WeeklyWorker

02.09.1999

What kind of republic for Australia?

On November 6, Australians go to the polls in a referendum on whether the 100-year-old federation of six former British colonies should become a republic. More precisely, voters will be asked whether they approve “the proposed law to alter the constitution to establish the Commonwealth of Australia as a republic with the queen and governor-general being replaced by a president appointed by a two-thirds majority of the members of the commonwealth parliament”.

There is a second question, asking voters whether they approve the proposed law to insert a preamble to the constitution. With explicit religious overtones, the proposed preamble begins: “With hope in god, the Commonwealth of Australia is constituted by the equal sovereignty of all its citizens.” In effect it endorses Australia’s military interventions abroad - Korea, Malaya, Vietnam - and has an inadequate, token reference to prior inhabitance; which has been largely condemned by Aboriginal leaders.

That such questions are being put to the electorate with practically no pressure from below represents an important development. Nevertheless how the working class and the communists respond to this referendum is not a straightforward matter of common sense. To begin with we must look at the communist attitude towards democracy.

Is democracy an add-on to the struggle for socialism, or is it an integral part of our method for achieving working class rule? Do we, like the Mensheviks, separate the two and treat democratic questions as tasks for the bourgeoisie, do we descend into economism and tail the bourgeoisie, or do we take up all democratic issues and stamp them with the hegemony of the working class and integrate consistent democracy as a central component of our programme for socialist revolution?

In his study of Karl Marx’s writings, Hal Draper notes that

“throughout the history of the socialist and communist movements, one of the persistent problems has been establishing the relation ... between the struggle for socialism and democracy, between socialist issues and democratic issues. On one extreme end of the spectrum is the view that puts the advocacy of democratic forms in the forefront, for their own sake, and subjoins the advocacy of socialistic ideas as an appurtenance ... On the other extreme is the type of radical ideology that counterposes socialistic ideas ... against concern with democratic struggles, considering the latter as unimportant or harmful.

“Marx’s approach is qualitatively different from this sort of eclecticism, and does not attempt to establish a sliding scale of concern with the two sides of the duality. For him, the task of theory is to integrate the two objectively ... Marx’s theory moves in the direction of defining consistent democracy in socialist terms, and consistent socialism in democratic terms” (H Draper Karl Marx’s theory of revolution Vol I, New York 1977, pp282-283).

Today, by far the most prevalent error on the revolutionary left in this regard is counterposing socialism and democracy - the former viewed as proletarian, the latter as bourgeois. Due to the inconsistency of the bourgeoisie and ‘their’ revolutions, democratic tasks are left to the working class to ‘complete’, almost as an afterthought of history.

Central to this misunderstanding is the ‘Marxism’ handed down to the theorists of 20th century socialism by the Second International. Pivotal in this is the category of ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ as a necessary, definite and bourgeois-led phase which introduces capitalism. It is not a category that emanated from Marx himself. As Ellen Meiksins Wood argues,

“The curious thing about this paradigm is that, while it contains significant elements of truth, it does not correspond to any actually existing pattern of historical development. In England, there was capitalism, but it was not called into being by the bourgeoisie. In France, there was a (more or less) triumphant bourgeoisie, but its revolutionary project had little to do with capitalism” (The pristine culture of capitalism London 1991, p3).

The revolutions of 1848-9 proved to Marx and Engels that the bourgeoisie was not and could not be a consistently democratic class. ‘Bourgeois tasks’ are in fact no such thing. Left to our rulers, democracy is constantly turned into its opposite - a method of oppressive rule. Yet because of its ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ paradigm, the left tends to collapse before the ruling class. Marx, who had no such straightjacket, developed his theory of permanent revolution as the most thoroughgoing and uninterrupted extension of democracy from below - not as an end in itself, but as the programme of working class self-liberation and the path to socialism and global communism. Our struggle is to give democratic forms a new social content by pushing them to the extreme of popular control from below. This, in turn, entails extending the application of democratic forms out of the ‘merely’ political sphere into the organisation of the whole of society - the principle of socialism itself.

