The PC President

Beware the hidden agenda behind the renewed republican campaign. By Fred Pawle.

The emphasis in the republican mantra, “Australian head of state”, is so much on the first two words that we tend not to notice the last one.

But this word carries equal, if not more, significance. It’s fine to advocate for an Australian head of state, but what kind of state are we talking about here? The answer to that question lies in the proclivities of Australia’s most ardent republicans, and it should ring alarm bells to those who value Australia’s traditional freedoms.

The correlation between political correctness and republicanism is more than mere coincidence. While it’s true that not all republicans are adherents to the nanny state, almost all nanny-state devotees and dependents are republicans.

Australian Republican Movement spokes-bandanna Peter FitzSimons is careful to downplay the Constitutional consequences of a republic. “The current system is (that) the prime minister chooses the governor-general and asks the Queen of England,” he told the Today show in 2015. “The system I propose is, everything stays the same… but instead of asking a woman living in a palace in London, ‘Is it okay?’ (the prime minister) asks the parliament of Australia for a two-thirds majority. And it’s done, and we all get on with our lives.”

​This is the “minimalist” model, which Australians rejected at a referendum in 1999, partly because, in my opinion, they think Australian society is politicised enough already.

​In the event of a republic, the new president will be an instinctive figurehead for our burgeoning and increasingly bossy bureaucracy. Remember when, in resolutely monarchist times, the Queen’s portrait hung in all government offices as a reminder of the standards of decency and decorum to which we were expected to aspire? Her proposed replacement, the president, will fill the same role, an omniscient reminder of the standards to which we have since evolved.

​And what standards! If you believe in controlled immigration, you are a racist. If you don’t think marriage is for gays, you’re homophobic. If you think sheltered workshops shouldn’t be given a billion dollars a year to run a media network, you’re against free speech. And so on.

​Any president chosen through a process exclusively involving politicians will inevitably assume a mandate to politicise our social mores. From past experience, there is a strong possibility that a newly defined head of state, with new powers and assumed responsibilities, will engage in mission creep.

​We’ve already seen it in the Australian of the Year, which is a kind of populist alternative to the governor-general as our social figurehead. Lately the Australians of the Year have leveraged the position by embarking on 12 months of taxpayer-subsidised virtue signalling.  They become flag bearers for political correctness, haranguing Australians for their shortcomings when they should have instead been celebrating our general goodwill and sense of humour.

Consider the type of president that would be backed by Fairfax, the ABC, The Guardian and social media. He or she would come gift-wrapped to side with climate catastrophists, militant feminists, immigration lobbyists, identity politics and turtles choking on plastic straws.

The extreme consequences for opposing such opinions would quickly be seen as part of the cut and thrust of the new politics. Ordinary dissenters against such fashionable causes already suffer enormously at the hands of social media mobs. How would they survive if the mobs were backed by no less than the president of the nation?

If you doubt the authoritarian tendencies of republicans, consider two of FitzSimons’ pet policies: climate change and sugar taxes. Regarding the former, he dismisses people who disagree with him as “deniers”, a term with connotations arguably as offensive as the “final solution” remark that landed Senator Fraser Anning in trouble recently. FitzSimons’ contempt for contrary opinions makes him a poor advocate for constitutional changes to a democratic system.

On the latter topic, FitzSimons is even more egregious. Sugar taxes are designed to manipulate the behaviour of people who can’t be trusted to think for themselves. Advocates of sugar taxes look at people knocking back cans of soft drink and think, “These people are too stupid to know what’s good for them - I must force them to correct their ways.”

It is pertinent to be reminded that the “state” to which the republicans refer is not the government. The state includes the government, as well as the bureaucracy, our institutions, laws and the population. Governments come and go, states remain.

Our state is one of the most successful in human history, partly because it was the first in the world created under Enlightenment principles. We tamper with it at our peril. It is deluded to think we can change the head of state without changing the state itself.