Australia must become a sovereign republic- Citizens Electoral Council of Australia Media Release

Australia must become a sovereign republic- Citizens Electoral Council of Australia Media Release  Thursday, 10 September 2015

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://www.cecaust.com.au
 

Australia must become a sovereign republic

Queen Elizabeth is not a powerless, benign figurehead. She is now the longest-reigning head of Britain’s oligarchical power structure which sits above the institutions of democracy. Her role ensures that democratic power can never touch the network of wealthy families, private banks, corporate boardrooms, elite schools, permanent civil servants and secretive security agencies, reinforced by the system of royal honours, where real power resides in Britain, Australia, and every other state where the Queen is Monarch.

The only way to bring this power-structure under democratic control is to replace the Queen with a democratic head of state, accountable to the people. It is past time Australia did this, and finally became an independent sovereign nation.

Here are the facts about the Queen’s power. In “The Real British Empire”, published in the CEC’s October-November 2011 New Citizen newspaper, the CEC reported a partial list of the Queen’s actual powers, sourced from Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage. Among her so-called Royal Prerogative powers, the Queen:

• alone declares war at her pleasure;
• is commander-in-chief, and may choose and appoint all commanders and officers by land, sea, and air;
• may convoke, adjourn, remove, and dissolve Parliament;
• may dismiss the prime minister and choose his or her replacement;
• alone may conclude treaties.

In practice, the British Prime Minister exercises these powers in the UK; in Australia they are exercised by the Governor-General under the advice of the Prime Minister. Nevertheless, they are her powers, and the British PM consults with her closely, in weekly face-to-face meetings and daily communications conveyed in her red boxes; Australia’s PM consults almost as closely with the Governor-General.

Unlike the US president, for comparison, her powers are not defined, and therefore limited, by a written constitution—the British “constitution” is an unwritten system of feudalistic conventions and precedents. Australia does have a written constitution, but the Queen’s powers are largely undefined and untouched, which is acknowledged in the “reserve powers” clause in the list of powers of her Governor-General. (One power of the Queen that is defined in the Australian constitution is her power to overrule any law passed by the Australian parliament within 12 months of its passage.) Australian constitutional law expert Ann Twomey called this disguised but very real power of the Queen in Australia’s system the chameleon Crown, which “takes great care to protect itself by blending into its background so carefully that its presence is barely perceptible”. (The Chameleon Crown: The Queen and Her Australian Governors, by Ann Twomey).

Take probably the most awesome of her powers, the power to declare war. This is not a power of the US president, who is ostensibly the most powerful person in the world. The British PM can declare war without consulting parliament, as Tony Blair did on Iraq in 2003, because the PM uses the Queen’s power to do so. The Australian PM can similarly declare war without the democratic accountability of consulting parliament, under our British-crafted system.

The current UK Labour Party leadership campaign has produced a revealing insight into just how undemocratic the British Crown system is. London’s 31 August 2015 Telegraph newspaper launched an hysterical attack on front-runner Jeremy Corbyn for suggesting that the elected parliament should have a veto over the Crown’s Royal Prerogative powers. Corbyn reportedly said, “The Royal Prerogative should be subject to Parliamentary vote and veto if necessary. The Queen hands her powers to the Prime Minister and he can then exercise them. It’s a very convenient way of bypassing Parliament. Also, orders in council are a very convenient way of bypassing Parliament.”

Whereas most Britons, and Australians, would assume that parliament already does have the final say, the hysterical reaction to Corbyn’s modest proposal proved emphatically otherwise, and indeed, just how much the Queen’s position is dependent on not being accountable to the elected parliament. The Telegraph quoted historian (and Tony Blair’s biographer) Sir Anthony Seldon telling LBC radio:

“It’s hard to know what would be left of the monarchy. The fact that Jeremy Corbyn is saying that, would be seen as an assault on the monarchy. It would be crossing the Rubicon. He would be the first Labour leader who started talking about a reduction in the role of the monarchy. It would be very serious.”

What is more serious is that an unelected hereditary monarch has that much power over elected institutions. That power is enshrined in the system of hereditary monarchy, which the Crown will kill, and has killed, to protect. Princess Diana was the last great threat to the House of Windsor’s control of the British Crown, her openness leading to scandalous insights into how the Monarchy really functioned. Australian-based investigator John Morgan concluded, from his forensic investigation of her death, that the Queen, whose first duty is to the continuation of the Monarchy, ordered her assassination and the subsequent cover-up.

In a true republic, sovereignty comes from the people. Abraham Lincoln expressed this principle most profoundly at the end of his 1863 Gettysburg Address, when he called on his fellow citizens to ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”.

It is time that Australians see through the carefully stage-managed PR campaign around the Queen, and resolve to become, finally, an independent sovereign nation. The CEC has been committed to that cause since its inception—join us.