Malcolm Turnbull: 'We may have a queen of Australia, but we do not have an Australian queen' - Republic speech, 1992

18 March 1992, National Press Club, Canberra, Australia

Malcom Turnbull is current Prime Minister of Australia. More information at Museum of Australian Democracy entry.

Listen to the speech. The questions afterwards are particularly interesting. When asked if he is still ambitious to be prime minister, Turnbull says, 'As far as my own political ambitions I have none. If nominated I will not stand, if elected I will not serve.' Twenty three years is a long time.

I will be blunt about my prejudices. I am an Australian. This is my native land, and I have no other. I believe that Australia's future and prosperity will be greatly advanced if our nation develops a stronger sense of patriotism and national purpose. We need to be prouder of ourselves. We need to love and respect our fellow countrymen much more than we do today, we need to rejoice in those things that make us different and we need to strive to make our nation foremost in every field of endeavor and enterprise.

For me, Australia comes first. I believe that our development as a more patriotic, more independent nation is being retarded by the fact that we have a foreigner as our head of state. We may have a Queen of Australia, but we do not have an Australian Queen. National sovereignty involves many facets, but among the most important is that a nation's constitutional and political structure is entirely indigenous. The leaders of a nation are appointed by, and are responsible to, the people and the institutions of that nation and no other.

It is no good monarchists pretending that the Queen is an Australian institution or that somehow or other her presence at the top of our constitutional pyramid is consistent with Australia's sovereignty as an independent nation. The historical truth is that the Queen is our head of state because in 1901, when our Constitution came into effect, Australia was no more than a self-governing colony within the British Empire. Our Constitution decrees that our Queen shall be Queen Victoria and her successors 'in the sovereignty of the United Kingdom'. That succession can be and has been, changed by the British parliament, but not by ours. If Prince Charles embraces Roman Catholicism he will not be able to succeed to the throne of our supposedly secular Commonwealth. If Britain becomes a republic, its first president will automatically become our head of state.

The Australian constitution gave extraordinarily wide powers to the Queen, wider than she wielded in the United Kingdom' The British government thereby reserved to itself the power to intervene in Australian affairs in much the same way a state Government in Australia can intervene and dismiss if necessary a local council.

When you see the word 'Queen' in our constitution, it is easy to construe it as meaning (in today's usage) the Queen of Australia acting on the advice of her Australian ministers. But in 1901 it meant the British Crown acting on the advice of its government in Whitehall. The
founding fathers of Federation had no aspirations to independence.

In the first three decades of this century the governor-general was first and foremost the representative of the British government in Australia. He was appointed by Whitehall and he was responsible to it. Indeed it was not until 1938 that Britain felt the need to appoint a high
commissioner to Australia. Until the Second World War Australia did not have any diplomatic representatives. It was a member of the League of Nations, but then so was India and no-one suggested it was independent. Australia did not even claim the right to declare war or peace.
War was declared by the King, for the Empire, and Australia followed the Empire in 1939 as much as it had in 1914.

In those days and for many decades to come, Australians were British subjects. They saw themselves as Britons living in Australia. They were an autonomous political sub-unit of the British Empire. If nation and nationhood require a belief in a separate and independent destiny, then Australia was not a nation. This may be regarded today as another symptom of Australia's confused sense of identity. I would not agree with that characterisation and latter-day Australian nationalists should be wary of vilifying their ancestors for lack of patriotism. Australia was, until relatively recent years, almost entirely composed of settlers from the British Isles. Even today, Australia has a higher percentage of white Caucasians than many parts of the United Kingdom itself. It was only natural that Australians, or people living in Australia, saw themselves as part of the same political unit from which they had spawned.

But, as the decades passed after Federation tensions increasingly developed in the relationship between Britain and its self-governing Dominions: Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand, South Africa and the Irish Free State. Canada, South Africa and Ireland pressed hard for more autonomy and independence. Leaving Ireland aside as special case with a unique history, it can be seen that Canada and South Africa shared two distinct characteristics which Australia lacked. First their populations were not wholly British; large and influential sections of each had grave reservations about being associated with Britain at all. Second, because of their geography they did not perceive they faced a real threat of invasion. Australia on the other hand possessed an almost entirely British population. More importantly however it saw the Empire as the only possible source of defence in the event, some would have said the inevitable event, of an invasion from Japan.

