Republic within the realm of possibility: is Charles the last king of Australia?
The reign of King Charles III comes with challenges for Australian monarchists and republicans alike.
For Australia, the coronation is conceived in conundrum. Such splendour, decorated in British pageantry, is foreign to our nature yet integral to our system of government. King Charles III launches not just a new era of British history but of Australian history – the question being whether Charles is our last king or merely the forerunner to King William.
The coronation is a glorious celebration of monarchy in an event with a 1000-year-long historical narrative. The reaction among Australians will be a mixture of awe, alienation and puzzlement. The coronation, in its rarity and fascination, is an invitation to Australians to consider who we are and what we aspire to become.
The most solemn aspect of the ceremony is when King Charles takes the coronation oath – pledging to rule according to law and custom – and is then anointed with holy oils behind a screen, highlighting its religious mysticism.
The coronation puts the monarchy in the sunlight. It humbles the most spectacular stage shows. All is display. Everything is ceremony. It is a fusion of three great elemental forces: Crown, church and state. It is a religious event conducted in Westminster Abbey by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It testifies to the King’s constitutional role as head of state of the United Kingdom and other realms. And it is a binding legal compact as the new monarch swears to his duties. The oath is central to the foundations of the common law.
For Australians, the coronation testifies to the living ties to our origins, to Britain and its monarch, with the vast and unresolved sentiments this provokes in the heads and hearts of the Australian people.
The coronation does not make Charles the king. He was already king, by law, on the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. This is because while kings and queens die, the Crown never dies. Charles will sit in the ancient Coronation Chair, holding the sovereign’s sceptre symbolising his command of the nation’s governance and the sovereign’s orb symbolising the Christian world and that his power is derived from God. The tradition of the coronation reveals what we are losing – our sense of shared polity bonded by religious faith.
Neither the Australian government nor the Australia people have any say or role in determining their new head of state. That is determined by British tradition, law and family.
There is no Australian homegrown monarchy but Charles is King of Australia under the constitutional model of divided monarchy. Charles does not belong to the daily life of the Australian nation – yet his powers have been nationalised, exercised in this country by the Governor-General. For the record, his formal title in Australia is: King Charles the Third, by the Grace of God King of Australia and His other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth.
Charles embodies a monarchy in a testing new phase: the post-Elizabethan phase. A YouGov poll published in The Australian this week shows only 52 per cent of Australians have a positive opinion of the new king – yet the trend is upwards – while, significantly, William, Prince of Wales, rates at a striking 73 per cent.
The monarchy is in transition but it seems far from finished.
The death last September of Queen Elizabeth was a departure point. The longevity of her reign and the admiration she inspired cannot be replicated. The coronation symbolises the launch by Charles of his great experiment to modernise the monarchy by embracing environmentalism, multiculturalism and a more informal modesty – yet he struggles against a drift in opinion, generational change and shifts in cultural norms.
The 1953 coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth became one of the most spectacular celebrations of the 20th century with a magical quality Hollywood could never match. Its defining feature was unity – a young queen in the post-war world offering a hopeful future. That world no longer exists. The coronation of King Charles, 70 years later, comes in a society beset by division, confusion and the anarchical assault on tradition.
The coronation ritual is beyond the Australian imagination. It is a foreign event on foreign soil with foreign symbols. It constitutes the recognition, the anointing, the oath, the homage and the procession. The coronation confers God’s grace upon the King. We have no royal blood in Australia; we have no established religion. Yet King Charles pledges to maintain the Church of England while offering a new ceremonial role to representatives of many faiths – Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist.
Anthony Albanese attends out of duty yet declares his lifelong republican allegiance. The contradictions are endless. They constitute the mystery of Australia’s constitutional monarchy. Is the coronation such a glorious spectacle that we enjoy our partnership in it? Or is such an out-of-Australian experience the sign we don’t belong any more?
