Page 837 - Week 03 - Thursday, 25 March 1993
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I hope that we do hear some sort of attempted argument from someone opposite in favour of retaining the monarchy, because that will give us the opportunity to shoot it down.
Mr De Domenico referred to the Australia Act. The Australia Act was a significant step in Australia's constitutional development from the days of colonialism. At Federation in 1901 we still regarded ourselves very much as a colonial nation. In the First World War Britain was at war and the prevailing view was that we were too. In 1939 Menzies commented, "It is my melancholy duty to inform you that Britain is at war and therefore so is Australia". Again there was an assumption that, because Britain had declared war, so had Australia. There was a change in 1942 when John Curtin saw it as appropriate to separately declare war on Japan, so for the first time Australia asserted an independence.
In 1943, under Dr Evatt's stewardship as Foreign Affairs Minister and Attorney-General, Australia ratified the Statute of Westminster, which was a formal break in the ability of Britain to control and interfere in Australia's affairs. That was an assertion that the British Parliament could no longer amend the Australian Constitution. I suspect that Mr Stevenson thinks it still can, but his views on these antiquarian constitutional aspects are always slightly different from the mainstream. In 1986 we saw the final step in that process of constitutional independence when the Australia Act finally severed the direct relationship between the British Crown and State constitutions. While the independence of the Commonwealth of Australia and the integrity of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia were guaranteed by the Statute of Westminster, there was always the possibility of State parliaments and State governments seeking to find a direct link to the Crown. That link was severed with the agreement of the Australian States, both Labor and Liberal, in 1986.
Madam Speaker, the process of evolution of Australia's sovereign independence has proceeded to the point where, for all practical purposes, we enjoy that sovereign independence. Monarchists have great difficulty with the exchange of correspondence between Speaker Gordon Scholes and Buckingham Palace following the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor Government by John Kerr. Following the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor Government by John Kerr the House of Representatives passed a motion of want of confidence in Prime Minister Fraser and called upon the Governor-General to summon the member for Werriwa, Mr Whitlam, to form a government. The Governor-General refused to do that, and that of course was a fundamental breach because the Governor-General is expected to obey the wishes of the Parliament conveyed to him by the Speaker.
Speaker Scholes contacted Buckingham Palace to point this out, and the response to Speaker Scholes from Buckingham Palace was that the Queen would not intervene in decisions made by the Governor-General of Australia. That is an extraordinary point because those monarchists who say that the Queen is the last bastion, that the Queen will somehow preserve and protect our institutions, must somehow confront the Queen's statement to Speaker Scholes that she would not intervene in the activities of her Governor-General. In fact, we do not have a monarchy; we have a governor-generalship. We have a governor-generalship which hangs under the shade of the monarchy. Most Australians may think, if they think about it at all, that the Queen has a role, but the Queen has divorced herself from that role. That is clearly an unsatisfactory situation.
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