Presidency 'destructive': Howard
Former prime minister John Howard says Australia won't become a republic while the current monarch is on the throne.
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Australia will ditch the Queen if we can directly elect the president.
Whose fault is it that Australia is not a republic? Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull, who led the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) on this date 10 years ago, when Australians rejected a proposed republic, famously blamed the then prime minister, John Howard.
Howard, Turnbull said, had broken the hearts of Australians by refusing to support a republic. On the Turnbull view, any misgivings people might have had about the republican model presented in the 1999 referendum apparently had nothing to do with the result.
Who's Queen of Australia? Well, if the republic gets up then no one, but the problems seems to be not the concept but the way it would operate. Photo: AP
Other advocates of the model pointed the finger of blame elsewhere. The referendum failed because the republican vote was split, they said, and the culprits were those republicans who wanted a popularly elected president instead of one appointed by Parliament.
A decade down the track, this is still a sore point among those who believe Australians were somehow cheated by the referendum result.
Direct electionists, they think, failed to do the decent thing when they voted ''no'' along with the monarchist minority, thus ensuring that the status quo prevailed. The decent thing would have been to vote ''yes'', allowing another minority, the supporters of the appointment model, to prevail. In other words, Australians - most of us, that is - were cheated because we didn't get something most of us didn't want.
As specious arguments go, this really is in a breathtakingly bad class of its own. But it remains politically potent: a reluctance to reopen the great republican split of 1999, rather than preoccupation with the bread-and-butter issues spawned by the global financial crisis, is the real reason the republic has dropped off the radar for the political mainstream.
For ''political mainstream'', read ''mainstream politicians''. Among voters, there continues to be a republican majority - though at 50-52 per cent on the latest poll, it is now a bare majority - and there continues to be a larger majority in favour of direct election. As in 1999, the fall-back position of many monarchists is that if there is to be a republic some day it should be one in which all eligible voters get a say when the head of state is chosen.
It is no surprise that the overall majority in favour of a republic has shrunk since 1999, when poll after poll recorded that most people wanted a republic but weren't going to take the one on offer. Enthusiasm for causes does tend to wane when no one keeps them alive in the public imagination.
The leaders of the major political parties, however, are so averse to the thought of keeping the republican flame alive that, avowed republicans though they are, they invoke the Queen as an excuse for doing nothing. The best time to revive the debate, it is suggested, will be when the present monarch dies.
Why? Does anyone really believe she cares? And even if she does, why should we care about that? The republic is about us, not her.
But it's us that the mainstream politicians don't want to talk about, of course. If they did, they would have to acknowledge that a republic would be achievable if people were given the option of an elected president. Indeed, the unavoidable inference from more than a decade of opinion polls is that it would be achievable only with that option.
As a democrat, I don't have a problem with the notion that people should get the system of government they want. But, as a democrat, I do have a problem with the notion that the leaders of the main political parties are apparently resolved that people should not get the system they want.
If we're looking for someone to blame for the survival of the monarchy, it is our leaders, not republicans who voted ''no'' in '99, who deserve it. Our present leaders, that is; not the supposed heartbreaker John Howard, who would not have succeeded in fighting off the republic 10 years ago if it hadn't been for the fact that the Constitutional Convention, steered by Malcolm Turnbull and the ARM, produced a model that had no chance of gaining support from enough voters to bring about change. Turnbull was the republican leader of Howard's dreams.
''Blame'' might be considered an unhelpful, divisive word to use. When the republic does get a mention these days, it is usually suggested that next time - when that might be is left vague - the acrimonious divisions of the last referendum campaign must be avoided. This is the line especially favoured by Kevin Rudd, who insists that since the republic failed last time it must not be allowed to fail a second time. Well yes, let's get it right; but doing that would mean beginning by acknowledging why it failed the first time, which neither the Prime Minister nor the Opposition Leader is publicly inclined to do.
While both leaders can conveniently protest that they have a global financial crisis and other more urgent matters to concern them, the republic will remain in limbo. But the kind of identity politics that so fervently consumed the nation 10 years ago will eventually return. And when it does, what will opponents of direct election do? Will they accept that voters should get a choice of models, as the ARM's leaders, perhaps with gritted teeth, now concede? Will they accept what polls still show the choice would almost certainly be? If they cannot, whose fault will it be in that oh-so-vague ''next time''?
Ray Cassin is an Age senior writer.
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