Argument: An Australian republic won’t mean rejecting English heritage

Supporting quotes

John Pyke. “Reasons Why Australia Should be a Republic” – “A Republic Would Not Mean a Rejection of our English Heritage

To say the things above does not mean that to “go republican” would constitute a rejection of our British (mainly English) political heritage; it would simply mean that we had learned to be selective about that heritage. Most of the modern principles of representative democracy were first stated, in the modern world, in England (see two good books to read), but many of them, though widely accepted elsewhere, are still not part of the English Constitution. The following ideas, for example, were all proclaimed by English orators or pamphleteers in the upheaval of the 1640s:

• that the people are sovereign,
• that all citizens (meaning, then, only the males – but eventually including women too) ought to be able to vote for members of Parliament,
• that no offices should be filled by the hereditary principle,
• that the powers of Parliament could be defined and limited in a written constitution, and
• that fundamental constitutional rules should be set down by a temporary assembly, constituted differently from the regular Parliament.

These, originally English, ideas were put into practice in the United States of America, and have since been copied in much of the democratic world including Australia. However, they were seen as dangerous in England and some of those who argued for them were prosecuted and even executed – not only by monarchs but by the republican leader, Oliver Cromwell. Though most of the world’s modern democratic theories originated in England, the ruling classes cleverly resisted their implementation in England, so that the current English political system is less democratic than many other western countries. A mainly-hereditary House is still part of its Parliament. There is still no acceptance in legal theory of the sovereignty of the people, though it was first advanced by English political theorists three centuries ago. According to the established Constitutional theory – still solemnly taught in the English law schools – Parliament is sovereign and “can make or unmake any law whatsoever”. It could limit the right to vote, or extend its own term to 7 years, or 20, or whatever suited the party in power. Even the extension of voting rights to all the people was put into practice later – and more reluctantly – than in England’s former colonies. To put the above democratic principles more completely into practice here would not, I repeat, be to reject our English political heritage – it would be to put more emphasis on the democratic part of that heritage and less on the aristocratic, absolutist and deferential part.

[Incidentally, it cannot be supposed (as some seem to suppose) that British migrants are more likely to be royalists than the rest of us. I asked a Welsh-born woman the other day “Why did you come here?” and she said “To get away from the weather and the class system”. The monarchy is the apex of the English class system. To keep the monarchy is to keep a symbol of inherited wealth and position, whose holders expect deference by the rest of the population – and many people who have come here from the United Kingdom are more aware of that than some Australians are!]