“Most Australians who know the king like and respect him,” writes Malcolm Turnbull in a guest essay. “But Australia’s head of state should be one of us”
mention of Australia in Charles III’s several coronation oaths; the only one of his 15 realms that is specifically mentioned is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The other 14 are swept up in an omnibus reference to “your other Realms and the Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining”, all of which Charles will promise to govern “according to their respective laws and customs”.
By 1901 the British monarch was very much a constitutional one, bound to act on the advice of her ministers. But in Australia it was a different story. The new Commonwealth of Australia was not, nor sought to be, an independent nation. The extensive powers vested in the queen in the Australian constitution were designed to be exercised by the government in London.
But while the Crown had ceased to represent imperial authority over a subordinate dominion, it was its very British character that gave it meaning to Australians. A year after her accession Menzies said of the young queen: “She is the enduring monarch, the monarch who dies as an individual but who passes on a crown that will always be the sign and proof that wherever we may be in the world we are one people.
In 1954, when Queen Elizabeth made her first, rapturously received visit to Australia, the Australian government’s Yearbook noted: “The non-indigenous population of Australia is fundamentally British in race and nationality.” Australia’s only referendum on becoming a republic, held in 1999, was lost because republicans split over how the new president should be appointed. The model proposed would have had him or her chosen by a bipartisan majority of Parliament—appropriate for somebody whose role, like the king or governor-general, was meant to be ceremonial.
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