I am an avowed republican, I waited until I didn't have to swear alleigence to the crown to take my citizenship in Oz.
But I am aware of a 51/49 class split between Liberal and Labor over Gough, and so the belief this "they tried to overthrow Gough" thing translates to "OMG the republicans will win" is ludicrous.
Enough people think Gough was bonkers, That even Razor-gang Malcom Frazer was better.
I am glued on Gough/Labor. I don't agree with the people who preferred Frazer (who in later life became quite left) -I just want to note that this isn't a huge "this story breaks monarchism" because enough people actually wanted what the Queen and John Kerr did, to make it more nuanced.
> But I am aware of a 51/49 class split between Liberal and Labor over Gough ..
This may be a somewhat outdated appraisal of the situation.
The number of people voting for neither of those parties (including coalition members) has been steadily growing for years, with the most recent federal election reaching 33%. I recall, more hazily, that the previous federal election (so several prime ministers ago) it was just north of 25%, which even then put us ahead of a lot of ersatz democracies where only two realistic options are presented to the population to pick from.
The idea of being 'glued' to a political party, or a political personality, feels a bit out-dated -- and/or a bit American (no offence intended to our cousins across the pond).
I find the growing popularity of a more nuanced political landscape domestically to be hugely encouraging, but somewhat tempered by a fear this trend can (also) be manipulated, once they work out the algorithms.
> I recall, more hazily, that the previous federal election (so several prime ministers ago)
The most recent federal election was this year. The previous federal election was 2019. There were no changes of prime minister in that time; Scott Morrison was the prime minister going into the 2019 election, and Scott Morrison was the prime minister going into the 2022 election. I realise this takes a bit of getting used to, since the last prime minister to get from one election to another was John Howard.
> a lot of ersatz democracies where only two realistic options are presented to the population to pick from.
Only the US has two realistic options, or else your statement is meaningless. Come up with a countexample.
In the UK and Canada there are three parties who regularly win general seats namely the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems, or the Tories, the Liberals and the NDP. They both also have Greens who can win certain seats. Moreover they also have various regional parties e.g. Bloc Quebecois or the SNP who compete against the general parties in their regions of interest. In such a system, there might only be two realistic possible governments foreseen by observers, but voters act as if there's more than two realistic options to vote for, and they vote for more than two options, and more than two options get seats.
Various other countries have two-bloc politics where you can give your vote to a left coalition or a right coalition, and to a certain party within that coalition. For instance, in NZ you can vote for Labour or the Greens if you like the left, and you can vote for National or ACT if you like the right (notice how the Greens got a ministry after the last election, even though Labour got a majority in their own right). But in such a situation there's clearly more than two realistic options to vote for, even if there's only two possible governments foreseen.
(Not to mention that you can also get the situation where no precommitments are made, or the precommitmentments are rendered vain by results, and coalitions have to be formed after the election. But I assume this is regarded as the ideal.)
Fundamentally the way people choose to describe a political system depends on the conclusions they intend to draw from it. The UK and Canada are substantially similar, but people want to praise Canada in comparison to its neighbor, and criticise the UK in comparison to its neighbors, so the UK gets called a "two-party system" and Canada gets called a "multi-party democracy". (Both are also sometimes describe as having proportional voting, since minor parties win: but this is false. Neither Canada, nor the UK, nor France have proportional voting.)
Yes, apologies - my several prime ministers ago aside was very much a tongue in cheek utterance. I'm painfully aware that Scott was the one to reset that record.
As to 'Only the US has two realistic options' - you appear to be switching in 'realistic', and overloading 'options', when comparing other countries.
I'd contend, f.e. that even with 33% of people not voting for the Labor or Lib/Nat coalition in Australia, we're still in the regrettable situation of only have 'two realistic options'.
In the sense of 'who'll be head of state' (or PM in Canada, AU, UK, etc) it's well understood going into an election who the two candidates for that job are, and undeniably that has an influence on voters in electorates where that person isn't running (ie. almost all voters).
I know nothing about Canadian politics, but was living in London in 2010 - pop media were struggling to understand & describe how a coalition could even work. Anyway, that went as well as we expected, and my point is mostly that there was only two potentials before, and zero doubt after the election, about who the prime minister would be.
You observe that other parties present candidates and win seats in the UK and Canada (and presumably everywhere except the USA?) - which is true, but misses my point. Consider, if an independent in the US won a seat, could that conceivably change the selection of president?
Aside - a model I'd love to see employed more widely is a Swiss-style Federal Council.
This is sort of tangential, but it doesn’t match what I’ve seen at all. Democratic Party voters are notoriously flaky, turnout is a constant struggle. Every election starts with a struggle between the progressive and centrist branches. The Democratic Party generally represents a larger chunk of the populace than the Republican Party but turns that into middling electoral success (which doesn’t seem to indicate much organization), has failed to block the Supreme Court from becoming a partisan Republican institution, and manages to barely pass like 1 big law per president.
Or: both parties constantly view themselves as the minority party even when they have the majority and complain about how the other party always wins and they never get to.
