Queen Elizabeth death: Thomas Coughlan - countdown as republic inches closer

OPINION

We always said we'd ask the question when she died: the Queen, that is.

Now she's dead and many of us, even if not out loud - even if we want the answer to be "no" - are asking the question: is this when New Zealand casts off the Royal Family and becomes a republic?

The reason the Royal Family endured in this country under the former monarch for so long is down to a mixture of power and aesthetics.

The Queen gracefully morphed into a national grandmother - at once Head of State and elderly dispenser of familial wisdom. Even if she didn't (couldn't) say much, she looked like she might. Whether deliberate or not, it had the effect of self-preservation. She's simply too nice to cast off so what's the point?

It's not to say her reign was without controversy or significance.

She wisely returned to this country for the signing of the Waikato-Tainui settlement. She needed to bookend her name to a process of honouring the commitments her ancestors' governments had failed to honour - commitments made by her ancestor, Victoria.

She inherited the privileges but also the sins of her ancestors. It's impossible for us to judge whether the grace by which she faced the latter justified the graces she enjoyed because of the former, but her appetite for modernisation - really little more than a kink - is still a mitigating factor in her legacy.

The fact that our unelected hereditary head of state was a largely powerless, kindly old woman made her materially different to other unelected hereditary equivalents.

But we might ask ourselves whether the public outpouring of emotion at her death compares unfavourably with regimes from which we distance ourselves.

The tributes paid to her on her death, be they from the British Foreign Office - who dubbed her the UK's "greatest diplomat" (a kindly lie - she was not) - or the blubbering rendition of God Save the King outside Buckingham Palace, are of the kind we're more used to seeing from countries like North Korea: a place where people routinely lie about the accomplishments of their leader (apparently Kim Jong-il once made 11 holes in one in a round of golf), and collapse into fits of public hysterics whenever the presiding Kim snuffs it.

A man telling Prince Andrew that he was "a sick old man" was beaten by mourners and escorted away by the police, who apparently did nothing to apprehend the man's assailants - the only ones who had done anything illegal. Blackshirt justice on the streets of Edinburgh.

King Charles III seems to wear his mother's mantle awkwardly. After a lifetime preparing for a job that mainly involves signing things, he seems incapable of using a pen.

An imperial family, which is really what it is in this country, can't survive on aesthetics forever. They fade. The consensus in Wellington is that the republic is a "when" question rather than an "if" - and yet decades after that became uncontroversial, we're no closer to answering the "when" part of the question.

Queen Elizabeth II greets Jacinda Ardern at Buckingham Palace. Photo / Getty Images

Seeing as this is all about the constitution, it's important to stress it doesn't actually matter what any of us think. Literally speaking, the only voices that count in this debate are those of the 120 MPs sitting in Parliament.

No one has asked them (so little do we care for the answer), but I would hazard a guess that this very progressive Parliament, elected by the historic landslide in 2020 to Labour (and the Greens), would lean republican. Those MPs could abolish the monarchy before King Charles III had even had his coronation.

Of course, it won't happen like that. The politics of constitutional change would require such a change to be put to a referendum.

The ratio of downside to upside is too heavily weighted in favour of the former for a party simply putting the question to a vote without a reasonable likelihood of winning. Until the electorate shifts towards a discernibly republican position, any vote is unlikely.

Part of this is party.

A referendum would likely be pushed by Labour, though perhaps not conducted by it.

Despite counting the chair of New Zealand's republican movement as a party member, National itself is explicitly monarchist (a remit removing the pledge from the constitution was narrowly defeated at the 2002 National Party Conference).

Labour is unlikely to call a referendum at the next election or include a promise for a referendum in its manifesto because there's no real clamour for change and it rightly believes the return on political capital investment is too low (possibly negative).

A conceivable pathway to a referendum is for the Greens to make it a bottom line in coalition talks, but even then, Green members might reasonably ask whether the party's political capital would be better spent on other bottom lines, like tax reform.