The coronation surely reveals something else – that our attitudes towards monarchy and republicanism are a mixture of emotion, kinship and nationalism in a brew far more complex than many grasp.
The Prime Minister has travelled to the other side of the globe for the coronation because that is his constitutional obligation. Yet Albanese embodies the contradiction at the centre of our cultural and political life – as a dedicated republican he expresses loyalty to King Charles as Australia’s head of state, fully aware that in 1999 the people voted to retain the monarchy and reject the republic. Republicans struggle with that fact: the monarchy in Australia got a popular mandate.
The domestic mini-drama over whether Albanese should swear allegiance to the King in the ceremony on behalf of Australia merely mirrors this enduring contradiction.
But Albanese has been gracious towards Charles. He described his meeting with the King as warm, informative and insightful. He said his role was to represent the Australian people with their different views on the monarchy and that attending the coronation was a “great privilege”. In reality, the reign of King Charles comes with opportunities for Australian monarchists and republicans alike. A new contest is beginning.
Monarchists will triumph if Australian opinion settles into a status quo acceptance of Charles. His assets should not be underestimated. Charles has a deep affection for Australia and has made 16 visits to this country. He attended school at Timbertop, long fancied acquiring a property in rural NSW, and he was willing to serve as governor-general if the chance arose.
No previous monarch has had the understanding of Australia that Charles possesses. Interviewed by the author when Prince of Wales, Charles said his time in this country as a schoolboy was basic to his development – it “helped me to know more about myself and also how to talk to people” since “I literally had to sink or swim out here”.
As King, he is deeply versed in the republican debate. During his 1994 visit to Australia when prime minister Paul Keating was spearheading the republican cause, Charles came with a strong message – he supported the debate, he made no claims on Australia, he said institutions changed, that there were “advantages and disadvantages” about becoming a republic and said if the country ceased to be a monarchy he would still visit Australia and enjoy those visits.
The Australian Republic Movement, however, is about to come under real pressure. For years republicans claimed the death of the queen and the ascension of Charles would herald the demise of constitutional monarchy in Australia. ARM co-chairman Craig Foster, a former Australian soccer player, human rights campaigner and sports presenter, ridicules the coronation, calls the pledge of loyalty to the King “ludicrous” and dismisses Charles as “completely irrelevant to contemporary Australian life”.
For years republicans from Bob Hawke to Malcolm Turnbull said the debate should await the change of monarch. That time has now come.
But is the republic movement astute enough to deliver?
There is an obstacle – Albanese’s preference and passion is for a referendum on the Indigenous voice and that issue will be put to the people between October and December this year. The last thing Albanese wants is for the voice to be linked to the republic. “That’s my timetable, I’m not looking beyond that,” Albanese told journalist Piers Morgan in his London interview last week.
Pressed on when another republican referendum would be put, Albanese was super-cautious. “I think at some stage in the future that will occur,” he said. “What I don’t want to do is to be a prime minister who presides over just constitutional debates.” Albanese said there had to be “a feeling from the bottom up” for the republic. It couldn’t just be “imposed from the top”. Asked when that feeling would arrive, Albanese said: “I don’t see this as being imminent.”
While Albanese is confident about the voice referendum, he is more sceptical about a republic referendum. Indeed, he virtually said the emotional momentum for the republic wasn’t strong enough at present. He’s right. And that’s a challenge to the ARM.
Albanese made critical distinctions in his interview with Morgan – his goal was an Australian as head of state. It wasn’t to get rid of the monarchy. That was a decision for Britain, not Australia.
The political reality is that the republic is hostage to the voice. If the voice referendum fails later this year, forget about the republic. Albanese won’t be caught with two defeats, particularly when he sees the voice as the far better prospect. So the voice referendum has a dual significance – as a constitutional change in its own right but as the necessary gateway to the republic.
