New minister a good chance to do our republic due diligence

It's no secret that I've been a republican since my teens. But even the most ardent monarchist must recognise that a government's job is to put Australia and Australians in the best possible position to navigate the future. Without checking his remarks I recall John Howard made a good speech after the last vote on a republic. The comments about intergenerational tolerance come to mind.

Perhaps because of my own views, confirmation bias reared its silly head and I took that to mean that even he, an ardent constitutional monarchist, could see the winds of change - but in the distance. That was nearly a quarter of a century ago. Even then, the inner-city Liberal seats had voted Yes.

Neither Coalition nor Labor governments have done anything since. It's pretty shameful. We don't want to go into constitutional change as ill-prepared as we were last time. The referendum debate was a knock-'em-down, hope-to-beat-the-others style of debate. Typical of many debates before and since then.

Our constitutional future deserves better than that. We deserve better than that. If you are a constitutional monarchist, sure, argue the case until the cows come home. At the same time, consider that you may not now or in the future be in the majority. Public opinion, indeed Australia as a whole, may be changing around you. What then? Will you be happy if Australia makes a potentially ill-considered constitutional change because the really serious work only started after a Yes vote? I hope not.

The most conservative thinker should agree that Australia should be in a position to choose the best and safest path forward if public opinion demands change. We can't be in that position if we leave all the grunt work to a post-Yes vote. That, in my view, would be reckless.

Surely the job of a government and individual members is to get Australia ready to face the future? The question for individual members isn't "Do I want a republic?" but "What if Australia determines to have one?" What shape will be the best? What methods are around that might be suitable for nominating and appointing a head of state?

Yes, our system works well - I just want a head of state who is Australian. Someone who represents us as a whole. A minimalist like me would be happy to leave the names the same, just have the Governor-General representing us, not representing our de jure head of state from another country. The Queen being head of state for the UK, us and others just doesn't do it for me. Our head of state should have one job: being our head of state, and no-one else's.

So having an assistant minister to oversee those thought processes is not a bad idea. But he should go further than just overseeing thought processes. Hopefully he'll do the groundwork so that some of the more stupid contributions made last time will be seen as stupid this time, should someone raise them again.

The dumbest proposal raised last time was in fact raised by direct-election republicans, who coined the fearmongering phrase "Don't trust the politicians". What a load of rubbish that was. Don't trust the people you elected? You elected them.

In over 20 years in Federal Parliament I met my fair share of federal members who were nincompoops, egomaniacs, braggarts, a bit loony, too lazy and then some. They were an acutely unattractive and very, very small minority across the board. On all sides, most people were decent, hard-working people who had to bear the burden of negative publicity that every profession suffers when a weak link is discovered among them.

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We trust politicians to allocate how we spend billions of our money each year, to shape our education and health systems, to negotiate our international relationships. Our system, which has under successive governments of various persuasions put Australians in a remarkably fortunate position, should not be white-anted by those telling us we shouldn't trust it.

Reflect for a second or two. We can trust ourselves to elect the politicians, we trust the Parliament we elect to make important decisions about our future ... but we can't trust them to decide who our next head of state will be? That's essentially saying we have to elect a head of state because we can't trust the people we elected to do it, even though we elected them. The idea that we don't elect the right people to Parliament but we will elect the right person to be head of state is nonsense - a non sequitur, if you want to be fancy.

Successive prime ministers have nominated governors-general with only a few blips. We could put a brake on that by requiring a prime minister's nominee to be approved by the Parliament we elect. Then we need a small body to actually make the appointment. It's the sort of model that is more likely to win over constitutional monarchists. And I want to win them over, because I want a republic.

The direct-election people I think unwisely stopped this sort of model being successful last time by dividing the pro-republican vote. Cynical I may be, but I thought then, and think now, that the direct-election/don't-trust-the-people-we-elect movement was used by anti-republicans to do just that.

There are of course other views. It would be a good thing if the appointment of an assistant minister brings about a reasoned and civil debate among us before a model is put before us. Why? Because at that point we will split into the Yes and No camps, and probably behave as badly as many did last time. With a decent and open discussion before we choose a model, we could move forward together.