It’s more nuanced: as results go in national elections, they have roughly equal success within the parameters of the electoral system that we have. Some localities are effectively single-party, and some are purple. Personally I think the people that live in purple parts of the country are the lucky ones and wish my own State were solidly purple, but one of the party’s here really doesn’t know how to run for election and win here anymore.
Yeah, it's unfortunate that this whole abortion thing came up and all the Republicans had to choose between scaring all the women in their lives or flip flopping, but the party leadership have been trying to divide everyone on mortality issues for years. No idea who to vote for anymore :(
The easy answer is if you don’t have anyone you want to vote for: don’t.
I still vote, but much more selectively and I retired the belief I used to have that if you don’t vote you can’t complain. I have priorities, and I know for a fact there isn’t another human being on this planet, let alone one in my general locality that would match my voting preferences perfectly. Nothing wrong with prioritizing because the best you can hope for is good enough for government work.
Choosing not to vote is, in and of itself, a form of voting.
Only in this case, you are actively abdicating the right to make a choice, and therefore by default you are choosing to vote for the worst possible outcome.
I don't care what party you are in, or what person(s) you would vote for. You can violently disagree with me on any of those topics. But you should at least get out there and cast your vote.
Incorrect. This is a lie we tell other people to guilt them into voting because if we can at least get them to a ballot box we can maybe also get them to at least partially vote for our preferred set of outcomes; it’s not actually true. Not voting is simply not voting: abstaining from making a choice or making the choice to not make a choice if you prefer, and how someone exercises their voting power and how much is a personal choice.
Not voting is at worst, voting for whoever actually won in a given election. In my case I live in a single-party county in a single-party State. So voting one of two ways is either wasted ink on the winner or a protest vote for the loser and I’ll sometimes do it anyway, but when the winner is going to be same officeholder who has held office for 30 years and won with 80% of the vote last time, it’s definitely more of an emotional exercise than a rational one no matter how you voted, and this will only be subject to change once that person retires. There was also one office where the incumbent was running unopposed (and has been for years) so I stopped wasting the ink.
Given how voting differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, everyone has their own calculus for voting so knock off the patronizing propaganda.
If it makes you feel better, I at least partially fill out my 10 page ballots packed with offices across three or more elections with four or five different kinds of voting methods, plus State and local ballot initiatives, but only to the degree that I am satisfied with it or can be satisfied with it, and that’s all that is really necessary.
> the Democrat party... are consistently better organized, more presentable, better funded, more advanced psychological operations, better connected, and more coherent than their Republican counterparts
In the US? Are you serious?
- The Federalist Society is a decades long conservative/Republican effort to stack the courts. It worked. There is no liberal/Democrat parallel that comes even close in terms of scope and/or effectiveness.
- For decades Republicans worked to stack state legislatures with their people, and they gerrymandered aggressively once in control so that they could keep it. It worked. You get oddities like Austin (famously liberal city) with only 1 or 2 of 5 state reps being democrat. Or states like Minnesota (edit: maybe Wisconsin… I can’t recall) that (until this week) voted consistently for Democrats in statewide races but had a Republican-majority state legislature. There has been no liberal/Democrat parallel that comes even close in terms of scope and/or effectiveness.
- The Koch brothers for decades led many initiatives to support Republican causes with money and infrastructure. They moved away from the Republican Party with trump in the lead, but there are a ton of folks like the Kochs who are looking for a new figurehead to stand behind. There has been no liberal/Democrat parallel that comes even close in terms of scope and/or effectiveness.
Meanwhile…
- Democrats can’t nominate better candidates than Hillary or Biden when much more electable candidates were available, mainly due to the periphery of the party insisting on getting their (very non-centrist, very non-electable) candidate or they just don’t vote. Hence Trump winning an election in 2016 and almost winning an election in 2020, both of which should have been slam dunks for Democrats even with the electoral college being what it is.
- You get congressional Democrats who play nice when they are in control, then get completely taken advantage of when they are not in control. Mitch McConnell is the master of this type of abuse. There are many reasons for this, but one clear one is a lack of unity in the Democratic voting bloc. Republicans are much more consistent at executing “win at all costs” congressional strategies than Democrats are.
Note that I wish the above were not true — I am embarrassed by the current state of politics in my country — but I see the reality for what it is.
Yeah republicans and conservatives are amazing at organizing and keeping order in the ranks. Trump threw a wrench in some of that, but then they come out with things like the Lincoln Project that work really well (unfortunately).
Average Dems in power will do anything to keep Social Democrats out of power. Even if they are all still capitalists. The Democratic Party would rather lose to Republicans by a bit than cede power and in my opinion more freedom.
There is much discussion about how in the cold war, a swath of countries from East Germany to China ran as states led by one party. Not much discussed is how many western aligned countries did as well. As the Cold War heated up, from 1949 to 1972, the Liberal coalition ran Australia. In 1972 another party is elected into power, and an extraordinary amount of energy from within Australia and without (UK and US) went into undermining anything but the old one party led coalition. Whitlam was undermined every day for his less than three years in power, then ousted by the retainer of a foreign queen, so that the one party led rule would continue to 1983. Of course the undermined <3 year interruption to one party led rule was "bonkers" to those supporting decades of one party led rule.
