Constitutional Reform, Then and NowSpeech to ACT ARM Dinner2 June 2007Andrew LeighIntroductionI acknowledge Ngunnawal people, the traditional owners of the land, and thank theorganisers Terry Fewtrell and John Warhurst for inviting me.

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I also acknowledge the waiters, who are doing a terrific job tonight. We in theAustralianRepublican Movement have a special affinity with you. We are all waiters. We havebeenwaiting a very long time.Twelve years ago next Thursday, then Prime Minister Paul Keating strode to thefloor ofparliament, and said firmly It is the governments view that Australias head of

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state shouldbe an Australian.

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Keating admitted that some were unsure about the prospect of change, but saidGovernments

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can wait for opinion to force their hand, or they can lead. They can wait for theworld tochange and respond as necessity demands, or they can see the way the world isgoing andpoint the way.

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A dozen years later, some of you may feel that Australia is no closer to being aRepublic thanit was in 1995. But I want to argue tonight that the challenges of the early-21stcentury are notthat different from the challenges of the late-19th century federation movement.Just as theyfelt frustration and disappointment in the 1890s, so we do today.In particular, Australian Republicans face the same three challenges as supportersoffederation in the 1890s:

. The wrong economic climate. Radical supporters. Extreme enemiesThe wrong economic climateLet me begin by talking about economics.In the late-1880s, momentum seemed to be building for federation. Part of this wasa sensethat Australia was doing well. From the gold rushes to the 1880s, Australia hadenjoyedsteady economic growth, with full employment and rising wages. Rising incomeshelped leadto rising national sentiment.Yet in 1891, all that changed. A drought, falling world prices for wool and wheat,a maritimestrike, and a shearers strike all led to a feeling of malaise. The federation

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movement, whichhad looked strong at the 1891 federation convention, was essentially dropped bycoloniallegislatures until 1895. The depression of the 1890s didnt kill the federation

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movement, butit certainly maimed it for a few years.

Fast forward eleven decades, and the booming Australian economy is perversely

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doingjust the same for the Australian republican movement. Having skipped through theAsianEconomic Crisis of 1997, and the US economic downturn of 2002, and with the miningboomfuelling our economy, Australian living standards are higher than ever before.But with the boom has come reform complacency. It is a strange paradox aboutmodernAustralian politics that the times of greatest reform the early-1970s, early-

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1980s and early-1990s have all been periods when unemployment was on the rise. Without the sense

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ofurgency created by an economic downturn, it has proved strikingly difficult todragAustralians towards the ballot box and away from their flat-screen TVs and newlyrenovatedkitchens.National conversations about the constitution are difficult at the best of times.One of itsgreatest fans, Greg Craven, begins his book with the sentence: Saying the

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AustralianConstitution does not have a strong hold on our popular imagination is like sayingfishsurvive better in water than on land: a statement so obvious as to be remarkableonly becausesomeone could be bothered making it.

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Most Australians adopt the prospect of Constitutional reform with all theexcitement of a 10thgrader sitting an algebra exam. Without a national sense of urgency, it willinevitably takelonger for the groundswell to build. But build it will.Radical supportersThe second problem facing Republicans today and one that also faced

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federationists in the1890s is our more radical supporters.

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Before I make the case as to why radicalism is a problem, I want to be clear aboutmy ownposition. Im co-author of a book that argues not only that Australia should

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