WeeklyWorker

04.11.1999

Grasp the nettle

Australian referendum

The constitutional referendum in Australia looks set to be a cliffhanger. Recent polls suggest a slim majority nationwide will vote ‘yes’ to the republic on offer on November 6. Unfortunately for the ‘yes’ campaign this will be distributed unevenly amongst the country’s six states. As well as requiring a majority of voters, successful referenda in Australia also require a majority in a majority of states.

Polls are putting the ‘yes’ vote at around 49% with the ‘no’ camp recording about 47%. However, while the most heavily populated states of New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria are likely to vote ‘yes’, the peripheral and more conservative Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia look set to vote ‘no’.

Importantly, the question is not whether Australia should be a republic, but whether you approve a republic model with a president with reserve powers appointed by parliament. Polls suggest that if the republic model on offer was for a president directly elected by the people, then more than 60% would vote ‘yes’.

This situation has split the mainstream republican camp, with a significant minority advocating a ‘no’ vote. The question, set by monarchist - and Liberal Party - Prime Minister John Howard, after recommendations from a partially elected constitutional convention, has been cynically designed to split the republican camp.

However, in all debates, what has been lacking is the third choice in this referendum. It can, though, still be created, using the referendum as a springboard. While voting is compulsory in Australia, the ballot is secret. Each elector may do what they like to their ballot paper.

On November 6, Australians are being offered a false choice. They are being asked to choose between the unelectable and the unacceptable. No one who cherishes genuine democracy wants anything to do with the monarchy, an institution which symbolises privilege, inequality and unaccountability. Yet what a ‘yes’ vote would mean is a continuation of a monarchical system in presidential form. Such a minimalist constitutional change is designed to keep ordinary Australians as removed from the real political process as they are today. It will be change to prevent further change.

Most Australians recognise the false debate taking place. From the monarchists who refuse to mention the monarchy, the republicans who refuse to discuss what sort of republic, to the supposed ‘radical republicans’ who, amazingly, will vote for the continuation of the status quo - the entire debate has been one of shadows.

The ‘no’ republicans at least realise that there is a stitch-up. Yet they are making themselves indistinguishable from the monarchist ‘no’ camp. Ted Mack, Phil Clearly and the other ‘no’ republicans hope that by defeating the establishment of an undemocratic republic, they will force a vote on a democratic one. Yet their ‘no’ votes will be indistinguishable from John Howard’s and other monarchists’ come November 6. They have no way of making their voice heard. They will force nothing.

Democratic republicans cannot vote ‘yes’ either, as this will be endorsing a most undemocratic form of republic. Hidden in this campaign is the fact that the president will retain the powers of the royal prerogative. For instance:

In this referendum there is, however, the inkling of the third choice that establishment politicians dare not mention. Voters are being urged by the Campaign for a Real Republic to refuse to answer a loaded question and instead write ‘democratic republic’ across the ballot paper.

A mass of voters in Tasmania employed a similar tactic in 1982 when 38% of them wrote ‘No dams’ across their ballot paper. The next year, the Franklin-below-Gordon River wilderness area became a protected World Heritage site.

On the night of November 6, there will be three piles of votes counted: ‘yes’, ‘no’ and informal. Revolutionary democrats such as the CRR want to see the highest possible informal vote; at the same time the CRR is campaigning for a constitutional convention with full powers to abolish the monarchical system and replace it with a genuinely democratic centralist republic.

If Australia is not a republic now, switching to an undemocratic form of presidentialism will not make it a fully democratic republic later. A democratic republic can only be a society where power is invested in the fully mobilised people, headed by the working class, not a political or economic elite. The current proposal is not a ‘step in the right direction’, as the left of the ‘yes’ campaign suggests. It is more of the same truncated bourgeois democracy in different form.

In an amazing display of short-sightedness influenced by worse theory, the left in Australia is letting an excellent opportunity pass it by. The Democratic Socialist Party and the rump of the Eurocommunists in the Search Foundation have politically equivalent, yet separate calls, to vote ‘yes’ but, like Oliver Twist, meekly ask for more. True to form, the DSP is capitulating to the populist mood by actually endorsing a directly elected president - an anathema for Marxists who oppose all presidential systems whereby one individual can claim to speak on behalf of the whole country. The DSP campaign has even less gumption than the ‘no’ republicans, who also favour a directly elected head of state. The DSP pathetically calls for a ‘yes’ vote, alongside the plaintive epithet, “elected by the people”.

The International Socialist Organisation advises a ‘no’ vote, lacking the courage or imagination to call for an active informal vote. The ISO’s slogan, ‘Stuff the bosses’ republic: fight for real change’, is ultra-left economism. It crudely counterposes phoney political change from above with ‘real’ economic change from below. The ‘official’ Communist Party of Australia is uncritically calling for a ‘yes’ vote.

Trapped by economism and the Menshevik ‘theory’ of bourgeois democratic revolution, the left has been content to leave the debate to the bourgeois and political elite. A united left grabbing hold of this political chance could have fought for and won a real place in Australian political life. Instead, the sects seem content to remain on the fringe. As the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s Martin Thomas puts it so succinctly, “Why not vote ‘yes’ - on the obvious grounds that we prefer a republic to a monarchy - while saying that we want radical democratic reform?” But do we prefer this republic to a monarchy? There is nothing concrete in comrade Thomas’s position, just poor Menshevik theory. (‘We obviously prefer the tsar’s duma to no duma at all’.) We’ve heard it all before.

Marcus Larsen

For a real republic

At the Australian High Commission in London the CRR has been distributing leaflets calling for an informal ‘democratic republic’ vote. It has hit a real chord among expatriate electors - 22,000 are expected to turn up at Australia House.

Individuals previously supporting either the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ campaigns have been so impressed by our arguments that they have actually begun to hand out CRR leaflets instead. The response is extremely encouraging. The spokesperson for the CRR in London, has been interviewed by Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Brazil’s Falho de Sao Paulo. This week, campaigners will be leafleting at Australia House and at the London performance of Yothu Yindi, Australia’s best known predominantly Aboriginal band. Their hit song, ‘Treaty’, calls for a democratic treaty between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia - one of the CRR’s demands.

People are genuinely relieved that there is a third choice, that they do not have to be corralled into either of the mainstream bourgeois campaigns for ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It is the way to be heard through the ballot box. An informal vote is not a wasted vote.

Democratic republicans in Australia campaigning around the CRR’s slogans will be able to claim the informal vote as theirs and go on to cohere a fighting organisation demanding real constitutional change from below