that, well over a century since we forged a single nation from shared interests and a common purpose across this great land, the cultural cringe has disappeared. Since that time of 1901 when the colonies joined we have grown into something much greater than the sum of our parts and become something much more than a distant outpost of a remote empire.

At the same time the balance of the world has shifted. With the rapid rise of Asian economies and culture we are now firmly in the Asian century. With so much change Australia has the chance to position itself for decades ahead. We have the opportunity to define our direction. When our nation was born in 1901 it was by democratic means. Our Federation was inspired by the American union, yet nobody asked the American people to vote on the Declaration of Independence. Despite all the similarities between Australia and the US, there were fundamental differences in the formation of our two nations. America rejected a monarch they saw as a tyrant, dissolving their link with the Crown altogether, but America held onto the rights of Englishmen, continuing to exalt the tradition of liberty found in Mill, Hobbes and Locke. More than that, the new republic turned British values into American values, inspired by the glorious revolution rather than eternally limited by it.

While some of Australia's institutions changed quickly after Federation, many did not. Without an institutional catalyst, our culture did not experience the change of other new nations like the United States or India. Inertia ensured that we were still more loyal subjects than citizens of a newly independent state. We continued to defer to Britain and our policies continued to reflect British priorities.

Slowly, some of the artefacts of colonial Australia did fade away. The despicable White Australia policy finally ended in 1973, ending racial discrimination in our migration system. God Save the Queen gave way to our own national anthem in 1974 and in 1994 the Crown was finally removed from the Pledge of Commitment.

The more than 80 per cent of new Australian citizens who are not British no longer swear their allegiance to a monarch who has never had an impact on their lives. These migrants have come not for an empire upon which the sun never sets, but for a sunburnt country. The heritage our new citizens honour is the heritage of Australia. We do not need to pretend that British history is our history. Our country has its own history.

That history began 50,000 years ago, when Aboriginal Australians founded nations across some of the most difficult landscapes in the world and forged connections to country that are as certain as they are profound. Those connections were ruptured by colonialism, but contemporary Australia is a place in which country can coexist with other deep spiritual beliefs.

As Sir Henry Parkes led the Federation movement, so we need leadership to light the republican movement. Deakin inherited a polity deeply entrenched in the British monarchy. He led the regulation of working conditions, just as Fisher later enshrined the minimum wage. That kind of leadership helped begin the definition of Australia, leaving behind the British class system and creating a nation based on egalitarianism and the fair go. But it took a brave Prime Minister to push forward on an Australian republic. That leader was Paul Keating, who in 1993 politely but definitively told the Queen her service to Australia was no longer required. His vision was for Australia to define itself according to the values and make-up of its people. Like many Australians of mixed heritage, I identify with the aspiration of Australians being represented by one of their own.

As the only Western country in the region, we have an extraordinary opportunity to harness the rise of Asia. Yet there is a mentality that, when we punch out at the end of our time working in or visiting China, we come safely home to the West. For example, only 20 per cent of Australians currently working in China can speak the language. We can no longer afford to think of ourselves as simply visitors to this region. We must learn the history, customs and language of our own region, as Prime Minister Julia Gillard recently outlined in the response to the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper.

The economies of the Asian tigers speak for themselves. The Association of South-East Asian Nations is now one-third larger than Australia in market exchange rate terms. China and India's amazing economic growth has tripled their share of the global economy in the last 20 years. In the next 20 years, their share of the global economy will grow from a fifth to a third.

Australia is no longer the Antipodes. It is from this region that the agenda for the future will be set, and it is from this country that we must announce our readiness to be involved in this region. We need to look to the future in reference to who we are: a multicultural society comprised of Indigenous Australia and people from all over the world, an economy with the advantage of adjacency and a polity with robust, distinctly Australian institutions and attitudes.

Fortunately, unlike conservative nations of the Commonwealth like Canada, the forces that would actively resist a republic do not have the authority of this government. We have a Prime Minister who believes in Australian republicanism. We have the energy and enthusiasm of young people and community activists for whom an Australian republic is the next logical step. Yet despite our support, despite the opportunities before us, the movement has too often hesitated. Perhaps chastened by the referendum in 1999 set up to fail, we equivocate, deferring to the macabre idea that we should wait until Queen Elizabeth passes on.

We need to ensure the idea of an Australian republic occupies a central place in our national debate once again. That is what the new Our Identity campaign is about; taking the idea of our own Australia to our schools, our workplaces and our kitchen tables.

I was pleased to be joined at the Australian Republican Movement dinner by friends and allies from all sides of politics and from all ages and background. I acknowledge that an Australian future means a future for all who love this country, not just those with one opinion or one single belief. But I also acknowledge the terrific Labor representation at the ARM dinner, building on the success of the Australian Labor Party's new Policy Action Caucus dedicated to supporting the movement for a republic. Labor for an Australian Republic, driven in large part by the efforts of grassroots convenor, Daniel White, is reinvigorating the movement inside the ALP just as the ARM is doing right across the community.

Parkes had to fight the 'no' campaign against federation. Now, we must rise to fight the 'no' campaign against an Australian republic with vigour, fortitude and a belief in the nation we want to define for the future; a nation with our own head of state that is truly Australian.