Changing the Constitution
Res publica
An Australian head of state should be on the political agenda because the likely future demands on the Governor-General require him or her to have legitimacy.
In 2015 opposition leader Bill Shorten called for Australia to become a republic within ten years.
Here we are, ten years later, still nominally loyal to a distant and foreign monarch. Albanese, fresh from a meeting with the King of England, has ruled out bringing on a republic referendum while he is prime minister. That could be a long time if he is out to break the Menzies 16-year record.
Albanese in his time has been enthusiastic about Australia becoming a republic. In his first ministry he appointed Matt Thistlewaite as “Assistant Minister for the Republic” after he had served since 2017 as the “Shadow Assistant Minister for an Australian Head of State”. But that office was quietly dropped in the second Albanese ministry.
Mike Seccombe has a contribution in the Saturday Paper A Republic in the too-hard basket, presenting an account of where the republican movement’s supporters and detractors stand today. It is also a review of Esther Anatolitis’ book When Australia Became a Republic.
Anatolitis argues that in a series of steps going back to the mid 19th century, Australia has been quietly severing cultural and institutional links with Britain. De facto, in most important senses of the idea of res publica, Australia is already a republic, but there is the still the fact that the Governor-General could be guided by a foreign monarch in making his or her difficult decisions in appointing a government.
That’s not just theoretical. Jenny Hocking, describing her painstaking research in which she encountered obstacle after obstacle (most often from Australia officials), has made it clear that the Queen of England had a role in the discussions that led to Kerr’s sacking of Whitlam.
Seccombe’s general conclusion, one he shares with many other commentators, is that the government sees nothing to be gained in pushing for a republic. YouGov polling confirms that there is little public interest in the republican cause. Their most recent poll, conducted last December, found only 41 percent of people answering Yes to the question “Do you think King Charles should cease to be Australia’s head of state and be replaced by a President of Australia?”, with 59 percent opposed. This contrasts with the actual 45 percent support in the 1999 referendum – and that was in response to prime minister Howard’s decision to put forward a specific model that many republican advocates did not want.
There are at least three other reasons Albanese’s political advisors would be urging him to leave an Australian head of state in the too-hard basket.
One is the failure of the Voice referendum, which confirmed, as has happened in past referendum proposals put forward by Labor governments, that the opposition stops at nothing to undermine a constitutional referendum. Rather than engaging with the arguments, they run a scare campaign, exemplified by the Dutton-Price “if you don’t know, vote no” slogan. These campaigns are not about the issues in the referendums; rather they are designed to ensure that Labor initiatives fail.
Another is the perception that the republican movement, the ARM, seems to have run out of oomph. Somehow their website seems to be less appealing than that of the Australians for Constitutional Monarchy. The ARM would probably mount the defence that it won’t sink to the standards of the ACM, whose website oozes mawkish sentiment and idiotic statements about “our beloved Australian flag”, but surely the ARM can present itself better.
The third reason is that to many the issue is inconsequential. In the Republic of Australia would the price of a liter of gasoline be lower, would it be easier to see a GP? It’s not worth it, and at worst a republican referendum would distract from other important policy issues.
This last argument overlooks the hard reality that the Governor-General is still subservient to a foreign monarch, and that subservience can be consequential. The Governor-General’s job is generally straightforward (and it should have been in 1975). But there is an increasing probability that our federal elections will not be clear-cut, and that the Governor-General will have to make a decision that does not rest on a simple convention or clear precedent. Allow the present prime minister to try to form a government? Call on the leader of the opposition – and which party if there are several parties with significant representation? Instruct parties to form a government (as has happened in some European democracies)?
This is not just hypothetical. Following the Tasmanian state election earlier this year, the state Governor had to use her powers to make a deliberate decision to re-appoint the Premier, even though he did not have a guarantee of confidence. We surely want serious decisions about appointing a government to be made by an Australian, with clear and uncontested authority.
That is why constitutional experts, such as Jenny Hocking, are advocating for a bare minimal change – even though others, as Seccombe points out, are reasonably calling for more extensive constitutional change to assert our nation’s democratic traditions.
Change may be easier if advocates pragmatically dropped the term “republic”, because most people don’t understand its meaning – a meaning that’s been lost because of the term’s misuse. The USA probably comes to people’s minds as a “republic”, but as Trump has shown, its weird constitution, and a politicized court, have allowed Trump to assume the powers of George III. This results from the conflation of the roles of the head of state with the head of executive government. Trump’s behaviour should put to rest any idea that we should have an elected president. Other examples of misuse of the word that come to people’s minds are the “Islamic republics” of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan – contradictions in their names because the principles of republicanism and theocratic government or established religion are quite at odds.
