Question of our heritage

GIVEN the Queen's arrival this week, it is hard not to reflect on the question of a republic. Not that there is any prospect of Australia becoming a republic in the foreseeable future. There is no groundswell of public support for severing ties with the monarchy, even if there remains considerable support for having an Australian head of state.

University of Melbourne legal academic Glenn Patmore has perhaps put it best: there has emerged a strange form of royalist republicanism. Most republicans have deferred consideration of constitutional change until after the Queen's death. It doesn't help republicans that the Queen has been an impeccable monarch. As the next week is likely to confirm, Australians - republicans and monarchists alike - have a healthy respect for the Queen.

Then again, the argument about constitutional change isn't about personalities or individuals. It is, most fundamentally, about our system of government. Namely, about whether Australians are best served by having as our head of state the British monarch rather than one of our own citizens.

For many republicans, a truly independent Australia requires us to sever our formal ties with Britain. This line, advanced most stridently by Paul Keating, has its roots in 19th-century radical nationalism. Perhaps the most influential republican of this sort was poet Henry Lawson, who believed it was offensive for Australians to remain subjects of the crown.

Thus, in A Song of the Republic, Lawson wrote that Australians had to choose between "The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green / The Land that belongs to the lord and Queen, / And the Land that belongs to you". Clearly, Lawson thought there was no cause for any hesitation. In his view, there was little in common between Australia and England except for a shared language. Worst of all was the "good-natured contempt" the upper class in the mother country reserved for its southern sons.

The republican case remains much influenced by radical nationalism. Republicans argue that a British monarch could never represent a contemporary Australia as well as a national president.

Certainly, our civic culture is no longer as explicitly British as it once was. This isn't to deny our British heritage when it comes to parliamentary democracy or the common law. But that insecure need to prove that Australians are more British than the British is a thing of the past (although some unimaginative historians bleat about our supposed inability to move beyond a "British race patriotism").

Even so, Australian republicanism has stalled. This is because it has been so preoccupied with the symbolic and continues to be defined by its anti-British flourishes. It fails to say enough about exactly why we need a republic beyond having a resident for president.

Yet republicanism in Australia isn't confined to radical nationalism. Historian Mark McKenna suggests in his book The Captive Republic that it in fact has some liberal, reformist antecedents. Within this liberal tradition, represented by figures such as Henry Parkes and Alfred Deakin, a republic isn't defined in merely anti-monarchical terms. Rather, a republic is understood as popular government for the common good; as an anti-despotic, balanced and representative form of self-rule. As McKenna notes, the creation of the commonwealth involved something of a disguised republic under the crown.

Advocates for a republic would do well to revisit this strand of local republican thought. For one thing, it may help to dispel the misconception that supporting a republic must mean trashing our British heritage. For another thing, it may just force republicans to provide a clearer answer to that most fundamental question: In what ways, symbolic and otherwise, will becoming a republic enhance what it means to be an Australian citizen?