So during the 1920s in the series of Imperial Conferences leading up to the 1931 Statute of Westminster we see Canada and South Africa forcing the pace of change while Australia (and New Zealand) dragged their heels. Australian politicians of that era, as different as William
Morris Hughes and Stanley Melbourne Bruce, rather favoured increased integration of the Empire. They wanted the Empire to speak with one voice, but they wanted that voice to be determined by a consultative process between the United Kingdom and the Dominions.

Again, it is easy to pick out speeches of all of our leaders from those days, Hughes, Scullin, Bruce, Lyons and even Curtin and point to examples of what today appear to be cringing subservience to Britain. [However] there is nothing shameful about these sentiments. Political
integration with Britain and its Empire was never a dishonourable course of action. Australian leaders were seeking a say in the Empire. At the 1943 federal conference of the Labor Party, Curtin described the full expression of our responsibilities in the post-war era to be 'a good
Australian, a good British subject and a good world citizen'. Or as the conservative politician and judge, Sir John Latham, observed in 1928, 'few Australians have the illusion that Australia could maintain her existence as a completely independent state. Alone Australia is weak . . .As a member of the British Commonwealth, Australia is strong.'

However noble ideas of Imperial Federation may have been, the truth was that the tide of history was running quite against it. Britain's idea of Empire was of one dominated by London, and that meant the British government of the day. Britain was nor prepared to share its
foreign policy with the Dominions and it preferred to have independent Dominions than have them meddling in what it saw as the concerns of Great Britain itself. To use a commercial metaphor, the imperial relationship was rather like that of a family company with grown up children. Some of the children want to move off and start their own businesses. others want to sit at the board table and jointly direct the enterprise. The patriarch however says: if you will not stay and do as you are told, then you had best leave.

So far from Australia seeking independence, quite the reverse is true. Australia increasingly undertook the responsibilities of nationhood because it had been turned out by its Mother Country. our nationhood was forced on us. We did not fight for it. Myth makers, particularly on the Left, will tell a different tale and I do nor mean to denigrate the Australian nationalism of our early radicals, many of them republicans, but it is well to remember they did not speak for the majority of Australians.

Given that background it is not surprising that a sense of national identity has been slow in coming. Right through the long reign of Sir Robert Menzies Australians were encouraged to believe they were still both British and Australian. It was conventional within the memory of
most of us to fly both the Union Jack and the Australian flag on public buildings. Our national anthem was 'God Save the Queen' until relatively recently. There was little emphasis in Australia on that important aspect of separateness and distinction which is crucial to a sense of nationalism. It is only since 1986 that an ultimate court of appeal ceased to be a tribunal of English judges, the Privy Council, sitting in London.

In the nine months since the launch of the Australian Republican Movement the republican debate has progressed considerably. It is now an important and lively subject of discussion. Major newspapers have editorialised in favour of the republic, the Australian Labor party has
placed a republican Australia firm1y in its national platform. opinion polls for the first time are showing a majority of Australians in favour of the republic.

But despite this, some conservatives fail to come to terms with the debate. The most common defence of the monarchy is a shoulder shrugging 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' caveman conservatism. Consider for a moment where human progress would be if that approach had
been taken to art, literature, technology or politics? The truth is that all human progress has been based on the desire to make something which is better. Societies which have turned their back on social or political progress have invariably atrophied and collapsed. Another disappointing conservative response is that recently employed by the Leader of the Opposition [John Hewson] who dismisses the republican movement as a 'distraction from the economic issues of the recession'. Does he really believe that we are incapable of
debating anything other than economic issues, or that Australians are so intellectually deficient they can only concentrate on one issue at a time? The republican debate is too important to become the subject of conventional party political debate where a cause supported by the Government is automatically opposed by the Opposition. But for the benefit of Mr Hewson, I would pose this question: has the success of other nations been advanced, or retarded, by a strong sense of national identity and purpose? Has the economic miracle of Japan or Germany been assisted by their keen focus on national self-interest? Was the rise to greatness of the United States assisted by that country's intense patriotism and sense of national mission? I am not saying the republic will make you rich. But history suggests patriotism is good for business.

