The Inspector-General of Misconception (13 page)

In all the debate about the coming of the republic, the one position that has been missing is that of the Maximum Republic.

We have had Minimal Monarchy, Minimal Republic, Full Monarchy, no-change. But we haven't heard it for the Total Republic.

The republican options have all been oh-so-timid and aimed at not frightening the horses; they have been without the imaginative leap.

It befalls this Office, therefore, to provide an outline of such a Maximum Republic.

We put it forward not in the spirit of advocacy or partisanship but as a democratic intellectual duty.

It is our position that there is a need for Australians to ‘reconfront' their civitas.

If we are to change such a core structural element in the constitution of a nation-state from constitutional
monarchy to republic, it might be well to take advantage of the ‘legal act' of change to engineer a complete change of mood; to look at everything which a republic means or could mean.

To refurbish the whole of the state in a republican garb. To not half do the job.

For the deeper meaning of a republic and its history carries a historical break with a kind of thinking as much as with a political arrangement.

It is then perhaps time for Australia to reconfront itself and to carry through the republican mission; to avoid what the other so-called republics – France and the US, for example – have done. They have faltered, they lost their nerve somewhere back in their past.

If we choose a through-going republic, we will have an opportunity to ‘clean our vision'.

Where do we start?

At its deepest, a republic is fundamentally a break with theocracy and this is where the other republics have failed.

The monarch originally was either the representative of god, exercising the divine right of kings, or god's servant.

At least, the monarch was defender of the ‘faith'.

The church crowns the monarch in the UK. The coronation is a religious service.

It is held in a cathedral.

That has to stop if you have a republic. The linkage with religion has to be cut.

But more, it is no use doing away with the monarch if
you leave intact all the trappings of the religious linkage. Someone's ‘god' will still rule.

Unless we are thorough, we will have a religious ghost then hovering around our parliamentary and civic affairs.

We will have a subversive divine presence infiltrated through the ceremonials and nomenclature of our proceedings.

We cannot go on opening parliament with a prayer or a religiously-based oath of office. Within that prayer and oath is a claim that the parliament is an instrument of divine will or that it is divinely ordained. That is monarchical thinking.

The whole basis of republicanism is that the only authority is the People. There is no other authority. Once you allow a supernatural fiction such as god or ‘nature' to be the source of authority, then only those with access to this invented god or to the messages of nature can claim power.

The philosophy of republicanism is that we are alone on the planet. There is no other source of inspiration or wisdom.

As that great republican first in modern times, Thomas Jefferson showed, it goes through to the very detail of daily life. Even to the way you run a dinner party.

For that's when you abandon gods as the source of authority and turn instead to the people. For a start, you embrace egalitarianism and the proposition that the human is the measure of all things.

The only argument that the monarchists have going for them is that it is sometimes fun to keep about
us things which are ‘quaint'.

Quaint names and quaint customs which are perhaps no longer representative of our understanding of the nature of things but which tickle us and make us different. To remain a constitutional monarchy with a foreign head of state is about as quaint as you can get.

We are too quick to rename things such as state schools or regiments or whatever in this country. It is fun to be surrounded by some quaint things. We do not have enough quaintness.

However, our task here is to argue the republic to the Max.

By so doing, we do not intend to eliminate entirely the linkage with the British past but only to ‘sanction the future'; to permit a future to emerge cleanly and unimpeded by language and imagery of the exhausted past.

We are happy for there to be one statue of Queen Victoria in Melbourne. The rest have to go.

We see it also as ‘cleaning the fogged windows' of our civic life to allow us to ‘see' civically. So much of the process of law and government and its meaning and justification are now invisible.

The republican dinner party

Jefferson wrote a memorandum on the republican dinner party in 1802 when confronted by the demands of diplomatic precedence.

The English Minister of State demanded to go to dinner first, after Jefferson, and that as was diplomatic
protocol, Jefferson as President should take the arm of the English Minister's wife.

There were also demands about who should be seated on the left and right of Jefferson.

Jefferson saw this as giving precedence to the ‘Crown' and of course, through the Crown to God, and he would not adopt this practice.

In his memorandum he wrote that his policies on dinner parties at the new White House were to be ‘Pell Mell' and ‘Nearest the Door'.

He felt that any arrangement of
placement
based on diplomacy as it was then practised would involve him and his nation in deferring to the Crown and then by extension, kneeling to Strange Gods.

Bully for Jefferson.

Jefferson ran the best dinner table in the US at that time. He had a French chef and imported wines from France.

He had lived in France for four years, and had advanced gastronomic aspirations.

We think that is republican also.

To eat ‘like a king' is a way of appropriating and taking to the people all that kings once held as their divine right.