It is from this theoretical base that we must approach the issue of a republic in Australia. When the question is placed in this context we can see that consistent democracy and the programme of working class emancipation cannot tail bourgeois constitutionalism. Democracy must be understood not as the task of the ruling class under capitalism, or of the bourgeoisie in order to achieve capitalism, but rather as an area contested by classes in which the working class can and must take the lead.

Let us move on to the subject at hand. Australian republicanism is a strange beast. Tinged red by transported Fenians and the migration of Chartists and 1848ers, republicanism has also had its racist and chauvinist flip side - a white Australia for white labour. There has always been a desire to be seen to be independent from the ‘mother country’ and there is an egalitarianism that runs like a thread even through bourgeois politics of today. Yet this almost intrinsic loathing for all things aristocratic never became mass independent working class politics. So while republicanism has not always been central to radical and oppositional movements, it has always been an undercurrent.

Of course, the November referendum comes from above, not below. In the last analysis it stems from divisions within the ruling class, not only in regard to national consciousness but fundamental shifts in the economic and political basis of Australian capitalism. This former British colony that increasingly looked to the United States after World War II has dropped its white Australia policy. Australia is now officially a ‘multi-cultural’ society - reflecting waves of migration and an orientation to Asian markets. Internal stability and the external impetus of globalisation has dictated this shift from the queen and the old country by sections of the Australian elite.

In many ways, this process began in 1983 with the election of a Labor government. Over 13 years, Prime Ministers Hawke and Keating steered the Australian economy away from protectionism towards monetarism and free trade. Labor has retained links with the unions. However, its active pole openly serves the interests of big capital.

The main push for republicanism comes from the most internationalist, Murdoch/Packer, wing of Australian-based finance capital. It is keen to engage with south East Asia, China and Japan. In opposition stands the more conservative landed and traditional capital based on resource export to Europe and the US.

With an atomised working class and shifts in balance of power within the Australian elite, a relatively cosmetic constitutional change seems appropriate. Although the election of a conservative Liberal-National coalition in 1996 slowed things down, the direction is clear.

Australia is trying to recast itself as an Asian economy: it initiated the Apec economic forum of Asian and Pacific nations. Apec was set up partly because Australia was kept out of the Association of South East Asian Nations, while Cambodia and Vietnam were included. This must have rankled, as Asean itself was established as a cold war organisation specifically in reaction to the spread of ‘communism’ in the region. Keeping Australia out of the Asian club is a particular hobby horse of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, who ensures that Australia is painted as an insensitive, white colonial neighbour. (Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party has been seized upon as evidence of this by Australia’s Asian capitalist competitors.)

Paul Keating, the most recent Labor prime minister, is a self-styled ‘ardent’ republican. He, more than anyone else got the ball rolling that has led to the November 6 referendum. For Keating - and the most dynamic and internationalising fractions of capital which Labor represents - the monarchy was an embarrassing anachronism. Their Australia - trying as it is to conquer new Asian markets and lay down the foreign policy framework for a whole region - needs to be seen to be breaking with the symbols of its European past.

Yet tinkering with constitutions is a dangerous business. At every step, the official republicans have endeavoured to cause as little disruption to the political fabric of the country as possible. It is their minimalist republican model which is on offer in November.

The formation of the very respectable Australian Republican Movement in 1991 precipitated the Keating Labor government to establish the Republic Advisory Committee (RAC) in April 1993. It was chaired by Malcolm Turnbull, the head of the ARM.

In its report of October 1993, the RAC concluded that a “republic is achievable without threatening Australia’s cherished democratic traditions”. In a statement on June 7 1995, Keating set out his government’s view that Australia should become a republic by 2001.

Had the Labor Party been returned to office in 1996, it is likely that a referendum would have been drawn up without going through the Liberal-National-dominated constitutional convention (ConCon) of 1998, a body which, considering its outcome, can only be described as the country’s most expensive opinion poll.