One party led rule from 1949 to 1983, with the one elected other party with less than 3 years ousted by a representative of a queen. These people then had the gall to criticize the one party led coalitions running China and East Germany as being one party states that blocked political pluralism.
The same thing happened in the other western aligned countries in the Pacific during the Cold War - Japan, South Korea. The same case in South Africa, Italy, France etc.
Maybe true for Australia but this definitely depends on the country. Mexico had one-party rule throughout most of the 20th century by any reasonable definition, but opposition parties weren’t formally banned. They were just never allowed to win anything.
In France the largest political party until 1956 was the communist party. In 1948 the communist/socialist alliance was almost elected to power in Italy, and the communist party was getting over one third of the vote to 1976 (the Italian socialist party with hammer and sickle logo got about 10% of the vote, and Maoist parties got hundreds of thousands of votes). Too much widespread support at the time to ban.
Not in West Germany which reinstated the Nazi ban on the communist party. Not the USA which banned the communist party, criminalized the party and jailed its leaders ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_195... ). South Korea, South Africa, Indonesia wtc. all followed the same path.
Dissenting parties were outlawed in western and western aligned countries all over the world, and many of them like Japan, South Korea, France, Italy, Australia etc. became one party led states.
Australia did not outlaw the Labour party, but we can see what happened when the Liberal party interrupted the 1949 to 1983 Cold War rule led by the Liberal party - pressures national and international undermined any ability to rule until a foreign monarch had her footman toss him out.
People may remember that the CIA also had a hand in this sordid episode, documented in the movie The Falcon and the Snowman (based on a real case) where someone working in signals (much like Edward Snowden) watching all the telexes go by realised that the US was taking part in the downfall of another democratic government
Case in point of the modern US meddling for "freedom" is Libya.
Once seen as a model of development African countries can look to, has spiralled into filth with open slave markets.
I don't know whether to applaud the US for destroying a such a promising country with such effortless guile or spit on disgust that other powerful nations looked on and did nothing.
The list of constitutional crises in the former Dominions is a short list, so I thought I'd point out a similar event that happened in Canadian history. Wikipedia calls it the King-Byng affair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%E2%80%93Byng_affair), but my history professors usually referred to it affectionately as the King-Byng Thing.
It will also require a referendum, which in Australia requires not only a majority of the population, but also a majority of the states (there are 6 states and 2 territories).
Constitutional change in Australia is rare and difficult and requires bipartisan support to get the change across.
The current government is already proposing a referendum on the "voice" of First Nations, which would make changes to the Constitution to formally recognize the presence of Aboriginal people prior to Australia's colonization, as well as requiring "consultation" when laws are passed that specifically address First Nation concerns.
This will take all of the bandwidth Australia has for "change" in the first term (3 years for Federal Governments), so trying to get more than one referendum through would be impossible.
We had a referendum on becoming a republic back in the late 90s, but our government at the time (led by John Howard) basically white-anted it, along with the pro-republic forces not having a settled agreement on what the republic would look like.
It is analogous to a “government shutdown” in the US - the Senate refuses to pass appropriation bills, which will cause the government to run out of money to operate.
While in the US either the House or Senate can do that, in Australia effectively only the Senate can - each “Administration” (we say “government”) gets its power from a majority vote of the House, so if the House votes against the budget, the government must resign. If the Senate does the same, it isn’t forced to.
Another difference relates to the consequences - the monarch’s representative (the Governor-General) can use that as grounds to sack the Prime Minister, appoint a new one, and force a new election, as controversially happened in this case. In the US system there is no constitutional way to have an early election, plus sacking the President is a lot harder (needs an impeachment trial)
It's not really the case that only the Senate can - it's just that the consequences for the House doing so are unambiguous and well-known, whereas in the case of the Senate convention was that it would not do so, so the consequences were unknown.
The traditional way for a lower house to register a lack of confidence in the government is in fact to amend the appropriation bills to appropriate one additional dollar from the treasury. A government that no longer controls the treasury must resign or call an election.
Confidence = voting for the government in confidence motions (or votes which are not explicit confidence votes but considered to be "matters of confidence"). Supply = voting for the budget (because if the government can't pass a budget, then it is considered to not have the confidence of the house, and has to be replaced).
Hardly .. the letters make clear that Kerr was serious about dismissing Whitlam well before supply was blocked:
> After decades of speculation, the letters show once and for all that the Queen and Prince Charles, now Australia’s King, knew as early as September 1975 that Kerr was considering dismissing the government, two months before he did so. This timing was damning.
> They knew a dismissal was being considered by Kerr in the absence of any crisis in government, since the Opposition had not yet made its decision to withhold supply in the Senate.
Thank goodness Australia had serious cutting edge journalists covering The Dismissal [1].
