Rage against the machine

Change advocates are no longer content with institutional reform that causes minimal disruption. Instead they are intent on tearing down the entire liberal-democratic edifice. By Nick Cater.

Last week’s 70th anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne was not entirely ignored, even in The New Daily, which assigned the story to its entertainment writer. Perhaps the rejoicing will break out in June on the anniversary of the Queen’s coronation, but probably not. Official plans to mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in Australia might best be described as low key.

Yet the apparent rise of indifference towards the pomp and ceremony of the Crown has not been matched by a corresponding rise in demand for constitutional change. Having shortened the name of the Australian Republican Movement to the Australian Republic Movement, the ARM board might care to reflect on whether the word “movement” is also redundant. The cause it is championing is going nowhere.

Geoffrey Blainey’s tribute in The Weekend Australian explained why Australians have reasons to be grateful for the Queen’s remarkable longevity.

Since the monarchy is the bedrock of the Australian Constitution, the institutional stability the Queen has provided throughout seven decades of turbulence has been our good fortune. It also helps explain why Australians declined the invitation to become a republic in 1999 and would probably reject the offer even more emphatically if the referendum were to be repeated.

The lack of appetite for change is neither evidence of the electorate’s stupidity nor John Howard’s mendacity, as Paul Keating brooded in The Weekend Australian.

Keating’s preferred referendum question seeking support for a republic without specifying what kind was never going to fly.

Nor would people be likely to vote in favour of the ARM’s recent condescending proposal for the election of candidates approved by the political class.

Not even Keating would have voted in favour of that, judging by his criticism. The risk that endorsement at the ballot box might go to the winner’s head, leading she or he to claim a US presidential-style mandate cannot lightly be dismissed. The calibre of recent occupants of the White House shows the wisdom of Australia’s constitutional architects.

Arguments for the republic have little traction even in New Zealand, the poster child of the modern left. The Maori Party, whose representation in the 120-member parliament numbers two, last week called for “a mature and adult conversation” about ditching the monarchy. Co-leader Rawiri Waititi’s preferred alternative is “a tiriti-centric Aotearoa through constitutional transformation”.

Roughly translated, that would mean overturning the Westminster system and creating an equal power-sharing arrangement between two separate parliaments. How the head of state would be appointed, or what authority the office would hold over two parliaments, is anybody’s guess. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, like most of her Australian Labor counterparts, says she favours a republic, but not yet. The result of the 2016 referendum to change the New Zealand flag serves as a cautionary tale. The proposal was overwhelmingly supported by the media and political classes but decisively rejected, 56-44 per cent, when put to the vote.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, like Ardern, is instinctively in favour of ditching the Crown but is happy to let moral perfection wait. At the height of the attention on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s brand-trashing interviews last year, Trudeau said the time was not right for the conversation.

Bill Shorten’s promise of a constitutional referendum on a republic may not have been his biggest mistake, but his successor has taken pains to learn from it, deftly postponing any discussion until after the resolution of the debate on the Uluru statement.

Paul Kelly’s recent column declaring the republic was “entering the vault of moribund issues” was keenly read by members of the Australian Monarchist League, who met for their annual conference in Sydney on the weekend. Yet there was no declaration of victory, no repeat of Francis Fukuyama’s brave post-Cold War cry of the end of history. Wisely so, for the stakes have been raised in the age of woke.

The task for conservatives today is not just the defence of a single institution. The old advocates of change went out of their way to advocate an arrangement that would cause as little disruption as possible. The new advocates of change are intent on destroying the whole liberal-democratic edifice: the Westminster system, rule of law, the equal distribution of respect, the traditional family, personal autonomy and more. That the system is morally corrupt and broken beyond repair is an article of faith for adherents of woke and there is no room for further discussion.

The calibre of the arguments proffered by this pan-institutional demolition squad can be judged from a speech by Mehreen Faruqi last week. The monarchy is “a racist, colonial institution. It is a relic of the British empire, and it shouldn’t exist”, the Greens senator declared. Faruqi is a migrant from Pakistan, a country that had been “colonised, ravaged and looted” by the British empire that the royal family represents. Colonialism was not dead, she claimed, it had “merely transformed into the extractive and exploitative global corporations that control vast swathes of the world”.

The history of bad ideas tells us this subversive, woke ideology will not necessarily remain on the fringes of political debate. The Ardern government is paddling in the shallow end of this dangerous pool by elevating Maori self-government to the status of a state within a state, a radical departure from the constitutional arrangements under which the country has operated for nearly 200 years. The road map for this proposal, known as He Puapua, was commissioned by cabinet in 2019. Any chance of debate about where such a proposal might lead has been curtailed by the denouncing of critics as racist.

In such a climate of debate, it is hardly any wonder that constitutional conservatives feel they are on the back foot. The assent of critical race theory is poisoning the civic debate in the US and may do so in Australia and NZ, too. Its ambition goes far beyond a makeover of our institutions or the practical righting of past wrongs. Its express aim is to pull the whole structure down and rebuild it in a manner not yet revealed.