Republics should study gastronomy. In fact, the amazing growth of interest in wine and food in Australia, the wine and food festivals, the emergence of fine restaurants, is in itself a republican impulse. We are beginning to ‘live like kings'.

As the French revolution understood, ‘We conceive of nothing except by images.'

We must reclaim the images of our social and political world and rewrite them afresh.

This is not necessarily a solemn or onerous business; it can be a lot of fun.

Republican dress

Any robes and gowns which derive from the Crown must go.

So must the usage ‘Crown of the hat'.

We should redesign the robes of office in a republican style.

No suggestion should be made by judges or priests or Sergeants at Arms in parliament that they are ordained or carry, by virtue of their robes of office, any feudal rank.

Feudal rank itself derived from the ‘god' through the monarchy.

Republican calendar

The clock and the calendar are the key daily reminders of ultimate change – that is the movement towards death.

As the daily or hourly proclamations of existential change, they could be conscripted to serve as a reminder that we, by proclaiming a republic, a new ‘state of civic being', have changed ourselves in a fundamental way.

If we are not to entirely change the calendar even though the present calendar did come from Pope Gregory and the names of the days and months contain theological and superstitious meanings, we must do something with it.

The French did change the names of the days and months for a while but the Church ultimately prevailed.

But while keeping the old calendar of day-month-year, we suggest that we incorporate in all Australian calendars a notation of the beginning of the republic so it would read day-month-year but have added to it a notation proclaiming the year of the beginning of the republic; that is Year One of the Australian Republic would be denoted R1, R2 etc. 25 April, 2002 R1.

There has to be in the calendar a daily reminder of our cleansing and affirmation of the fact that something has changed and something new is beginning.

Street names

We do not propose wholesale changing of street names. That would be a nuisance.

We do propose, however, that in each city, town and village a symbolic street be renamed Boulevard of the Republic – the obvious candidates for renaming being all streets called King or Queen or Prince or Princess.

We are not a-historical vandals. We believe that street names do embody history and that the flavour of that history should emanate from the streets we live in. Even if the residents do not always know the origin of their street names, there is an emanation from the very words used and, of course, historical detail in some cases.

However, nothing is lost if we rename the Royalty Streets aforementioned (they could remain in brackets and smaller lettering underneath the new name).

Pledging ceremonies

There will have to be pledging ceremonies of loyalty to the republic, beginning with the highest officials and the armed forces and then the school children.

Royalists who choose not to pledge to the republic will be given two years to think about it.

They will not receive passports after that time.

The coat of arms can go along with feudal relics such as the Order of Australia.

Playing cards

The Jack, Queen, King should be replaced by republican images. The French did this.

The royal flush will be the republican flush.

Gays

Gays will have to drop the expression ‘queen'.

Authors' royalties

The payments which creators receive for their work are called royalties because Queen Anne introduced them. They will be republicities.

And as a celebration of creativity, they will, by law, be doubled.

Currency and stamps

It goes without saying that this will change to reflect the republican spirit.

The letter

This has nothing to do with the republic but there is something unsatisfactory about the mode of address and conclusion of the letter – ‘Dear Sir or Madam' and ‘Yours faithfully' or ‘Yours sincerely'. The fax and the email have brought home to us that these quaint forms of address should go.

Just felt it was a good time to get that fixed up while we were at it.

The names of the states

Only Queensland and Victoria would need to change their names.

Although while we're at it, couldn't we find something more imaginative than South Australia, Wesern Australia and the Northern Territory?

It must have been a dull day in the Office of Names when they came up with those.

No presidents

Sadly, the whole idea of having a president or a titular head comes directly from monarchical thinking. Ideally, there should be no titular head, no president. We could have a National Master of Ceremonies and a National Clown. But no ‘heads of state'.

 

The thing to remember is that the ‘physicals' – the structures and styles and visible parts of civic life – always incorporate within them the ‘philosophicals'. There is a philosophical or ideological justification or authority
residing in everything in civic life, including street names and so on.

To change these is to
see
this. For those living through these changes, it is a chance briefly not only to change these but to see the civic skeleton if you like; to see, however briefly, a cat-scan of our very civic life and its rationale.

It would cause the languid Australian psyche to reconfront its civitas (to put it in simple words); it would be a Festival of Rationale (that is, the rationale for our public living arrangements).

The most disparaged part of democratic life, other than the long speech, is the committee.

‘We are overrun by them, like the Australians were by rabbits,' said Winston Churchill during the Second World War. He spent much time trying to circumvent or abolish committees but they saved him from quite a few wilful disasters (the invasion of Portugal being one).

Yet probably, hundreds of thousands of Australians serve on committees, panels, inquiries, councils, working parties, boards. We are hugely skilled at committee work and procedure.

