Royally trumped: Why Australian dreams of a republic are dead
Still mates? King Charles III hosted antimonarchist Anthony Albanese at Buckingham Palace last May. Photo / Getty Images
A year ago, it looked in reach. Now, the dream of an Australia republic has quietly died and not even the Prime Minister’s antimonarchist sentiments can save it.
Anthony Albanese – with some hubris – appointed as his Assistant Minister for a Republic barely 19 months ago admitted as much earlier this month.
“It’s not a priority at the moment,” Matt Thistlethwaite told the Weekend Australian.
That’s code for dead in the water. There will be no referendum for Australians to accept or reject a republic should Albanese win a second term – the timetable he heroically offered soon after his Labor government came to power in May 2022.
We know how the republic died: the resounding rejection of an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament by Australians when they voted on that question in last year’s referendum has left the government with no appetite for a second constitutional referendum.
The damage of defeat has been too great; the Prime Minister is still struggling to recover political momentum. The loss of the Voice – which he courageously continued to champion despite overwhelming evidence before the vote that the majority of Australians would not support him – has cast a sense of decline over Albanese and his government.
Perhaps it can recover before the next election, due in the first half of next year. But no Australian government is likely to again put constitutional change to the people by way of a referendum without the support of political opponents.
And Albanese knows that the Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, having inflicted a heavy blow by successfully campaigning against the Voice, won’t pass up a repeat performance were there to be a republic referendum.
As that great Australian historian Manning Clark used to say, Australian public life breaks into two groups: the enlargers, and the punishers and straighteners. Dutton is within the latter.
Republicans will therefore need to await an alignment of the political stars that bring a republican prime minister as well as a republican opposition leader into office simultaneously to have any chance of the required constitutional referendum to decide the issue.