But of all the conservative reactions I have heard, the most depressing was that which fell from John Howard when I debated him recently for a television program. Mr Howard said the monarchy had given us 'decades of stability'. I was immediately reminded of Victor Daley's poem about Queen Victoria's sexagenary procession in London in 1897:

Sixty years she's reigned a-holding up the sky

And bringing round the seasons, hot and cold and wet and dry

And in all that time she's never done a deed deserving gaol,

So 1et.joybe1ls ring out madly and delirium prevail.

Oh, the poor will blessings pour on the Queen whom they adore

When she blinks with puffy eyes at them, they'll hunger never more.

The political stability of Australia is a tribute to the political stability of Australians, not the grace and favour of their iong-distance monarch. The same monarch reigned over Fiji and did not seem to faze Colonel Rabuka, ancl the Queen of Grenada was unable to prevent the United
States Marines imposing their idea of political stability on that country. John Howard's remark, which I am sure he now regrets, is a typical example of how too many of our leaders subconsciously underrate themselves and the people that elected them.

The republican debate is one of the most important confronting us today. Economic issues will come and go, and never be resolved (at least to everyone's satisfaction). But today we are building a nation and there is no worthier enterprise for any of us than that. I imagine there will
always be some who will resist the republic, but few of our critics suggest it is not inevitable.

The Prime Minister [Paul Keating] has not been slow to recognise the increasing popularity of this cause. Mr Hewson does himself, his party and the nation no good at all in not following suit. Conservatives who fear change to our constitutional system should stop hiding behind the royal petticoats, acknowledge the inevitability of a republic and constructively participate in the debate about the constitutional changes that are needed to effect it.

It is not just conservatives we need to persuade, of course. Some Australians find it hard to see how such a change could be important. If you believe we should have a head of state at all, if you believe that office is of importance, then it follows that the head of state should reinforce the values and interests of our nation above all others. Whatever the Queen may represent to Australians, she does not represent Australia. She does not represent this nation to its own citizens and to the world at large she unequivocally represents Great Britain.

The monarchists of bygone decades genuinely believed that Australia was part of Greater Britain and their patriotism was sincerely a British one. They did not pretend that Australia was, or ought to be, independent. Today's monarchists are more disingenuous. They claim to be, Australian patriots, they claim Australia is independent but at the same time cling to the last symbol of colonialism. The Australian republic will put Australia first, and in our hearts at least, Australia should have no other place.

Pádraic Pearse: 'Ireland unfree shall never be at peace', O’Donovan Rossa’s funeral - 1915

1 August 1915, Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, Ireland

It has seemed right, before we turn away from this place in which we have laid the mortal remains of O'Donovan Rossa, that one amongst us should, in the name of all, speak the praise of that valiant man, and endeavour to formulate the thought and the hope that are in us as we stand around his grave. And if there is anything that makes it fitting that I rather than some other. I, rather than one of the grey-haired men who were young with him, and shared in his labour and in his suffering, should speak here, it is, perhaps, that I may be taken as speaking on behalf of a new generation that has been re-baptised in the Fenian faith, and that has accepted the responsibility of carrying out the Fenian programme. I propose to you, then, that here by the grave of this unrepentant Fenian, we renew our baptismal vows; that here by the grave of this unconquered and unconquerable man, we ask of God, each one for himself, such unshakeable purpose, such high and gallant courage, such unbreakable strength of soul as belonged to O'Donovan Rossa.