If the supply is only voted on once a year then seeing a problem arising months in advance shouldn't be surprising. The government and opposition weren't going to change over night.
By law, and by basic common sense, there MUST be a bill passed that contains the budget for the coming year. Otherwise no money is made available to public servants.
Any government must be able to secure support for this bill once a year.
Otherwise the entire civil service will not be paid.
What the Queen established was the precedent that, instead of having a government shutdown over supply like the United States, you instead just have an election right away.
Frankly, compared to the US approach, it's much more practical.
It's different than that - calling an election has always been the Queen/Governor General's only real power in this situation, that bit is not new. What's a big deal now is that Kerr and the Queen were going to do it because it COULD happen, not because it WAS happening.
Minority governments, with confidence and supply agreements from minor parties (or not) are not uncommon in the world, but they're obviously not as stable ... but in an English (and commonwealth) parliamentary democracy it takes a loss of confidence (a majority vote of no-confidence in the parliament), or loss of supply (the inability to fund government) for the head of state to force an election
Well, having a shutdown is just... inane. Should the government ever get wedged into a spot where there's no budget and no Parliament, the Crown has a duty to enact the most conservative (i.e. identical to the previous) budget as feasible and hold an election ASAP. The issue has never actually arisen in those terms here in Canada, but it's generally understood that is the constitutional procedure. If the government is not functional, then prevent society from collapsing in the meantime, and get a new government elected ASAP. Really, that's the essence of the reserve powers of the Crown.
Two things are generally required for a Westminster-system government to have mandate to govern: supply and confidence.
Supply relates to the access to money, specifically through approval of the government budget. If a government has supply, it has an agreement with enough members of the house that it will retain approval to spend money on its policies. If a government loses supply, it loses the support of the house to spend any state money.
Similarly, confidence relates to support that the government represents the will of the people. Just as with supply, a government must secure a vote from enough members that they will support the government’s actions (they have confidence in the government). When they talk about a “vote of no confidence” it specifically means voting to remove support of the government in this way.
In Australia, legislation needs to pass through both lower and upper houses. In this situation, the opposition party was able to block crucial legislation from passing through both houses and into law. If legislation is repeatedly blocked, it may lead to a double dissolution [1] of both houses where all parliamentarians require reelection.
supply of funds. The government needs to bring an appropriations bill to explain how all of the tax revenue will be spent. This bill then needs to pass the House of Representatives and the senate. At the time, the liberal government controlled the senate and refused to pass the appropriations bill, hence blocking the supply of funds to government programs.
Subsequent to this, there is an agreement that appropriations bills are split in 2. One bill is to continue funding from last years budget (on the basis that it was approved, and passed both houses, and therefore those things need to continue to be funded), and appropriations bill #2 which is all of the new initiatives. This way, government will continue to function, but the government and opposition can still debate and argue over changes.
"Supply and confidence" is an expression used to refer to the arrangement between the party of government and a weaker party, that refers to the fact the weaker party will vote with the government on budgets and confidence motions. It doesn't imply a coalition, and the weaker party can't expect ministerial posts.
The assumption that things like this necessarily increase support for republicanism is probably misplaced. In Italy and Greece Governments have been effectively overthrown by the EU (or ECB/IMF) in fairly open ways with technocrats put in charge. In both countries support for the EU is running at very high levels despite that. Higher levels in fact that when it happened.
The U.K. monarchy clearly lacks the wherewithal to influence Australian politics today that it possibly had back then and has nothing like the influence (through the Euro) of the ECB on the democratic Governments of Eurozone countries.
The lesson might actually be (ironically if so) that the monarchy would be more resilient to republican opinion if it wielded more power. It is the perceived pointlessness of it that will lead to its decline, not any strength.
-Obviously, public opinion differs in different monarchies, but living in one constitutional monarchy - Norway - I feel that precisely as the monarchy is gutted of real power, its resilience is strengthened.
One could quip that we need someone to inaugurate new infrastructure works, provide soothing, apolitical speeches in time of need and serve as an unelected symbol of our country - the 'unelected' bit being important, as otherwise we'd just end up with some has-been politician put out to pasture, someone probably the majority of the population had never voted for and don't see as 'their' head of state.
Now, on principle, the monarchy is laughable, anachronistic and undemocratic - but donning my pragmatist glasses, I see it as probably the best way to ensure we have a (symbolic) head of state for performing just those duties where you need someone not overtly political. As long as the royals feel like doing the job, I say let them.
As a dual-national UK/Australian, I can say it's a little more complex for us.
In the UK, the monarchy fits pretty well with the other European constitutional monarchies, and there are reasons to support it as you say. I still think hard questions need to be asked about the exact nature of the monarchy, but it's clearly an English/Scottish/Welsh institution that belongs here.
In Australia, it's a remnant of colonialism, a foreign invader that destroyed one of the oldest, if not the oldest, civilisations on the planet. If we're ever going to get over this, then we need to remove these remnants. Having a British constitutional monarchy in modern Australia is a ridiculous anachronism. The "advantages" could clearly be replicated without the historical baggage. We need to be a republic.
