Page 832 - Week 03 - Thursday, 25 March 1993
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Mr Lamont: We are a republic. The ACT is a republic.
MR DE DOMENICO: I am talking about New South Wales now. In 1993 people may think that this is riveting new debate. Madam Speaker, it is nothing new, though, because the history books show that in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, there was an upsurge in radical republicanism in New South Wales.
Like Mr Lamont, I welcome a debate on this issue. It is a very important issue. If some people have a genuine feeling about the inevitability of our system of government changing from a monarchy to a republic and if, as I believe they do, the same people intend that this change should come about by peaceful and democratic means, then we have to question their motives and tactics in fixing a target date at a time when, so the opinion polls tell us - and I know that from time to time we should be reminded that they are not always right - that the overwhelming majority of Australians still do not want that kind of change and probably will not want it in 10 years' time. They might at a future time, and I accept that. If that happens, so be it.
To reflect on the statements I have just made, I mention that, since 1901, 42 constitutional referendums have been put to the Australian electorate, of which eight have been approved. To some people these figures show either that our Constitution is unreasonably difficult to amend or that the electorate is too stupid to know what is good for it. Some people in the Liberal Party say that from time to time. Those people are now burying their heads in the sand perhaps even deeper than they did prior to the last Federal election. Surely we are not going to say that, because one thing that we do know is that the Australian electorate and the Australian people are not stupid. Even on those occasions when a referendum has been held at the same time as a Federal election, as for example in 1974 and 1984, it has been seen that the Australian voter is wise and clever when marking his or her ballot-paper and choosing the right government, but apparently the same voter lapses into ignorance and stupidity a moment later when marking his or her referendum paper and producing a result which the Government does not like. We cannot have it both ways.
Let us look at what Mr Kerry Stokes said. Like Mr Lamont, I was at the address by Mr Stokes. The most important thing that Mr Stokes - and Mr Lamont - said was that today we should not be worrying about whether we are going to have a republic or not in the year 2001, but we should be concentrating on those issues which are going to help Canberra and the ACT. We recall Mr Richard Carleton's recent assassination of Canberra on 60 Minutes. It provoked an understandably shrill local furore, amplified of course in the daily pages of the sympathetic Canberra Times, which Mr Stokes owns. Yet outside the Territory it attracted little more than a silence broken only by a stifled yawn. No matter how glib you saw his journalism, no matter how trite you may have believed his approach, no matter how unbalanced you thought his story, Carleton was merely reinforcing the prejudices the wider Australia has about Canberra. There is no doubt about that.
The report was nothing, if not unremarkable, outside the borders of the ACT. Yet it crystallised for me the problem threatening Canberra's future, and that is perception. Madam Speaker, given the shenanigans that happened here in this Assembly yesterday afternoon, as reported on the front page of the Canberra Times this morning, it is no wonder the perception of Canberra by
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