Shorten Confirms Labor Republic Campaign

John Donne wrote in the 16th century “For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.”

With his announcement that a move towards a republic should be progressed alongside a treaty with Australia's indigenous people, the bell could now be tolling for Bill Shorten.

Not only is this a huge blunder because support for a treaty and support for a republic derive from two entirely different sectors of the community. Besides, a referendum is not required for a treaty whereas it is for constitutional change.

Moreover, previous Labor leaders have recognised that approximately one third of Labor voters are monarchist and conservative traditionalists. We saw this in the 1999 referendum with traditional Labor vote against a republic and more recently with the high no vote in Labor electorates in the same-sex marriage postal survey.

Many members of the Australian Monarchist League are Labor voters. They are in despair at the republican stance of their members of Parliament, both State and federal. They may be silent in any campaign but once in the secrecy of the polling booth they will make their vote count. With Mr Shorten linking a republic to the next Labor campaign, traditional Labor voters could well opt not to vote Labor on this occasion. Mr Shorten could well be facing the same sort of devastating defeat, due entirely to pushing his republican wheelbarrow, that Paul Keating faced in 1996.

The Australian Monarchist League has moved much of its operations online and we will be targeting Labor voters with a strategic online campaign not to vote Labor at the next election and send a message to Labor politicians that their support for a republic is ill founded. If the Coalition was led by a monarchist, then it could well gain from Labor’s loss, but it is not. It is led by a republican, for whom a republic is unfinished business. Even though Malcolm Turnbull claims now to be an ‘Elizabethan’ and a ‘Queen lover’, he has never ever approach the Australian Monarchist League to help in honouring Her Majesty on the 65th year since her Coronation or on any other occasion.

Mr Shorten has said "I think it's remarkable that over two centuries after first European settlement we are still borrowing a very worthy person but a monarch from another country." (AAP 10/6/18) He forgets, that in Australia the Queen is Queen of Australia and subject only to the Australian Constitution and to the advice of her Australian ministers. Moreover, we do not pay one cent to the Queen personally for being our sovereign head of state.

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