Sitting over February 2-6 and 9-13 the 76 elected and 76 appointed delegates to the ConCon were powerless. They were merely members of an advisory committee to the prime minister who was not bound to accept or act upon anything. The majority were republican. On the motion, “That this convention supports, in principle, Australia becoming a republic”, 89 voted ‘yes’, 52 ‘no’ and 11 abstained - a reflection of general opinion. Yet on the type of republic, the republicans were - and remain - split. A minority supports a directly elected head of state. As a result, the current minimalist model being offered in November could not garner an absolute majority. 73 voted ‘yes’, 57 ‘no’ and 22 abstained.

For all the disagreement at the convention, everything took place within the safe limits of constitutionalism and the ‘Australian way’. This was epitomised by the monarchist prime minister, John Howard. In summing up, he said: “I have learnt out of this convention that this Australian way we have of doing things is special and is unique.”

Howard, a monarchist despite his inclusive rhetoric, has played things with exceptional skill. He has managed to divide republican opinion by framing the November 6 questions entirely to his advantage. The prime minister is deliberately offering change to prevent change - and whether the outcome is a credible ‘yes’ or ‘no’, in essence he will achieve his aim. Already, a camp of ‘no’ republicans has emerged. They favour a US-style presidential system and are not prepared to accept the appointed system. Treasurer Peter Reith has also now declared himself to be a ‘no’ republican.

What sort of a republic is on offer? Every five years, the sitting prime minister will nominate one candidate to a joint sitting of both houses of parliament. This candidate must then be seconded by the leader of the opposition, or else the nomination falls. The candidate is prohibited from being a member of a political party. So it is not about popular sovereignty from below. It is a repackaging of the constitutional monarchy. Significantly, the act to create a republic only becomes law, not after the constitutionally required referendum, but after the bill receives royal assent. The president is to represent a phantom common national will.

This president will not even be accountable to parliament, but to the federal executive council. Only the prime minister will have the power to dismiss the royal president, and the president will retain the power to dismiss the PM - in 1975 the Whitlam Labor government was sacked by the governor-general, the monarchy’s representative in the Australian federal executive council. In any constitutional crisis, it will become a matter of who blinks first.

The president will in fact retain all the monarchical powers of the governor-general. The president will be head of the separate federal executive council and also of the armed forces. This minor modification of the status quo is explicit in the proposal for a republic. If passed, section 70a of the Australian constitution will read:

“Until the parliament otherwise provides, but subject to this constitution, any prerogative enjoyed by the crown in right of the Commonwealth immediately before the office of governor-general ceased to exist shall be enjoyed in like manner by the Commonwealth and, in particular, any such prerogative enjoyed by the governor-general shall be enjoyed by the president.”

Such an undemocratic state of affairs must be rejected. In the November 6 referendum, we are asked to choose between the unwanted and the unacceptable. On the one hand we cannot support the monarchical constitution system; on the other, we are offered the most minimal of changes to a system that might thereby become strengthened. There is no imprint from below, no democratic working class alternative.

We must reject this whole exercise as a fraud. It is a fraud as democracy and a fraud as republicanism. To vote ‘yes’, no matter what your private caveat, is to endorse a modified version of the current undemocratic constitution. Yet we cannot vote ‘no’, as those supporting a directly elected president are arguing. Such a tactic would make us indistinguishable from the monarchists. The only consistently democratic position is to call for a boycott of this rigged referendum.

What has been quite amazing throughout this entire constitutional debate is the quiescence of the left. This was most obvious in the elections to the toothless constitutional convention. The government wanted to ensure the most widespread inclusion in the process. Thus the election of the 50% of delegates not appointed to the convention were designed to be the most proportional Australia had ever seen.

Among the hundreds who put up for election there were no candidates of the left whatsoever. Almost universally, the left, small as it is in Australia, views these constitutional matters as the sole preserve of the bourgeoisie and professional middle class politicians. The only reflection of  a reformist agenda came with those delegates - such as Aboriginal magistrate Pat O’Shane - arguing for a directly elected head of state and a bill of rights under the banner of ‘A just republic’.