In real republics presidents are relatively unknown: can you name the presidents of Germany, Ireland and India? And can you name the president of our own Senate?[1] The slogan “a resident for president” has a catchy rhyme, but keeping the term “Governor-General”, without use of the “R” word, is less likely to scare the horses.
Similarly, do we want to be known as “The Republic of Australia”, when we have the name “Commonwealth of Australia” – a term that some on the right see as dangerously socialist because it is used in relatively liberal states such as “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts”. In fact the term embodies the very spirit of a res publica – stuff we share. It’s in strong contrast to the right-wing idea that government is some monster, some leviathan whose interests are different from and in opposition to the interests of the people.
To come back to Anatolitis’s argument, perhaps a minimalist change, solidifying the Governor-General’s powers, and instituting a non-political method of appointment, would mark the day that Australia finally becomes a republic, without the need to change any significant names. It would still require a referendum, but it would be hard for the Coalition to mount a scare campaign against it.
Even if we rid our Constitution of the last vestiges of British imperialism, there is still the question of our politicians’ sentimental attachment to Britain, which seems to be elevated to the status of a “special relationship”, going beyond the normal attachments people may have to a country from which their immigrant ancestors hailed.
That “special relationship” has been costly in past times, particularly when Australian politicians have assumed that Australia’s interests and Britian’s interests align. War historians point out those costs, particularly in relation to the 1914-18 and 1937-45 conflicts. More recently we invited Britain to use our country as a nuclear weapon testing ground, and maintained British preferential tariffs to the detriment of our own commercial interests. And just four years ago prime minister Morrison bought into England’s centuries-old conflict with France, reneging on our contract to buy French submarines.
Our politicians, particularly Coalition politicians, still flock off to London like Barry McKenzie on his first unsupervised excursion. Our national broadcaster, the ABC, maintains London as its European office, even though Paris, Berlin or Brussels would be more appropriate locations, particularly since the UK turned to isolationism and left the EU.
That “special relationship” will probably take longer to shake off than it will take to change the Constitution.
1. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Michael Higgins, Droupadi Murmu, Sue Lines.↩
Do we want more politicians?
As our population grows our electorates are getting bigger and bigger, and they may be becoming less representative.
In the interests of full disclosure I should reveal that I once campaigned for the DLP – the Democratic Labor Party, a right-wing party emanating from the 1955 split in the Labor Party over the allegation that Labor was sympathetic to the Soviet communists.
That once was in the referendum of 1967, which put two questions to the Australian people, initiated by the governing Coalition. One was about the removal of clauses in the Constitution that were specifically discriminatory against Aboriginal Australians. There was no serious opposition to that proposal which passed with 91 percent support.
The other proposal, known as “breaking the nexus”, arose from the Holt government’s desire to expand the size of the House of Representatives, which at that stage had 124 members. But if they were to do so they would have to expand the size of the Senate, because the size of the two chambers is linked in a clause in the Constitution, Section 24, which states:
The House of Representatives shall be composed of members directly chosen by the people of the Commonwealth, and the number of such members shall be, as nearly as practicable, twice the number of the senators.
The Senate at the time had 60 members – 10 from each state – which meant that five were elected in each half-Senate election. The Coalition held 30 of those seats, one short of a 31 majority, and was dependent on the DLP, which held 2 seats, for passing legislation. On many matters there was an ideological alignment between the DLP and the Coalition. Opposition to communism is still an issue that binds the right together. But the Coalition didn’t relish that dependence, and they were wary about allowing the Senate to expand to the next increment of 12 from each state, which would mean that the quota for election to the Senate would fall from 17 percent (1/(1+5)) to 14 percent (1/(1+6)), which would give the DLP more opportunity to hold the balance of power in the Senate and possibly encourage other parties to upset the duopoly.
Therefore the Coalition wanted to break that link – the “nexus” as they called it to show off their command of schoolboy Latin – and Labor went along with the idea because they didn’t want any more defectors winning Senate seats.
That left the DLP as the only party opposing the idea to “break the nexus”. So where else was a politically left 22-year-old student to go but to the DLP to help them campaign? He figured that the DLP was in its early stage of biodegradation: its members were mainly aged and grumpy Catholic men fighting religious sectarian battles that had become irrelevant, and the Labor Party looked as communist as the Rooty Hill RSL. A larger Senate, with easier hurdles, should make it easier to achieve a more diversified Senate.
The referendum failed, gaining only 40 percent support. The Coalition didn’t expand the House of Representatives, and in the next two Senate elections, even with the 17 percent hurdle, the DLP managed to expand its representation and hold the balance of power, before disappearing spectacularly in the Whitlam government’s double dissolution in 1974. Expansion of the House of Representatives had to wait until 1984, when it was expanded to 148 seats and the Senate was expanded to 76 members – 12 from each state, and 2 from each of the 2 territories.