It's a country of those colonising this minicontinent. For them standing on position of the colonised scarce locals is laughable. Australian population is British. The same way as imported puritans, english elitists or the so called "white trashes" all are postBritish and can't represent Indians.
And what kind of ancient Australian civilization you talk about? I never heard about anything useful for humanity invented by them.
Anachronism is to be driven by "savage purity" myth while degrading achievements if own actual civilization (not forgetting it's side effects but being objective comparing it to other options - compare to old style Dutch plundering and British become suddenly a true blessing not a curse)
If Malayans wouldn't be so iddle Australia would be like Indonesia or rather Madagascar now and nobody would ever hear about any other natives there, like we don't hear about modern Ainu.
Oldest doesn't mean better nor in any way more civilized.
Australians could spend more time defending their guaranteed basic civil rights that become only theoretical in time of barbarian madness of sanitarism*.
If they feel bad for aboriginal folk they can carve them big piece of Austrialia back and we will see how civilized they are at giverning themselves.
But we all know Australia is equally imperial, predatory & hypocritical state as old Britain after what happened to Timor. So it won't ever happen.
I think having a nominal monarch for people to form parasocial relationships with rather than getting overly attached to any given politician has its advantages.
But (note, UK person here, add salt accordingly) it seems like you could retain that part while also stripping any actual power - i.e. 'power-wise practically a republic, emphasis on the -nominal- in my first sentence.'
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how Australia works this one out. I think becoming a republic is a matter of when not if, and there's a ton of ideas around about what to do about a head of state. We're not averse to trying out new ideas if they seem good - the Aussie voting system is about as close to perfect as you can get (but our politicians not so much).
Having an 'above the fray' (or at least apparently so) head of state -somehow- is pretty much the thing I'm endorsing here.
Implementation details thereof I don't have a strong opinion on except perhaps "if I ever do develop such an opinion you should probably ignore it anyway."
I used to think that Australian preferential voting was the best practical method. Though the Ranked Choice Voting debate in the US has taught me that STAR voting and approval voting are both easier to count and avoid some edge cases.
I think the Aussie system is flawed because of the party preferences thing - but that's more because the average voter just wants to tick a box for their party and be done with it. I'm not sure that the perfect system would actually be practical.
I always vote "below the line" - it's more fun trying to rank all those micro-parties in order of how much I agree with them :)
> In Italy and Greece Governments have been effectively overthrown by the EU (or ECB/IMF) in fairly open ways with technocrats put in charge.
How, exactly? I don't recall the EU appointing technocratic governments there, i recall elections and the Greek and Italian people making a choice. Choice in specific circumstances that probably influenced them, but same as any election during a crisis.
You probably know this, but Italians don't vote for a PM directly, they vote for parliament and president. Monti was invited by the elected president to form a government, and confirmed by the elected parliament, after the previous PM resigned.
In most European countries - and so in Italy, you don't vote for a person, you vote for a party. This is usually a good idea, but can lead to unintended side-effects (See: United Kingdom).
Monti was supported by both democratically-elected Houses of Parliament, otherwise Napolitano would not have given him the task of creating a government.
> This is usually a good idea, but can lead to unintended side-effects (See: United Kingdom).
In the UK you very much vote for a person, using the arcane first past the post system. People usually vote based on party allegiance, but at the circonscription level you cast a vote for the one winner, resulting in massive disenfranchisement.
The narrative seems to conflate the Palace and the Queen as being one and the same.
The Wikipedia article on this is less... certain, shall we say. [0]
We always knew that there was correspondence between the Governor General and the Palace, because after all, the GG is the representative of the current monarch, when a GG is going to wade in and cause a constitutional crisis, I'd expect there to be such correspondence.
But calling it the "Queen's Coup" is overegging the pudding.
It was very much John Kerr's Coup.
And for fun, there's lots of salacious rumours that the CIA and UK's Foreign Office were encouraging the removal of Whitlam because he was perceived as too friendly to the darn Commies.
But calling it the "Queen's Coup" is overegging the pudding.
It was very much John Kerr's Coup.
Yes, I find the detailed history fascinating, but I am a bit unconvinced by the spin put on it. Clearly, the claim that the palace had no idea it was coming is false, but I don't read the supposedly damning quotes from the letters as the Queen (or anyone else in the palace) giving partisan advise about what action to take. I read it as advising him of what powers he held and that he was free to use them should he decide it was necessary.
Frankly, I feel like this is exactly the sort of role that a Governor General should take: acting as a neutral referee when the children stop playing nicely. The Governor General's powers are quite limited, but they are very real. The fact that the Prime Minister can replace the Governor General more or less at will acts as a strong democratic check on this power. (This is more problematic in the UK where the King cannot be replaced.) Personally, I think the "theoretical monarchy" and the role of the Governor General is a very nice feature in Canada and Australia (and presumably other commonwealth realms).
It is notable that the piece's primary author (as noted at the end) wrote a two volume biography of Whitlam.
