The Foundation for National Renewal   The Constitutional Convention of February 1998

Federal Election October 2004: Which Candidates Trust the People?

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS
Monday, 2 February 1998
Page 13

Ms RAYNER- My friends and absent friends, I am one of those Australians who chose to be so- I was born in another country- 13 years ago. I am one of those Australians who was born prior to 1949 in a country which made a sentimental commitment to the monarchy, which it has retained. I refer, of course, to New Zealand. Until recently I described myself as a sentimental monarchist, and I describe myself today as a realistic republican. Should Australia be a republic? Yes, but not at just any price. The reason I support the creation of a republic is that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a country which is proud of itself and is aware of its responsibilities.

I am not prepared to support a republic that entrenches discrimination or perpetuates injustice. That is not a real republic and it is not worth the trouble of creating one. A real republic puts the power in the people, not just symbolically. Republican heroes are ordinary women, men and children who value their rights and freedoms, and fight for them and for the responsibilities, and respect them and expect them from others. The quality of a republic depends on the quality of its citizens.

This republic must come because the people want it and want it passionately. I have heard on all sides of this chamber groups of people who want the status quo dressed up in much the same language. No minimalist model, no cautious compromise, no preservation of the past in aspic will capture the hearts of the Australian people. Any constitutional document that defines our nation must reflect our democratic expectations. It must guarantee individual, human, social and economic rights somehow, but that is a debate we are not going to have. It must protect the individual from the misuse of her government's power somehow, but is this not the debate we are not going to have?

I was elected second on the real republican ticket in Victoria, together with Tim Costello, to represent Victorian electors on a platform based on three core principles. The first is that this Convention is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build a new Constitution and a fair, modern and thoroughly democratic Australian republic, which we should not waste on just one issue. The second is that for ordinary Australians it is more important that our Constitution guarantees decent living and working conditions, social and other justice, and equality before the law; recognises indigenous rights; and respects our environment, our diversity and our common goals- far more important than the appointment of a symbolic head of state.

If Australia is to become a republic, and I believe it should, our new arrangements must not just symbolically reflect the moral as well as the political fact that all political power depends on and comes from the people. But the Constitution we have was drafted in terms of the rights of governments- colonial governments, imperial governments, federal and state governments- with each other. It reflects their turf battles, it reflects their jealousies, it reflects their trade and economic concerns. It says virtually nothing about the freedoms, rights and responsibilities of government to citizen and citizen to government. Any constitutional change must enhance democracy.

The purpose of a move to a republic is to do that and to put back in the hands of the people the constitutional and political power that is genuinely, and ought to be recognised as, theirs. But the agenda which was settled by the government and selected delegates before we commenced our discussions this morning has focused debate relatively narrowly- whether we should have an Australian head of state and the very technical and legal issues that derive from a possible `yes' answer to that question.

But the people who elected us and the people who write to us do not want to talk about just the appointment of a head of state, and it is not because that issue is unimportant. It is a question of where it belongs in a proper democratic scheme of things. This, I believe, falls into place after you have thought through core values, basic rights and duties, and the citizen's relationship with her government. The real republicans seem to be the only group that went to the people and asked what they wanted in their constitution.

We have not got every answer, but we do know that a far higher proportion of people support a Bill of Rights of some kind, in fact even believe they have one already, than want to have an Australian head of state. The more dialogue we had and the more we trusted the people, the clearer that message became.

The message was this, and this I believe is the core we should focus on: the Australian people do not trust their government. The Australian people believe that they are treated with disdain by these persons. They tend to regard them as self-interested and incompetent at best. So when we hear speaker after speaker today saying that we have the best democracy in the world, I say to them, `Don't be so bloody-mindedly self-satisfied and complacent.' It is not a question of tinkering only with the top levels. Only those who have benefited from the practices of the past hundred years think so- that is, proud men, clever and cautious administrators and academics, and new and old elites.

This Convention has been opened by speakers who want to retain the way things are, who have given some lip service to those who have traditionally been excluded- especially Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and, in some respects, women- but there is no special place for the poor, the unemployed, the people who have no disabilities, the children who do not vote and the alienated or cynical excluded voter who sees all politicians as power grubbers.

This is a time when government is held in deepest disrespect by the people and when, if you are running a current affairs program on television and you put on a politician, the ratings go down. This is the time of the growth of managerial politics and of the power of the executive overwhelming the parliament which is elected by the people, a time of galloping loss of esteem for all politicians and political structures and of loss of faith in the institutions which are intended to decide- and on the face of it they do so- how we are governed. And this is a time when we must make people and their participation in government the core of the republican debate.

We need a proper consultation over the next two weeks, and I am prepared to find ways and means of making sure that discussion does take place about what sort of a republic this will be. After this Constitutional Convention we need to engage with community groups who have been left right out of this debate, and we need to find imaginative ways to break that technical nexus between our constitutional document and what really happens- not leaving it to lawyers and self-interested politicians.

