Republic

Call for Australia to have referendum on republic

'We think the time is right, the stars are aligned. We have a prime minister and a leader of the opposition who support the republic. We Greens are going to move before Christmas for a referendum at the next election on the republic, just a yes-no question,' Australian Greens Party leader Bob Brown told reporters.

The last effort back fired because people felt rail roaded. They felt like there was a push from the top and they were not prepared to back it. There will come a day, but we have a few things to sort out first. We need to be confident in political debate. It has to rise above the mud slinging and petty pot shots. We need good press and radio coverage of political issues and that is certainly becoming the case on the radio. People are taking a better interest. I'd also want to see women succeed at the top. For as long as we have a Prime Minister's wife who has to abandon charity support in case there is a conflict of interest then I don't think we are ready. Nor are we ready when women are somehow shooed out of the way...either because they cannot deal with it or because we cannot deal with them. We need to educate ourselves, we need to develop more depth and we need to continue along this road where we start to understand the political impact of changing people and faces. The whim and fancy stuff would pull us apart were we to be a republic. We need to get the foundations right. Then we need to sort out what we actually think about having state leaders or whether we wish to abandon that. I'd hate to see us run completely from Canberra and states might become more important were we to be a republic. People need to also understand exactly what that would mean in terms of our legal situation and our geopolitical situation. It'll happen but if people keep telling us we have to then we may well make a rash decision and regret the consequences. It needs to be an evolutionary process...which is it is at present . One of the first pieces of research we need to look at is to consider every country in the world...and then decide whether monarchies or republics are more stable.