One of Australian leading historians says the ARM must go beyond its narrow focus and promote the wider reasons for a Republic.

[Read Dr Tony Moore’s article in Independent Australia by clicking here.]

Dr Moore, the Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, says an Australian Republic should be about much more than merely having an Australian as head of state. He says Republicans should embrace Australia’s long republican history and its struggle for liberty, popular sovereignty and democracy.

“Australian republicans tempted to scoff at the pomp and ceremony that rolled out of London last week for the marriage of the heir to our throne should think again. For too long now the republican cause has been diverted by a small target strategy, myopically focussed on an Australian head of state, when the move to a republic should be about so much more.”

Dr Moore, the author of the book Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia 1788-1868, says most Australians are not aware that 1 in every 45 convicts sent to Australia was a political prisoner, many of them republican martyrs from England, Scotland, Ireland and even Canada and the United States.

“While familiar with our convict antecedents, few Australians realise their homeland once served as the British Empire’s version of Guantanamo Bay where some 3,600 rebels, radicals and protesters were transported as political prisoners in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century.”

Dr Moore says that Australians would be more motivated by a Republic that placed power in the hands of the people and not more in those of politicians, political parties and the elites.

“Simply voting for a parliamentary representative every three years no longer gives citizens a sense of control over government and state institution. In an era of rigid party discipline, the stacking of parties with obedient hacks and the growing presidential style of rule by prime ministers, we truly are subjects, as monarchy implies.

But with decline of parliament’s sovereignty over the executive, the ancient powers of the Crown vested in ministers are a ruse behind which skulks an oligarchy — the rule of the many by the few.”

Many of the colonial aspects of our political practice can be democratised by legislation without referenda, says Dr Moore, such as the election of public boards, the Australian Electoral Commission administering party elections and pre-selections, and augmenting centrally managed departments with locally elected school and hospital boards.

(Tony Moore will be speaking at the Sydney Writers Festival on Friday 20 May at 1 pm, on the panel ‘Radical Sydney’ with Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill. The session is hosted by the Historic Houses Trust and will be held at the Mint, Macquarie Street. The three historians will be in conversation with Robbie Buck of ABC radio 774.