Why we’re still stuck with a monarchy

King Charles is poking his cortege into Australia again for a day or so, rather in the spirit of a ten-year-old who’s been dared to ring someone’s doorbell and run away. There’s really no point discussing Charles, because what he stands for in our national story is a policy vacuum. The policy vacuum itself, however, is fascinating.

Australians don’t want to abolish their subservience to a foreign monarch because they have no faith in the ability of our people to put together any new system that didn’t make everything worse. That’s partly what sank the Voice. Doing nothing is, in fact, our most sacred constitutional principle, and our current constitutional arrangements seem almost deliberately designed to produce that outcome.

Any change, of anything, will produce winners and losers. Australians don’t want change, because they want their enemies to lose much more than they themselves want to win. For most of us, the country has been solidly prosperous for long enough for people to forget what real hardship is like, giving us free rein to obsess over purely symbolic issues, such as the monarchy.

I say symbolic, because while it would certainly be possible to advocate for a different system of government that had a different role for our head of state, nobody on either side seems to have any interest in doing so. Republicans say that it would be nice to have an actual Australian in the role, while monarchists say that the absence of a king would allow politicians to have more power. Both sides seem united in the conviction that the most important quality in a ruler is to be so powerless that there’s no good reason ever to give a toss about them. It’s the reason I’ve let my republican membership lapse (that and not wanting to be confused with Donald Trump’s mob).

The point of our political system – any political system – is to make decisions, set priorities, and commit resources to one course of action over another, all of which Australians viscerally object to. Why must we make difficult choices? A proper government, one that listened to the people, would let us have it all: low taxes and large spending programs, multiculturalism that treats everybody the same, and freedom of speech and liberty of conscience moderated by the good sense never to use either. Is that too much to ask? That’s a pity, because we’re asking for it.

The rise of the independents in state and federal parliaments may be partly the result of the Teals having more attractive policies, but it’s also an aspect of our preference for powerlessness over responsibility: ‘don’t blame me, I voted informal but with pretty ribbons’. As with the monarchy, the point is not to exercise power, it’s to stop other people from exercising it.

We call for our politicians to inspire us with big ideas, only to rip them to shreds if they take us at our word. We’re much more invested in finding someone to blame than we ever were in trying to succeed in the first place (that’s also what sank the Voice).

Indulging in these pointless squabbles does rely, of course, on there being no important issues elbowing their way into the discourse – there’s no room for climate change, or inequality, or pandemics, or for anything but a brightly-coloured cost-of-living decoy. But what are the chances of that happening? We’re the Lucky Country; that’s in the contract, isn’t it?

If we do really want an Australian head of state, I can only see one way to achieve that, consistent with the collective Australian crabs-in-a-bucket ethos. To avoid unseemly politicking, the monarch would be chosen randomly by computer from the Australian electoral roll.

But, I hear you ask, isn’t that a bit risky? Couldn’t the crown fall on the head of someone unsuitable? A Hell’s Angel, or a Collingwood supporter?

Ah, but that’s where the next precaution comes in. To avoid a media feeding frenzy descending on the new monarch, the computer wouldn’t reveal the chosen citizen’s identity. Nobody would know, including the monarch themself. To avoid any constitutional issues, the Governor-General would continue to act in the Unknown Monarch’s stead, just as they do now.  

We’d have an Australian head of state – indeed, on bad mornings we could all cherish the faint hope that we were that Australian head of state – and nothing else would change, which for some odd reason seems to be considered a good thing.

Ideally, we’d insert a preamble into the constitution repeating the words of children’s author Hilaire Belloc:

“And always keep a-hold of Nurse

For fear of finding something worse.”

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.