A year ago, it looked in reach. Now, the dream of an Australia republic has quietly died and not even the Prime Minister’s antimonarchist sentiments can save it.
Anthony Albanese – with some hubris – appointed as his Assistant Minister for a Republic barely 19 months ago admitted as much earlier this month.
“It’s not a priority at the moment,” Matt Thistlethwaite told the Weekend Australian.
That’s code for dead in the water. There will be no referendum for Australians to accept or reject a republic should Albanese win a second term – the timetable he heroically offered soon after his Labor government came to power in May 2022.
We know how the republic died: the resounding rejection of an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament by Australians when they voted on that question in last year’s referendum has left the government with no appetite for a second constitutional referendum.
The damage of defeat has been too great; the Prime Minister is still struggling to recover political momentum. The loss of the Voice – which he courageously continued to champion despite overwhelming evidence before the vote that the majority of Australians would not support him – has cast a sense of decline over Albanese and his government.
Perhaps it can recover before the next election, due in the first half of next year. But no Australian government is likely to again put constitutional change to the people by way of a referendum without the support of political opponents.
And Albanese knows that the Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, having inflicted a heavy blow by successfully campaigning against the Voice, won’t pass up a repeat performance were there to be a republic referendum.
As that great Australian historian Manning Clark used to say, Australian public life breaks into two groups: the enlargers, and the punishers and straighteners. Dutton is within the latter.
Republicans will therefore need to await an alignment of the political stars that bring a republican prime minister as well as a republican opposition leader into office simultaneously to have any chance of the required constitutional referendum to decide the issue.
The opportunity was last there when Malcolm Turnbull, a former leader of the Australian Republican Movement, was the prime minister and leader of the centre-right Liberal National coalition government between late 2015 and mid-2018. The Opposition leader then was another avowed republican, Labor’s Bill Shorten. But Turnbull, who was leader of the Australian Republican Movement when then-prime minister John Howard led the defeat of the last republican referendum in 1999, believed it futile to hold another while the Queen was on the throne. He believed Australians would be loath to sack her as Head of State.
The Queen’s death in September 2022 and the ascent of her son, now King Charles III, fulfilled part of what Turnbull considered the necessary preconditions for Australians to vote for a republic.
Yet, a YouGov poll published less than five months ago – marking the first anniversary of King Charles’ accession – instead showed him to be more popular than any Australian politician. It also showed those Australians (35%) who want their country to remain a constitutional monarchy for the long term outnumber those (32%) who want the country to become a republic.
King Charles will likely test these sentiments when he visits Australia later this year. Might the republicans have been wrong in thinking their fellow Australians would be more willing to kick out the monarchy upon the death of the Queen?
The Australian republic seems as distant as ever.