I'm not going to pretend to be informed enough about the overall events and motivations to have an opinion, but it does seem likely that the piece's overall tone is likely to be affected by that fact.
The GG is the "Queen's Representative" in Australia and is appointed by her on the advice of her Prime Minister. She is "Queen of Australia" in this role, not Queen of the UK.
As such, her advice to Kerr should have been "Take the advice from the PM and the legal advice he has asked the Solicitor General and Attorney General to provide to you".
That should have been it. Anything else is improper and against the rules of a constitutional monarch.
If the Queen had tried to do the same thing in the UK, Parliament would immediately remove the Crown from power.
In a similar situation in the UK, where the House of Lords attempted to block supply passed by the Commons, the Lords have no power to amend the bill. If they refuse to pass it, the Commons can reintroduce the bill unchanged.
The Crown would have no power to intervene unless there was a "loss of confidence" in the Commons, at which point the PM would have no alternative to advising the Crown to call an election.
I actually think that is an advantage in Australia and Canada. The Governor General is not the monarch, but is (effectively) appointed by a democratically elected official. That gives them more freedom to actually wield that power (albeit extremely rarely). I, personally, think it is very useful to have that neutral referee with real power. As you say, the King is much more constrained in the UK. Although, he theoretically has the same power, it is much more problematic if he uses it.
EDIT: To be clear, I am not well enough versed in the history to make a judgment on whether Kerr was right or wrong, and I understand that it will always be controversial, but I do think it is a feature and not a bug for the GG to have that power.
I don't agree. Parliament, representing the votes of the people, should be Supreme. The constraints on monarchy or a non-political head of state should be absolutely clear. The so called "reserve powers" have no place in a nation with a written constitution.
Almost the single job is to call on someone to be Prime Minister and form a government that holds the confidence of the House of Representatives. Then swear in who that person advises you to as members of the Executive Council.
We recently had the ridiculous situation that the Prime Minister advised the Governor General to swear him in as a "secret" additional minister in a number of ministries. That is now the subject of a Parliamentary inquiry.
> If the Queen had tried to do the same thing in the UK, Parliament would immediately remove the Crown from power.
That's very far-fetched. MPs take an oath of loyalty to the monarch on taking their seat. The entire House of Lords hold their positions wholly by the grace of some monarch or other. Without an electoral mandate, it's inconceivable that Parliament would dismiss the monarchy.
Yeah, I know, it's happened once or twice before; but the last time was 400 years ago, and the world has changed.
MPs take an oath of loyalty to the Crown, representing the nation. The Lords (especially the modern Lords and Bishops) are appointed by the Crown on advice from the Prime Minister, so other than the left over inherited nobility, who's power has been severely curtailed in modern times, no one in the Lords is beholden to the Crown for their position.
If the monarch attempted to expand their power beyond their current minimal role in the UK, Parliament would exercise its supremacy.
As for "without an electoral mandate", the current UK government is on it's 4th (or 5th? I lose count) Prime Minister because it holds the confidence of the Commons.
> The narrative seems to conflate the Palace and the Queen as being one and the same.
"The Palace" sounds just like an insulation layer to guarantee Queen's infallibleness: If something is good, then the Queen did it. If anything turns out hairy, it's "the Palace".
Similar to multiple management layers in companies. Unless it's a major blunder, the CEO won't take any blame. There are multiple management layers that "absorb" the hit.
This seems a rather passionately biased take on the - undoubtedly very controversial - constitutional moment, that seems determined to push "blame" onto the late Queen. The title is absurd clickbait.
Reading into the background in less partial news articles it seems that the Royal team were rightly answering the GG's questions in his uncommonly frequent letters and stressing the action should be a last resort.
If the guy was a bad choice, that's ultimately on the Prime Minister who selected him, the one he dismissed...
The monarchy means that prime ministers, who are generally only directly elected by people in a small geographic constituency, get to exercise the power of a head of state, via the monarch.
Even weirder in this case, the prime minister (not directly elected by the general populace) appointed an Governor General (not elected at all) to a position with monarchic powers, and that power was used against him.
I know this seems weird to outsiders, but as a Canadian I quite like it.
Having PMs elected by MPs means that it is harder for a single rabble rousing politician to sweep to power and distort the use of, say, the military.
Having Governers General appointed by PMs, and confirmed by the monarch, means that someone outside of politics (usually a well respected figure like a university president or astronaut) holds the final red line about whether or not an election must be called. Since it's via appointment, the monarch doesn't bear the brunt of the public rage for it. And since the monarch must confirm the GG it means that the position can't be stuffed with an obvious political hack.
It jives better than it sounds it would jive. It's like checks and balances with as many arguments and gridlock.
As an aside, I feel the same way about the Notwithstanding Clause[0] of the Canadian Constitution. It's a useful tool to diffuse hard issues that can't be used against the public to stop them from voting or speaking and since it automatically expires after a short, preset time the power is ultimately in the hands of the electorate.
