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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 7 Hansard (18 October) . . Page.. 1781 ..

Mr Connolly: Gary, you would like these antiquarian forms - Queen Elizabeth, King George.

MR HUMPHRIES: My personal feelings do not come into it, Mr Connolly. Queensland has a similar swearing of allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, updated of course. The Northern Territory has an arrangement which I will come back to in a moment but one where members swear two oaths or affirmations - one to Her Majesty the Queen and the other to render true and faithful service as a member of the Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory. I will not go through them in detail, but substantially similar arrangements apply for the swearing in of members of benches, members of courts, around the country. I think there is one exception that I found before - I cannot put my finger on it at the moment - but it is almost invariably the case that members of courts in this country swear allegiance to the Queen.

It is not true to say that this is the way of the future, necessarily - it might be, but it is not necessarily the case - or that this removal of reference to the Queen is the rule rather than the exception. That is simply not the case. I ask members to ask themselves this question: Ought these sorts of changes to be made now or in the context of the outcome of a referendum on this subject by the Australian people? My view is that the Australian people have a right to make this decision, that they ought to make this decision, but that when they do make this decision, if we have held a sensible and rational and adult debate, we will abide by the outcome of that debate. If we are effectively engineering the debate to begin with, if we are removing references to the present Australian head of state because it suits the agenda of those who would see a particular outcome of that debate, then we are, I think, pre-empting the appropriate decision of the Australian people and we are doing them a grave discourtesy and insulting their capacity to make that decision. If the Australian people decide in whatever year it is - 2000 or 1999 or whenever it might be - that they wish to preserve the current arrangement for the Queen to be the Australian head of state, then I think it is appropriate for us to have arrangements such as this in our legislation.

That is why I propose to move the amendment I have circulated in the chamber. What this does is to pick up the important references in Ms Follett's legislation to the swearing of an oath or affirmation to the people of the Australian Capital Territory, but also to preserve a reference to our role as members of a nation and the current reference to swearing allegiance to the symbol of Australian nationhood, which at the moment is Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. I therefore suggest that we should be preserving that option until such time as the Australian people make an alternative decision. Then perhaps we would amend that, if there was a decision to have a republic, to provide for the swearing of allegiance to the Australian head of state or Australian-born head of state, or perhaps to the concept of Australia or something of that kind. But I believe that it is appropriate for us to indicate some allegiance to a matter beyond just the people of the ACT. We are all Australians; we have responsibilities as part of this nation. At the present time our responsibilities are defined in terms of allegiance to the Australian head of state, and I believe that we should preserve some mechanism in the legislation to do that.

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