(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

Summer must be here, and there is birdsong over the culture war trenches because the Australian republic is back in the news.

Peter FitzSimons is bobbing up again — the, well, king of the Australian Republic Movement these many years past, and its public face. The bandana is gone, but the army marches on. What’s he on screen for now? To announce unconditional surrender? Turn up the volume and it’s “a list prepared from nominations by all Australian parliaments which the public vote on”.

And, well, noooo. The ARM has got together and come up with the worst designed program for major constitutional change since, god, since the Voice to Parliament, I guess. The ARM wants to get out of the trap that became visible in the 1990s, whereby the republican establishment wanted the president elected from Parliament, thus creating a mates’ shonks presidency, while the republican rank-and-file overwhelmingly wanted a directly elected president.

The ARM is now pointing at Donald Trump as a reason why a direct-election model may be difficult to sell, and look, it may be right. But it was always against a direct-election model, and that basic mistrust of the people poisoned republicanism as a popular movement from the start.

Having emerged top-down, spawned from Paul Keating’s Kokoda-kissing forehead like Athena from Zeus, the ’90s republican movement needed to jump up, widen the idea of what a republic could be. It didn’t — and all the public saw was a bunch of grandees and activists piloted into John Howard’s fish trap of a constitutional convention, where they were then filleted.

The attempt to revive the movement is mirabile dictu, even worse than anything on offer then. It’s what appears to be a proposal that looks great when you’ve been in a meeting forever. Under the “Australian Choice” model — a Mojo jingle waiting to happen — federal Parliament would nominate up to three candidates for president, each state and territory one, which groaning list would then be put to a grateful populace.

The president would have fewer powers than a US or French president, more than a governor-general — crucially the ability to sack a prime minister and dissolve Parliament if they’ve lost the confidence of the House.

But leaving aside the general politics for a moment, ARM’s proposal is a little light on detail about the selection of the (up to) 11 names. Are these selected by the lower houses? Both houses in joint session? Would this not require the amendment of each state and territory constitution, separate to a national change? In majority parliaments, the vote would be in the partyroom, rubber-stamped by Parliament. If joint sessions created an assembly with no overall control, how would the nominees for the single selection be handled? How would they be voted on — first past, preferential, two-stage run-off? Ditto with the three federal Parliament names.

This all-consuming bunfight would last for months, engendering cross-dealing and trading, consuming energies and making the dominance of the political class achingly visible. Then when three or four or eight or nine names get on the ballot, once again the pretty crucial question of preferential v first-past comes up again.

Then finally this whole smoking mess has to be taken to a referendum, either as a detailed specific scheme or a general proposal to be filled in by Parliament — or parliaments? — and sold on the doorstep, all its flywheels spinning.

The monarchists, meanwhile, have a simple story: presidential republics are coming apart, the US is crazy, the fascists are rising in France, constitutional monarchy is simple, works, anchors parliamentary democracy and allows people to get on with their private lives.

If you wanted to give monarchists a means by which to get around the falling Anglo-ishness of Australia, you couldn’t have designed it better.

How did the ARM come up with this disaster? Same way the Indigenous leadership came up with the hopeless Voice to Parliament. Their job involving sitting around all day talking and negotiating. They think everyone else wants to live and choose like that. They don’t. They want a say, which they’re not getting, but having said, they want simple and effective government.

This disaster of a proposal sells its opposition. Centre and right republicans will recoil from this political Heath Robinson machine; the left (a section at least) will reject anything but a direct-election model. The monarchists will be united.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but really, isn’t it obvious there is one huge opportunity for republicans coming up? That is when the Queen dies, or in the lead-up to. Because then, of course, the situation is reversed. It’s the monarchists who have to defend and try to talk away King Charles III of Australia, and republicans who can campaign for the simple alternative of getting a republic. The slogan? “King Charles III? No. It’s time. Vote for a republic.” Then just make poor old Charlie an object of ridicule and derision while the monarchists have to drivel out stuff about “Well, it’s actually the governor-general you see that … It’s the crown not the person under it. … (sigh) No, he doesn’t talk to plants … Yes, he did once express a desire to be a tampon … ” etc etc.

There’d be more to it. You may not have heard of those things, but hopefully the idea of being handed over to a 70-something boy-man like we were chattel would do the trick. The absurdity of monarchy is most exposed in the transfer of it. When a popular, loved and respected — even by those grudging such — is in place, and the monarchy is offering a stability it claims to ensure, the relationship of public and monarch is sutured pretty tight, and it takes a lot of (cultural) violence to make it visible.

Using the transfer, and making the monarchists do the work, would entail — should a Labor government eventuate — a straight monarchy v republic plebiscite, which we would probably win (or we may as well pack up) followed by an almighty stoush over the question for a referendum, basically parliamentary selection v direct election. We may well lose that referendum anyway as part of whichever group didn’t get the model it wanted on the ballot stayed away. But then the wood’s on the movement to get its vote out. No excuses left. And if centrist republicans would never support a direct-election model, you have to ask where their heart lies anyway.  

The ARM say it’s got polling that shows 73% support for this. But as electoral analyst Kevin Bonham argues, that tells you nothing about what the 73% is saying. It’s the “pineapple milkshake” question: do you like pineapple milkshakes? Sure, yeah. Had one in the past 20 years? Well uh…

The task of a republican movement is not to reverse-engineer a republic from quantitative surveys. It’s to find the rational core of the republican proposal and put it in such a way that it appears as the imminent real, the that-which-must-happen. The “Australian Choice” model is distinguished by its utter contingency — it could have been 20 other things. It lacks the moral force of necessity that wins great campaigns like this. 

FitzSimons is a decent man, and he’s kept this basically empty republican movement chugging along for a few years. Or maybe he and others have hobbled it by excluding direct electionists, as some allege. I don’t know. But on the evidence of this proposal one has to ask if that bandana was a bandage for a shrapnel wound.

The man has written a shelf of books on disastrous military campaigns, but can’t recognise the marks of them all in this one. The republic is his passion project. Sorry, but on the evidence of this proposal, it may be our Passchendaele.

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