To script, the left organisations posed ‘revolutionary’ during the elections to the constitutional convention, effectively abstaining on the spurious grounds that workers were not interested in an establishment talking shop. Yet now the left, which pooh-poohed the whole republican issue as irrelevant, is flipping to ‘realism’.

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s Martin Thomas, on political secondment to Australia, recently called for a ‘yes’ vote in the referendum, before the question had even been announced. It is this sort of non-thinking which is leading the left nowhere. It is tantamount to writing a blank cheque. The response of Dave Ball - a correspondent of the AWL’s Action for Solidarity paper (July 23) - tails the ruling class on questions of democracy. He writes: “We should see the proposed change as a small step towards a radical democratic socialist programme.” It is, of course, no such thing. A ‘yes’ will take the working class not one step closer to power. Comrade Ball’s tactical ‘yes’, “coupled with criticism of the very limited and wealth-dominated democracy on offer”, is to be linked with socialists campaigning independently on their own programme. The comrade is incapable of even contemplating an active boycott on a working class programme, despite being able to conclude that “voting in elections cannot be viewed in the same way as voting in referenda”. Boycotts are the exception in elections, but they are frequently a useful tactic in referenda, that most undemocratic form of rule by consent.

And what of the others? The rump ‘official’ Communist Party of Australia is giving an uncritical ‘yes’. The CPA favours an indirectly elected president with powers. What remains of the former Eurocommunist leadership of the old CPA, now a trust fund called the Search Foundation which backed the ‘Just Republic’ ticket in elections to the constitutional convention, has capitulated to the establishment’s agenda, but is nevertheless running a ‘yes, and more’ campaign.

The main organisation on the Australian left is the Democratic Socialist Party. In an article, “Republic yes, but not a ‘safe and conservative’ one” (Green Left Weekly August 18), the DSP announced that it will campaign for a ‘yes’, but urge voters to write “elected by the people” on the referendum paper. This tailism reflects the DSP’s opportunism as well as its economism.

Correctly, the article points out that “for establishment republicans any change should be about nothing more than nationalist symbolism”. It goes on to note that such figures are determined “to ensure that any shift to a republic does not prompt a more general questioning ... that could lead to instability”. Quite right. ARM leader Malcolm Turnball argues: “The November model is a safe and conservative means of achieving an Australian head of state while preserving our Westminster system of parliamentary democracy.”

Amazingly, to support its argument for voting ‘yes’ (albeit combined with the slogan “elected by the people”), the DSP invokes a successful boycott of a referendum in Tasmania in 1981. After a two-year campaign to stop the damming of a wilderness area, the state government called a referendum to choose between the conservative government’s hydro-electricity plan and the Labor opposition’s ‘compromise’. A full 38% boycotted what the DSP rightly calls a phoney choice and wrote ‘no dams’ on the ballot paper.

Yet when the votes are counted on the night of November 6, the DSP’s will be indistinguishable from Malcolm Turnball’s as they will all end up on the ‘yes’ pile. Only an independent programme around a democratic republic, with a tactic of clearly spoiling the ballot paper would register independent politics.

Then there is the DSP’s collapse into presidentialism - an anathema to the Marxist programme. There will be passive abstentions on November 6, even though federal referenda are compulsory. Due to cynicism felt towards establishment politicians, 67% of Australians support a republic with a directly elected president. Support for a republic falls to 47% under the minimalist model being offered.

Without thought, the DSP is opportunistically falling in behind this spontaneous presidentialism. Economism does not allow them to lay out a fully democratic and militant republicanism.

What then should be our attitude to the presidential system? Marx dealt with this most undemocratic form of the democratic state in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, his study of revolution and counterrevolution in France from 1848 to 1851. Central to his critique was the bourgeois-liberal covenant of the separation of powers. Reflecting the need to balance the new regime of elected representatives with the continuation of the old executive rule and its entrenched bureaucracy, the separation of powers is essentially about checks and balances between classes. Presidentialism is a conservative safety valve in the constitution to prevent untrammelled democratic rule from below.

