Content area
Full text
Australia is to hold a referendum in 1999 on the replacement of the Queen as head of state and the mechanism of electing a President who would assume her functions and those of the Governor-General. The choice will be between remaining a constitutional monarchy or having a president elected by both Houses of Parliament. Direct elections were said to be widely popular but disliked by politicians who saw it as a major step towards the United States-nt,pe presidential system and a threat to the constitution. Many of them favoured the minimal change option under which the powers of the Queen and GovernorGeneral would be assumed by a president elected by Parliament. In opposition Mr John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister promised a constitutional convention which would consider the question. This convention, of 76 appointed and 76 elected delegates, met in February 1998 and produced 10 models for change. The paper examines how in debate the republican models were narrowed first to four and then to the final proposal for a bipartisan nomination to be approved by Parliament. The paper also examines the problem raised by the inclusion of references to the monarchy in the constitutions of individual states of the Commonwealth of Australia which can only be changed by majority votes of the electorates of those states, and argues that the Commonwealth and the states should move to a republic simultaneously or not at all.
AUSTRALIA'S MOST RECENT LABOR PRIME MINISTER, Paul Keating, promised that if he won the 1996 federal election he would hold a referendum to abolish the Australian Commonwealth's links with the monarchy. This led two successive federal Opposition Leaders, Alexander Downer and John Howard, into the defensive play of pledging that, if the Coalition Parties won the 1996 elections, they would summon a `people's convention' to consider whether the federal government should inaugurate the processes leading to a federal referendum and the other steps necessary to complete the severing of the Commonwealth's links with the Crown. This pledge produced much dissension. Many claimed that the era for convoking such assemblies had ended in 1901, for Australians now have a Federal Parliament which can fairly represent the people, making it Parliament's business to decide what constitutional questions should be put to...