One of the mistakes outsiders often make about all political change is the incredible gravity of the status quo. This affects everything from turfing out a party leader to transforming from a monarchy into a republic.

This isn't a binary choice: do you want a Royal as head of state or don't you?

Queen Elizabeth II and the Māori Queen, Dame Te Arikinui Te Atairangikaahu, Prime Minister Jim Bolger (left), and Sir Douglas Graham. Photo / Evening Post

Unless New Zealand does a botched, leap-into-the-unknown Brexit-style referendum (which, being New Zealand and infinitely more sensible than its former colonial boss, is unlikely), the first question will actually be: what kind of republic do we want to be?

Do we want to look like we do now, but with an elected or appointed Head of State (the most likely option)? Do we want to look like Ireland, France, Italy, or - heaven forbid - the United States?

It's impossible to put the question before we know the shape of the alternative. This hobbles the republican campaign by fracturing its already tiny electoral coalition.

The most likely path to a republican referendum is the one taken in Australia.

There, Labor was the party most enthusiastically in favour of pushing for a referendum on the monarchy, but it was actually the Liberal-National coalition that won office and asked the question in 1999.

The model likely to be put forward is likely to look something like Australia was offered: what we have now, minus the monarch. This neutralises the strongest criticism made against becoming a republic, which is that politicising the head of state through electing them risks injecting US-style partisan gridlock to New Zealand.

The way we are asked this question could differ. Australia decided on its model through a constitutional convention. New Zealand would likely borrow from its MMP referendum experience and hold one vote on what kind of republic it wanted to be, and another pitting this model against the status quo.

If you were republican-leaning, you would be right to wonder why you would expend precious political capital fighting a divisive battle that wouldn't put an extra dollar in anyone's pocket, but merely change the glazed argentian profile that peers out of them.

One thing in the republicans' favour is the fact the monarchy will struggle to make a case for itself.

It's worth reflecting on what kind of monarchy we will live under going forward. Queen Elizabeth II reigned for more than a third of the 182 years this country has existed in its modern, monarchical form.

The Head of State never visited in the first century of this country's post-Tiriti life - they were absent for the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and absent when it was dishonoured. In the 50 years between 1953 and 2002, our Head of State visited 10 times. In the intervening 20 years, we've had to do without.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh are greeted by Prime Minister Helen Clark after they arrived at Parliament. Photo / NZ Herald

Charles is two years younger than the Queen was when she last visited here.

He will no doubt make a tour of the countries in which he is Head of State, but that is likely to be one of few visits he will make as King. It's not impossible to imagine him spending less than a month here during his entire reign as our monarch.

Should he live to the same age as his mother, his heir, William, will inherit the throne two years off becoming a pensioner himself. For the foreseeable future, this country will have Heads of State who are old and distant. If William dies at a similar age, Prince George will at least be in his 50s when he accedes, giving him a few decades of travel time.

Will having such a distant, absent monarch change things? The royals certainly think so - it's why they travel so much.

The problem of Te Tiriti in this is overstated. The Government of New Zealand is already responsible for the Treaty relationship. However the inheritance of The Crown is dealt with post-republic, it would not lead to the diminishment of the Treaty.

The problem is more of a political one. There's a chance that progressive republicans might use a republic to advance a more Treaty-focused constitution and Government. This could fracture the already tiny republican coalition, which includes conservatives who would like everything to stay more or less the same minus the monarch.

As ever with things Tiriti, there's always a problem settling the rights and obligations to an electoral minority with a majoritarian vote. The way te Tiriti works in a post-monarchy world is best settled between Māori and the Government. Instead, it's likely to be settled between the Government and three million voters.

Remember, many of us currently can't agree whether this future republic should be given a name in its official indigenous language.

And yet there's no doubt a republic will happen. The monarchy in this country is on an invisible countdown. No one can see how much time is left on the clock, but everyone knows it'll hit zero eventually.

Politics is a game of attrition. Remember, republicans need only win once, and they've won for good.