Media Releases

14 February, 2020

The Australian Monarchist League welcomes the proposed visit by the Duke of Cambridge to Australia. His Royal Highness, representing the Queen, will visit areas ravaged by bushfires and meet with firefighters and also those who have lost their homes.

Hopefully, this visit will also lead to a formal recognition of the heroic involvement of all those involved in fighting the devasting fires of this past month whether they be volunteers or otherwise.

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9 January, 2020

The decision by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to seek a measure of privacy in their lives and that of their son, Archie, has come as no real surprise as this is something that has been in the air for some time. The intense media intrusion into the Duchess’s family and unexpected criticism of the Duke over jet travel whilst promoting environmental policies would have undoubtedly have firmed their decision.

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29 December, 2019

The article today in the Courier Mail headed ‘Brexit likely to revive republican movement’ could itself well be one of the laughable but fictitious episodes of ‘Yes Minister’ which it highlights.

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2 December, 2019

In July 2017, Malcolm Turnbull, when Prime Minister and obviously playing to a wider audience stated “Even republicans like myself can be, and in my case are, very strong Elizabethans,” he paid tribute to the Queen as having embodied “selfless public service, dignity, wisdom and leadership for longer and more magnificently than anyone alive today”. AAP 12/7/17)

However, it didn’t take him long to change his tune. On this Tuesday, the 26th November, when speaking to a republican dinner in Canberra this so-called Elizabethan said, “it is an “absurdity” and “crazy” that the Queen is the nation’s head of state when she is “not a citizen of Australia”. (Australian 27/11/19) As a former prime minister he knows, or should know, that the Queen is above citizenship and that, as Queen of Australia, passports are issued in her name through her representative, the Governor-General.

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23 November, 2019

So, Janet Albrechtsen thinks we should become a republic because a relatively minor Royal (8th in line to the throne) is in the spotlight (Australian 21/11/19). Of course, were she an American, I doubt that she would be calling for a return to the monarchy because of the various matters being revealed in the impeachment process against the president!

She forgets that we have our own constitutional arrangements which are subject only to the Australian people and to no one else. We have nothing whatsoever to do now with the British parliament and because we, not anybody else, have opted to remain under the Crown, the Governor-General, as representative of the Queen, is our executive head of state.

We therefore have the best of both worlds. We have a system that blocks politicians from absolute power, and we have the independence to decide for ourselves on whether we wish to retain our current system or move to another. It is the people’s choice, not the Queen’s, not the politician’s and certainly not that of Janet Albrechtsen or her friends in the media. Only the people.

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6 November, 2019

In 1999 the Australian Monarchist League submitted to the then government that Section 128 of the Australian Constitution (the process for constitutional change) was, in itself, not competent to be used to remove the Crown and that for this to be done all States had to vote to agree by a simple majority in each State. The advice from the Attorney General’s office was against our submission meaning that our only course of action left to us was to seek to appeal to the High Court but that was something we could not afford to do at the time.

Furthermore, we believe that there are a number of impediments written into the Australian Constitution and the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act of 1900. For instance, the preamble to the Constitution specifies that the States “…have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown…” If you remove the Crown, do you also remove the ‘one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth?

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6 November, 2019

The 6th November marks the 20th anniversary of the failed republic referendum of 1999. It was the accumulation of around eight years of hard campaigning essentially on a daily basis and was a learning curve for all, even for those lawyers involved.

Nearly all of the campaigners were amateurs. Even the politicians had no expertise in a referendum proposing changes as drastic as this. The last time there were referendums was in 1988 when the Hawke government submitted four proposals to the people. These four were on parliamentary terms, fair elections, local government and rights and freedoms, all of which were rejected by the people and all of which were totally unlike the republic referendum which, in itself, required nearly 70 changes to the Constitution.

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Winston Churchill had famously said in 1947 “democracy is the worst form of Government”.  No truer words could have been spoken in regard to the example in recent times given by the mother of modern parliaments, the Westminster House of Commons.

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At no time in the modern history of the British Westminster parliament have we seen a government so pitted against its parliament and now the highest Court in the land. 

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