Australian Republic back on radar
To Canberra, for Senate hearings into a non-binding plebiscite. What a riveting combination, I hear you cry, as you manoeuvre your mouses to click on the next story. But this is the course which the Republican movement believes could ultimately lead to an Australian head of state, and thus might be the start of something significant.
The hearings, the first on the question of an Australian Republic for five years, are the initiative of Senator Bob Brown, the leader of the Australian Greens, whose conservationism does not extend to the monarchy. His plan is to get Australians to vote in a non-binding plebiscite, as opposed to a constitution-changing referendum, on the simple question of whether they favour an Australian head of state.
If the nationwide plebiscite decided "Yes", the idea would be to press for a full referendum to change the constitution, something which is notoriously difficult to do (remember, only eight referenda have passed since Federation).
The strategy behind the move, of course, is to unite Australian Republicans, who were divided at the 1999 referendum between those who favoured a directly-elected president and those who wanted an appointed president.
So many of the Republican stars are in alignment right now. Kevin Rudd is a Republican, so too is Malcolm Turnbull, the former leader of the Republican movement and now the leader of the opposition.
All of Mr Turnbull's main rivals, including former treasurer Peter Costello, support an Australian head of state - though not all of his party, which for him is a major stumbling block.
There was almost universal support for a Republic at last year's 2020 Summit - a gathering in Parliament House of business and community leaders, celebrities, academics, etc, admittedly hand-picked by the government.
But many of those participants have felt aggrieved that in its formal response to the 2020 summit's ideas and proposals, a Republic has not been put on the government's "to do list". (Of the 1,000 ideas that came from the summit, the Rudd government pledged to "immediately begin work" on just nine).
On the future of the monarchy, the government was non-committal saying that it favoured constitutional reform "where appropriate".
Many thanks for your comments and observations on Anzac Day, which I thought produced one of the best threads for a while. So here's a related question to consider: why the Anzac spirit has never translated into an overwhelming Australian head of state spirit?
Clearly, there's a widespread sense that Australian diggers were treated as cannon fodder by the British during World War I, and that the Australian people were left in the lurch by Churchill during World War II. Yet one of the paradoxes confronted by the Australian Republican movement during the 1999 debate was that Australia's veterans groups were one of the main bulwarks of the monarchy.
Clearly, nobody would blame Queen Elizabeth for the sins of Winston Churchill. Yet neither war seemed to produce much of an anti-British backlash. In fact, some of the histories suggest quite the opposite: that the bonds of kinship were strengthened. Comments please...
UPDATE: Sydney has had yet another power cut, which this time affected Sydney Fashion Week. Black-out is apparently the new black.
On that subject, I know I've been giving Sydney a hard time. The truth is that were I to write down everything I like about the place, the list would run the length of the cliff-top walk from Bronte to Bondi.
But there are frustrations and, on that subject, this caught my eye. It comes from that old sage Phillip Adams: "New South Wales? New? There's nothing very new about South Wales. It's become Elderly South Wales, even Old. It's rheumatic, arthritic and shows signs of Alzheimer's. Its political condition is so parlous, so terminal, that perhaps it's time to put it out of our misery."
I'm 
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