We have much more to address than what has been put to us on a platter. These are symbolic issues, and we need to be concerned about this gap between what the Constitution says and how it actually works. Our Constitution is defective. It is 100 years old, for God's sake. Thomas Jefferson said that you should revise your constitution every 30 years to make sure it is relevant to your current situation. It has a real lack of substance in terms of defining and entrenching democratic values.

Our Deputy Chair actually said in the newspaper last week that we have two constitutions: one written, which says how things are; and one unwritten and largely discretionary, which is how power is actually exercised. This is profoundly unhealthy for our democratic system. Our Constitution says nothing that really matters in political practice about where power lies. It says nothing meaningful about the real power sources- political parties, the Prime Minister, the cabinet, the lobby groups that have the ear of the political parties, and of the Prime Minister and the cabinet.

We are not talking just about formal governing structures; we are talking about democratic institutions which have fulfilled the gaps in those structures over the last few years. I refer to freedom of information about government activity, access to justice- if you have a lot of money- an impartial ombudsman overseeing administrative maladministration but, most importantly, mechanisms which are all used to make government accountable to the people, because the formal structures do not make it so accountable.

The founding fathers, and the bureaucrats in London who re-wrote what they wrote, wrote a narrow constitutional framework defining powers between governments, and they did it quite well, but at a cost, leaving out democratic values and on the dubious assumption that our common law tradition would do the rest. It has not. The Constitution has been a tool of administration and when the High Court has sought to fill the gaps interpreting implied values and principles into that document, the executive side of government screamed loud and long. So this is the time, I believe, to talk about world best practice in democracy and constitutionally.

What would it really mean if our Constitution were the most progressive, best written and most effective, in democratic terms, constitution? What sort of process do we really want to create it when the public, according to the republican argument, owns its government. Most of us have not thought what that means in practice. If the public owns it, it must participate not just in our vote, and especially not in a narrow postal vote selecting half the delegates to this Convention. The public have to be engaged in framing what the Constitution should look like, given the change to a republic. If we were to adopt this as a principle, we would do far better than to be engaged in protracted and technical discussions which assume either that we know the answers or that the people are stupid and can be told that we know what the answers are.

The group of republicans who are not ARM members but are, nonetheless, united in the common goal of a republic have a very large support group, we believe. Those who elected us believe that this Convention should be about their greatest hopes and fears represented by the symbol of a change of a form of our government. They did not believe it was an elite issue. They did not believe that there would be to-ing and fro-ing and done deals before anything happened at the commencement of this Convention. They do not want no change; they want to choose the change. They feel their government has become haughty, unresponsive and unaccountable. They punish those who govern at elections, voting ratbags out and heroes in and turning heroes into ratbags at the next election. They expect the worst and feel vindicated daily. There is no better vehicle than the building of a constitution for building a democracy and republic alike. We must trust the people. Government is based on a contract with the people. It has to be based on full disclosure.

This is not the government's convention. It is not owned by some voluntary association of politicians, republicans, monarchists, public servants, Prime Ministers or ministers. This is the people's Convention. Abraham Lincoln once said that if the people did not like the way their government was governing they had the right to overturn it by armed rebellion. This is an opportunity for the people's consultation process to begin. The fact that the people do not know much about their Constitution or, when they read it, are bored and stop reading at paragraph 5, does not mean to say they should not be actively involved. Jefferson also said:

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves and, if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education.

I believe that the talk of rights that we began this morning, which was so vigorously curtailed by a coalition of groups who did not want that discussion to take place, is the one which should take place from time to time, where appropriate, through the next two weeks. The talk of rights implies respect which elevates a person's status from human body to social being and, even if they cannot be enforced, these statements of rights are politically animating, socially cohesive and a source of motivation and hope, and they are not able to be parcelled out by powerful white men to minorities, whether they are Aboriginal, ethnic or other disadvantaged groups, in small pieces, in small favours or as an insulting gratuity.

Yes, we need a republic. We need an elected head of state but only if that means that their powers and the limits on their powers are absolutely clear and if the checks and balances are rightly, honestly and accurately set out in our Constitution, not in unwritten conventions which are ignored in practice, and we need a republic which is based on the accountability of government to the people and the humbleness of politicians- much forgotten. In our core document we need to have an assumption that we are no longer subjects of a crown but that we are the owners of all sovereign authority.

I began by saying that Australia should not be a republic at just any price, but the price is of course some uncertainty and the risk, a tiny risk, of actually asking the people what they want. We must surpass our cautious approach or it will defeat this move to the sovereignty being placed in the people. We must not become a `billabong' republic- green and yellow, stuffed with decaying materials and cut off from the flow of the river: warm, safe and stagnant. We need to look at the rights of the people in a meaningful way because this is an animating spirit which fires this country's most oppressed psyche which will wash away the shrouds of inanimate object status. Let us say not that we own gold but that illuminous golden spirit owns us.

 
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Last updated: 21 October 2000