As a fellow Canadian I f*cking HATE it. Hereditary monarchies are pure unabashed evil. Monarchs only hold their positions because some ancestor of theirs was a better murderer than everyone else. They have massive wealth / land holdings, huge incomes and tremendous influence in politics and other spheres, despite not being elected nor actually earning any of their ill-gotten gains.
That being said, I agree with you wholeheartedly about the benefits our current system affords, though there's precisely ZERO reason those functions need to be performed by a monarch. There are other ways to achieve the same results without needing to prop up and pander to the spoilt, entitled children of some long dead yet highly effective murderer.
Well, I make no bones about the fact I loved the Queen. So take this with as much salt as you think you need, but I honestly think that there isn't really a better solution than what we have. Queen Elizebeth did not want the role of monarch. She literally prayed to God when she found out that she was in the direct line of succession. She asked for a brother, so she wouldn't have this heavy burden of responsibility.
If we want a single, final, sole, human decision maker I do not see how we can accomplish this without a monarchy that doesn't come with the massive downsides of attracting those that have a lust for power. That the monarchy is essentially toothless in all but the most dire circumstances is a feature not a bug.
It's like the folks in the military that get slated to man the nuclear weapons silos. Very few want the job because they know that they're only need in the very rare circumstance where the whole world is on the line.
It's illiquid power.
As for the rest of it, the holdings, etc. I looked at the Queen as essentially a guardian of nature and an encourager of those in the military, intelligence and of the many charities that exist across The Common Wealth. Yes, she had many fancy dinners, but we got more than what we paid for. Whether encouraging a single little girl to become a doctor when she grows up or slapping a good-hearted wealthy guy on the back when he donates a colossal fortune to helping orphans the return on investment is obvious. Fifteen minutes of her time yielded (and continues to yield) tremendous return.
Agree in principle, but it's not quite as cut and dry as one might hope. The most prominent example of this are the various Indigenous matters the country is still working through. For many of these peoples they did not create agreements with the Canadian government, but rather with the monarch of the day. Over time we will likely disentangle ourselves, but it is definitely a multi-faceted question.
Is your system notably different from most parliamentary systems? The PM is usually selected by seeing who can put together a large enough coalition of parties, in terms of the sum of MPs in those parties, right? Is the difference that your MPs actually vote, rather than it being assumed that they follow their party leadership, or something like that? But I imagine the parties must have a way of keeping their MPs in line…
I mean that isn’t how it works in the US of course but I was under the impression our system was more unusual. Parliamentary systems seem quite popular.
(In the US it often seems like we’ve got this weird old version of Representative Democracy XP, while most of the rest of the advanced democracies have updated to Representative Democracy 10: Parliamentary Edition. We had a bunch of the original devs on staff, so they wrote a bunch of in-house patches, which let us keep XP running well past EOL, but now it turns out layering on patches like that results in an incredibly fragile system and we can’t update anything without possibly taking down the whole system.)
Well, it’s more like if XP had never died and was seeing continuous ongoing development. The kernel isn’t patched often, but the layers above are very very actively maintained by Congress, State Legislatures, Governor’s Mansions, the White House and a diffuse network of courts from SCOTUS to the lowliest traffic court in the little towns that can’t really afford them but charge obscene fines to maintain their traffic courts.
If you’re only interested in XP’s kernel rather than the rest of it, you’re going to have a bad time.
In est, you can think of the GG’s appointment as being done by the Sovereign — just with the nomination process delegated to the country’s current PM in order to minimize the Sovereign’s workload (especially for the Commonwealth, where they don’t live anywhere near the country themselves, and so don’t have an independently-legible candidate pool to choose a GG from. Back when Canada first became independent, appointing a GG independent of the PM would have meant a transatlantic voyage!)
Likely, if these countries were only just de-colonizing and ratifying constitutions today — where the existence of an intelligence service with global reach, directly reporting to the Sovereign, can be assumed — then the GG appointment for each country would be probably be done directly by the Sovereign, with MI6 analysts doing the nominations and then the countries’ PMs (or trusted delegate cabinet ministers) merely doing recorded interviews for the Sovereign to watch and evaluate.
> you can think of the GG’s appointment as being done by the Sovereign — just with the nomination process delegated to the country’s current PM in order to minimize the Sovereign’s workload
Is there are practical difference between this description and just saying that the country's PM does the appointment? I guess one test would be what happens if the sovereign decides to override the PM. What happens then?
>someone outside of politics [...] holds the final red line about whether or not an election must be called
This seems like only a theoretical red line. If/when the GG does anything against the advice of the PM it's a crisis moment. There was a bit of a media fuss in 2008 but then the GG just did as she was told, no?
It's a factor, but in a general election voters have to balance multiple considerations. From which local candidate is going to be a good advocate for my area, via which policy platform is best, all the way up to who should have the nuclear codes.
And then the candidate Prime Minister you (partially) based your decision on might resign, and the MPs of the governing party will pick a new person to exercise those powers, with no recourse to the electorate.
This is not theoretical. In the UK it's happened twice in the last six months.