Marx wrote of the presidential system as proposed in France: “On the one side are 750 representatives of the people, elected by universal suffrage ... on the other side is the president, with all the attributes of royal power ... with all the resources of the executive in his hands ... officials and officers ... of the armed forces.” Marx points out that, where each representative is elected by this or that segment of the populace, the president will be elected by the people as a whole [as proposed by the DSP]. The president, continues Marx, “is the elect of the nation and the act of his election is the trump that the sovereign people plays once every four years”, which Marx argues is the abrogation of the constitution. This is because the president is not accountable to elected representatives but to a metaphysical “national spirit”.

The Marxist programme is against the separation of functions in general and the presidential form of the executive in particular - something the DSP is actively campaigning for in this referendum on top of their support for Howard’s minimalist republic.

The attitude of the DSP is revealing. In criticising those ‘radical’ republicans voting ‘no’ on November 6, the DSP does so from the right. Leading ‘naysayer’ Ted Mack has argued that an appointed president will “preserve and extend a monarchical form of government ... as well as denying people the right to vote for their leader”. While this smacks of presidentialism, Mack has hit on a truth. The DSP is reduced to a pathetic gradualism.

It claims:

“Firstly, getting rid of the queen represents some long overdue house cleaning. It is an extreme anachronism that the head of state is a hereditary and sickeningly wealthy English landowner whose only claim to pre-eminence is that her forefathers proved more effective at crushing peasants and executing rivals that anyone else did. It is long past time to get rid of this vestige of feudalism.”

Not only does this display a thoroughly philistine inability to grasp the fact that Britain has a capitalist monarchy; it shows that the DSP believes that democratic tasks are mere “house cleaning”. It evidently holds to an “ideology that counterposes socialistic ideas ... against concern with democratic struggles, considering the latter as unimportant or harmful”.

The call for a boycott must be used to highlight the working class road to a republic. We call for the abolition of the existing constitution and its parliament, its bureaucracy, its secrecy and its politicians. We do not need a bicameral parliament - we need a working body of instantly recallable representatives elected on an annual basis by proportional representation. A president, if there is to be one, should only be the presiding officer and an elected member of the assembly representatives - accountable to those delegates. We need no ‘head of state’ standing above the rest of society.

In order to achieve this radical constitutional overhaul, communists must demand the convocation of a constitutional convention with full powers. This must be central to our campaign for a republican government. To the extent agitation is successful, then action committees should be formed to organise opposition from below.

Our minimum programme must be based on extending democracy under capitalism to its limits. Our programme must be for the most thoroughgoing democracy from below - not as an end in itself, but as the road to working class rule. This is proletarian republicanism.

Concretely we say:

These minimum demands must be filled out through further debate and through struggle. Yet, as I have said, our constitutional agenda is not an end in itself. It reflects our vision of socialism, of a different society.

Do we treat republicanism as an alienated thing in itself, as mere “overdue house cleaning”, as does the DSP? Or is our republicanism about the very way we are ruled, about human beings deciding history; about the method of developing the working class as a future ruling class? Socialism will not be given to us by any government. It will be, and can only be, the act of the working class itself. For the working class to liberate itself, it must become the hegemonic force for consistent and thoroughgoing democracy. For this reason, we cannot pin our colours to the phoney republic on offer on November 6.

Given the hurdles in the constitution, the splits in the republican camp and the way the question has been set, at present it seems the most likely outcome of this rigged referendum will be a ‘no’ result. This will be no surprise as the question has been set to achieve this result. If there were another question - “Should Australia become a republic?” Then we could only vote ‘yes’ and it would undoubtedly be passed. But this is not what we are being asked, no matter how the likes of the DSP ‘amend’ their responses on the ballot paper.

A ‘no’ result would throw the conservative republicanism of the establishment back a step. It is not only opportunist to vote ‘yes’; it is bad opportunism. The left should not tie itself to the sinking sink of the ‘yes’ campaign. By doing that, it is setting up the defeat of the establishment republicans as our defeat, which it will not be. If there is a ‘yes’ result, they are setting up an establishment republican victory as ours, which it will not be.

Ours is an independent, working class and democratic republicanism from below.

Marcus Larsen