We applaud the work of Dr Judith Brett of La Trobe University, who in a remarkable essay, ‘Meetings, Parliament, and Civil Society' has focused on the role of ‘meetings' in our economic and social life.

The author Frank Hardy used to tell a good committee story about the Meatworkers Union of Victoria.

During the Second World War, the abattoir workers' executive committee in Bendigo voted in favour of a second front being opened to take the pressure off the Soviet Union.

They decided to send the resolution directly to Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill.

When sending it off, the branch secretary added at the bottom: ‘Please note that this resolution has still to be ratified by the membership and should not be acted upon until then.'

The committee system is really the unrecognised tier of government working alongside and within local, state and federal government.

Much of the day-to-day life of the nation is run by committee, including much of commercial life.

Arts patronage is run by committee.

Nearly all of our organised recreation is run by committee. Most of our major judicial decisions are taken by juries, a committee.

We have heard that even some families have ‘committees'.

Nearly everyone tries to avoid serving on them (or at least ‘protests' about having to serve).

The most deadly ridicule of the committee comes from a near-forgotten, perniciously humorous book called
Parkinson's Law
by C. Northcote Parkinson, which sets out to analyse the madnesses of bureaucracy and committee work (surely, the basis of the TV show,
Yes, Minister
).

Parkinson thinks that an effective committee is made
up of nine members.

Policy is made by three who are talkative and able. Information is supplied to these three by two experts, and a financial warning is given by one other who sees his or her role in life to issue financial warnings.

With a neutral chair, this accounts for seven of the committee members.

Parkinson says that the other two are silent members. ‘We know little as yet about the function of the two silent members,' he says.

Committees are usually composed of experts, officials and laypeople.

There is a tendency now for the laypeople on committees or in public to assume a ‘representative' position which, it is implied, carries a new kind of
expertise
.

So a gay person on the committee is expected to ‘speak for gays', a Tasmanian to speak for all Tasmanians.

Committees increasingly wish to include someone from the ‘arts', or ‘a parent' and these people are so selected and unofficially labelled to give the committee political credence.

This blithely ignores the multiplicity of divisions and contradictions which exist, say, in ‘the gay community' or among feminists or the arts or whatever.

Or within any given individual, may we add.

True, these people might have paid more attention to data from these areas. But maybe not.

Alcoholics do not necessarily know much about the chemical, organic or psychological effects of alcohol. Or anything about alcohol.

Poets do not necessarily have a clue about arts funding.

Attributing or accepting representative status should be carefully considered.

But why is committee work bemoaned?

Firstly, with few exceptions, committees are characterised in political science terms as bodies which ‘lack original jurisdiction'.

They are usually adjuncts of a larger body – the membership of the organisation, the corporation – and as such are places of delegated and limited power. Most committees can, if necessary, be overruled.

Yet right down to the golf club management committee, committees do
exercise power
. They hire and fire. They spend money (very often public money). They implement plans and they build. They buy and sell property. They formulate policy. They admit and they expel.

The characteristic which lowers the appeal of the committee is the anonymity of committee work.

No glamour comes to the individual committee member.

It has lead, quite correctly, to the notion that committee work is ‘thankless'.

Committees are also time-consuming. That is, everyone on the committee can have a say, and usually does. The work does expand to fill the time available for it.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.

One of the most interesting arguments we have had about committee work was on the Press Council.

One of the members, Edmund Rouse, a newspaper
executive from Tasmania, had a game he played where he timed our decision-making. This, he argued, was good executive practice.

He would proclaim it a ‘good day' if we finished earlier than we had the previous month.

Half-humorously, we argued that this was philosophically and technically an incorrect approach to the work of the Press Council.

We said that we should pride ourselves on the length of our deliberations, on the time we put into the subtleties of a complaint rather than the rapidity of our decision.

The pleasure of this argument for us was that it took nearly an hour and wrecked Edmund's attempt to finish by 11 am.

Finally, the irritation of committee work is inherent in the process of decision-making. The calibre of membership is often uneven which means that you have dumb and tiresome people on the committee.

The committee may take longer to see the point than you do. That is, the committee mirrors life.

Committee work does not suit large egos, self-seekers, impatient zealots, and revolutionaries (characteristics which are to be found in most of us on some issue or another).

May we quote, immodestly, the words of a character from a short story, ‘Milton rebutted – intellectual tricks and accusations'?

The character says, ‘That one does not “like” committee meetings is what committee meetings are all about.

Committees are supposed to be obstacles to our wilfulness and our rashness …

Committee-goers are wilful.

Committees are parental.'

Despite our impatience, we do change the world, usually for the best – and we do it one committee meeting at a time.