I think OP means the prime minister has to be voted in by his own party's members of parliament - and OP trusts the integrity and foresight of 300 MPs more than that of the unwashed general electorate. (He might have had a point 50 or 100 years ago when the majority of MPs took pride in integrity and public service and weren't mostly full-time party hacks and climbers of the greasy pole...)
It’s funny, I have read a lot about various intrigues in the UK parliament and felt I understood them (I was talking w/ a political science prof the other day about Disraeli and the Corn laws) but everything invested read about the Australia affair has come across like one of those personal conflicts that you can’t make sense of because they a talking about it a mile a minute without filling in the context. Is there a good account of it that would make sense to an American?
I've really enjoyed reading the discussion in this thread; having approached this general topic with no prior knowledge I now have about 8 Wikipedia pages up that I'll skim throughout the day! Always a fun time.
Ok, but then it must be accepted that a "British style constitutional monarchy" is not a full democracy, given that in certain situations a non-elected head of state holds real power.
I believe this sort of news appears in the context of it being commonly argued that in a "British style constitutional monarchy" the monarch holds no real power, and people who suggest otherwise are often dismissed as lunatics.
It is good to point out that one cannot have it both ways. Either this is indeed a coup, or the regime is not a full democracy.
I disagree. Direct vs representative democracy is orthogonal to this issue. In a representative democracy, the mandate to exercise power still comes from popular vote. That is a qualitatively different situation from one where someone can exercise power by virtue of birth.
They're not orthogonal, direct democracy is the logical conclusion to your definition. Moving on from that though, I disagree that being a Constitutional Monarchy means we're not a full democracy; likewise, being a Republic doesn't gurauntee full democracy... look at America for the easiest example of this. I can give more specific examples if you'd like. Anyway, the King exercises power with the acquiescence of the public. We can abolish the Monarchy but we choose not to. Indeed, Australia can choose to emancipate themselves from the Crown, they just haven't. The fact that we can choose and there's no limitation on our ability to choose proves that their mere existence in our establishment doesn't inherently diminish our democracy.
> I believe this sort of news appears in the context of it being commonly argued that in a "British style constitutional monarchy" the monarch holds no real power, and people who suggest otherwise are often dismissed as lunatics.
Almost every Brit I’ve ever spoken to about this will fastidiously argue that the Queen or King in power holds no real power. I simply don’t believe them. Given a constitutional crisis large enough for the House of Commons to want to strip the Royal family of its power and privileges, I wasn’t convinced they would be the guaranteed victors of that conflict with Queen Elizabeth II. King Charles hasn’t been King for very long, so a conflict with the Commons probably would favor the Commons at this point in time, but I’m not convinced the King could easily be run over either.
The reason this remained hypothetical under the Queen and will probably remain so under the King is they know how to effectively wield power without attracting spotlights and given a choice want the spotlights pointed in a different direction than at them. Compare and contrast with the President of the United States where every possible move he could make is scrutinized and gamed out within an inch of its life before he can make it, and when the Executive team leading the country does something, the President wants his credit so he can leverage that in forthcoming elections both for his own re-election and to bolster the campaigns of members of his party; but taking credit—even opportunistically—also means you suffer the blame as well.
Australia has good reasons to want to take a different approach though, and well, the King of Australia does live on the opposite end of the world, so picking up the Republican ball will probably be more straightforward for them should they choose to go down that route.
In a British style constitutional monarchy, the crown is supposed to exercise executive power only on the advice of ministers who command the confidence of the House of Commons or equivalent. Kerr appointed a prime minister who manifestly did not command the confidence of the House of Representatives, then acted on advice from that prime minister. This was a suspension of democracy.
This particular use of reserve powers probably made it harder to use those same powers in the future due to the outrageous failure to follow protocol, and the consequent deceit involved.
Jenny Hocking is considered by 'serious' historians as a hack. Her biography of Murphy borders on hagiography. The Palace Papers were a dud that she is still attempting to show point to QEII/Buckingham influence in the dismissal. Barwick, who was the chief justice of the high court at the time, said that the constitutional crisis was Whitlam refusing to resign upon failure to secure supply. Kerr dismissing Whitlam was resolving the crisis.
In the end it is academic. The Australian people had their chance to judge the performance of the Whitlam government at the election held 13 December (both Whitlam and Kerr knew that 11 November was effectively the last day that this could be considered due to the requirements for elections to be held) and delivered a resounding message to the former Whitlam government. Even if Whitlam had the half senate election he wanted, it would not have achieved his aims and he would have had to take the issue to a full House election.
But I am aware of a 51/49 class split between Liberal and Labor over Gough, and so the belief this "they tried to overthrow Gough" thing translates to "OMG the republicans will win" is ludicrous.
Enough people think Gough was bonkers, That even Razor-gang Malcom Frazer was better.
I am glued on Gough/Labor. I don't agree with the people who preferred Frazer (who in later life became quite left) -I just want to note that this isn't a huge "this story breaks monarchism" because enough people actually wanted what the Queen and John Kerr did, to make it more nuanced.