In fact it is only seldom that one of the two old parties hold a Senate majority. The graph below shows Senate outcomes over the last 80 years – the period in which the present two-party system has existed.
Note the dotted line marking the 50 percent hurdle. The only time Labor held a Senate majority was one term after the 1949 election. The Coalition has enjoyed the occasional majority since then, most notably in the two elections following Fraser’s 1975 landslide, and in the Howard government’s last term when he used his numbers to push through Workchoices legislation.
This is all background to present stirring by Special Minister of State Don Farrell to increase the size of the House of Representatives once more. (The building has 175 physical seats). He has asked the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters to look at this and at expanding the term of members from 3 to 4 years.
The former can be done by legislation, but lengthening the term of office would require a Constitutional amendment. The Hawke government held a referendum in 1988 on lengthening House of Representative terms (while shortening Senate terms), but true to form the Coalition ran a scare campaign and it gained only 32 percent support.
Farrell’s ideas are probably outside the Committee’s brief, which is notionally about the 2025 election, but they are worthy of consideration. The norm in Australian states is for four-year Parliamentary terms (only Queensland has three-year terms).
He hasn’t flagged the idea of “breaking the nexus”, which means that a larger House of Representatives would see another increment in the Senate size, probably to 14 Senators per state, with 13 percent as the quota, allowing more opportunities for minor parties.
Unlike the situation in 1967, it is now inconceivable that even with the present quotas either of the two parties could hope to gain a Senate majority, or even a sympathetic Senate as the Coalition did with the DLP. Political pundits will have to think through their strategies, and should realize that the composition of the Senate’s minor parties can change quite significantly. Since 1967 it has swung from DLP (conservative religious right), to the Australian Democrats (liberal centrist), to the Greens (left).
In any event party strategists benefit from some aspects of their inability to hold a Senate majority. A party can appeal to its ideological base by putting up legislation that the Senate goes on to reject. Many political commentators suggest that Howard did himself a disservice by using the Coalition’s Senate majority to push through Workchoices. Had it been blocked by a hostile Senate he could still have told his neoliberal right that he had tried, without suffering the electoral backlash of the legislation’s “success”.
A larger Senate probably does not provide many opportunities for independents, who would have to campaign on a state-wide basis. In the ACT David Pocock holds one of the two Senate seats as an independent, but that is possible because the ACT is essentially a city-state, like a very large House of Representatives electorate.
It is in the House of Representatives that more seats, and therefore smaller electorates, may be more consequential for independents. Skye Predavec of the Australia Institute has done the arithmetic, looking at the number of enrolled voters per Member of the House of Representatives. Its trend has been upwards, broken only by expansions in the number of seats in 1949 and 1974. Just this century so far it has risen from 85 000 to 121 000.
Those figures refer only to the number of voters. Metropolitan seats have comparatively larger numbers of immigrants and children below voting age, whose interests politicians are expected to represent. (A 1974 referendum proposal by the Whitlam government to make population, rather than the number of electors, the basis of electorate size, failed.)
Smaller electorates should favour independents running on issues with strong local manifestations. There are geographically large electorates in which it would be very hard for independents to run, such as Sussan Ley’s Farrer electorate, which stretches from Albury to the South Australian border – urban through to outback. The electorate of Grey in South Australia includes the Whyalla-Port Augusta-Port Pirie industrialized cities, a large renewable energy zone, large Aboriginal settlements, small farms and big cattle stations. In both Farrer and Grey independents did well in the 2025 elections, but it would have been hard for them to mobilize their whole electorates. That is one reason why the older established parties have an interest in larger electorates, both in geography and population.
Another consequence of more House of Representative seats would be a loss of Tasmania’s electoral privilege, laid down in the Constitution. Once again Section 24 comes into play, to Tasmania’s advantage, with its specification:
… five members at least shall be chosen in each original State.
But for that clause Tasmania would have only 3 or 4 electorates, but it has 5. If there were more mainland electorates at some point they would come to Tasmania’s size, removing that state’s relative advantage. But because all states have the same number of Senators, Tasmania would still enjoy 14 times New South Wales’ Senate representation.
It is difficult to pursue the case for a larger House of Representatives, because it’s always easier to run a slogan “say ‘no’ to more politicians” than it is to argue for “more accessible representation”. But there are ways: in 1967 the DLP, a political body never too heavily constrained by a regard for the truth, actually ran a “say ‘no’ to more politicians” campaign, when anyone who bothered to consult the Constitution and do the arithmetic realized that they were actually campaigning for an enlarged Senate.
Framing counts.