If the voice is carried, expect a clamour of demands for a republic referendum. The earliest it could be held would be in Albanese’s second term. But there’s no guarantee. Albanese would make a careful judgment and, mindful of the 1999 defeat, he would sponsor a republic referendum only if he felt sure the situation had changed significantly.
That is far from certain. Albanese knows scepticism towards the monarchy won’t deliver an Australian republic. The obstacle lies in Australia, not Britain – that’s our inability to find a viable model for the republic. The easy part for Australia is separation from the monarchy, but you cannot separate from the monarchy without having a republican constitution in its place.
Given Albanese’s priorities, the republic push begins to shadow the voice, with Foster saying conversations are needed about our “truthful history” along with reconciliation and “the place of the Crown in our national story”. Foster and ARM co-chairwoman and former senator Nova Peris link truth and Indigenous dispossession to the republican cause.
Indeed, on Thursday, Foster and Peris as ARM co-chairs endorsed a joint statement from groups in 12 countries calling on King Charles to acknowledge genocide and colonisation, the need to recover from “centuries of racism, oppression, colonisation and slavery” and to start discussions about reparations. The signs suggest a growing affinity between the Indigenous and republican causes.
For years the republican cause has languished. It has been overshadowed on the progressive side, subservient to identity politics, Indigenous recognition, climate change and social justice issues. Its former clarion call – “an Australian as head of state” – remains a beacon of clarity but empty of the passions it once engendered.
The pivotal question now is the character of a revived republican movement and how radical it goes. Unless the republic can revive under King Charles, it may become moribund as the prospect of a younger King William looms in the future. Declarations that the republic is inevitable are worse than useless, implying it will happen anyway but overlooking the obstacles.
In truth, many republicans were dismayed at the model released by the ARM in January last year after a lengthy process that culminated in a national embarrassment. Desperate to unite republicans, the ARM model was a bizarre hybrid – all parliaments, state, territory and federal, could nominate presidential candidates, with up to 11 nominees being allowed, and the public then voting on a president in a direct-election ballot. It meant the president could get elected, conceivably, with as little as 20 per cent of the primary vote.
This hybrid won’t fly. Genuine direct-election advocates won’t accept having no open nomination of candidates while opponents of direct election will not be assuaged by having politicians decide the nominees. Keating said it was a dangerous and “massive shift” in our system of government. Turnbull said it was dead on arrival (but he’d vote for it). And Tony Abbott said he agreed with Keating.
The ARM’s folly is to think the public will buy a direct-election model that compromises our Westminster system. That is most unlikely to happen – and leads us back to the coronation.
The constitutional underpinning of the coronation is the Westminster model: a ceremonial king sits at the apex of government yet that king had no power. The monarch’s function is to symbolise national unity. That symbolism is a political system where continuity exists – beyond government and opposition politicians tearing each other apart – recalling Edmund Burke’s dictum that society is a contract between the living, the dead and the yet to be born.
In this system political power lies elsewhere – with the prime minister, the executive government and the parliament. The Westminster model separates the symbols of the state from the powers of government. This is Australia’s system, with the governor-general representing the Crown.
The question for the republic is: does it believe in Westminster? If not, then beware. A directly elected president will have a popular mandate greater than the prime minister since the prime minister is elected only by the partyroom. That means rival power centres in our political system – a president and prime minister, both claiming their respective mandates, engaged in contest and competition. This is a model Keating and John Howard, along with many others, have rejected.
The republic faces a permanent conflict between populist sovereignty demands for a directly elected president and republican conservatives who want to replace Buckingham Palace but keep the Westminister model. That means a president, non-executive, non-partisan, non-elected – the exact opposite of Donald Trump.
When you watch the coronation, feel free to reject the ceremonial British Crown but beware the folly of rejecting Westminster because that’s the model we need to keep in any transition to the republic. Sadly, only an optimist could think the ARM is up to the job based on its efforts during the past several years. Get ready for lots of noise about the republic but a prolonged stalemate.
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