"Deliberately here we avow ourselves, as he avowed himself in the dock, Irishmen of one allegiance only. We, of the Irish Volunteers, and you others who are associated with us in to-day's task and duty, are bound together, and must stand together henceforth in brotherly union for the achievement of the freedom of Ireland. And we know only one definition of freedom: It is Tone's definition; it is Mitchel's definition; it is Rossa's definition. Let no one blaspheme the cause that the dead generations of Ireland served by giving it any other name and definition than their name and definition.

We stand at Rossa's grave, not in sadness, but rather in exaltation of spirit that it has been given us to come thus into so close a communion with that brave and splendid Gael. Splendid and holy causes are served by men who are themselves splendid and holy. O'Donovan Rossa was splendid in the proud manhood of him--splendid in the heroic grace of him, splendid in the Gaelic strength and clarity and truth of him. And all that splendour, and pride, and strength was compatible with a humility and a simplicity of devotion to Ireland, to all that was olden and beautiful and Gaelic in Ireland; the holiness and simplicity of patriotism of a Michael O'Clery or of an Eoghan O'Growney. The clear true eyes of this man almost alone in his day visioned Ireland as we to-day would surely have her--not free merely but Gaelic as well; not Gaelic merely, but free as well.

In a closer spiritual communion with him now than ever before, or perhaps ever again, in spiritual communion with those of his day living and dead, who suffered with him in English prisons, in communion of spirit too with our own dear comrades who suffer in English prisons to-day, and speaking on their behalf as well as our own, we pledge to Ireland our love, and we pledge to English rule in Ireland our hate. This is a place of peace, sacred to the dead, where men should speak with all charity and with all restraint; but I hold it a Christian thing, as O'Donovan Rossa held it, to hate evil, to hate untruth, to hate oppression, and hating them, to strive to overthrow them. Our foes are strong, and wise, and wary; but strong and wise and wary as they are, they cannot undo the miracles of God, Who ripens in the hearts of young men the seeds sown by the young men of a former generation. And the seeds sown by the young men of '65 and '67 are coming to their miraculous ripening to-day. Rulers and Defenders of Realms had need to be wary it they would guard against such processes. Life springs from death, and from the graves of patriot men and women spring live nations. The defenders of this realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us, and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything. They think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

Robert Emmet: 'Let no man write my epitaph', From the dock - 1803

19 September, 1803, Dublin, Ireland

Robert Emmet was an Irish nationalist and Republican, orator and rebel leader. He led an abortive rebellion against British rule in 1803.

My Lords:

What have I to say why sentence of death should not be pronounced on me according to law?  I have nothing to say that can alter your predetermination, nor that it will become me to say with any view to the mitigation of that sentence which you are here to pronounce, and I must abide by.  But I have that to say which interests me more than life, and which you have labored (as was necessarily your office in the present circumstances of this oppressed country) to destroy.  I have much to say why my reputation should be rescued from the load of false accusation and calumny which has been heaped upon it.  I do not imagine that, seated where you are, your minds can be so free from impurity as to receive the least impression from what I am going to utter--I have no hopes that I can anchor my character in the breast of a court constituted and trammeled as this is--I only wish, and it is the utmost I expect, that your lordships may suffer it to float down your memories untainted by the foul breath of prejudice, until it finds some more hospitable harbor to shelter it from the storm by which it is at present buffeted.

Was I only to suffer death after being adjudged guilty by your tribunal, I should bow in silence and meet the fate that awaits me without a murmur; but the sentence of law which delivers my body to the executioner will, through the ministry of that law, labor in its own vindication to consign my character to obloquy--for there must be guilt somewhere: whether in the sentence of the court in the catastrophe, posterity must determine. A man in my situation, my lords, has not only to encounter the difficulties of fortune. and the force of power over minds which it has corrupted or subjugated. but the difficulties of established prejudice: the man dies, but his memory lives. That mine may not perish, that it may live in the respect of my countrymen, I seize upon this opportunity to vindicate myself from some of the charges alleged against me. When my spirit shall be wafted to a more friendly port; when my shade shall have joined the bands of those martyred heroes who have shed their blood on the scaffold and in the field, in defense of their country and of virtue. this is my hope: I wish that my memory and name may animate those who survive me, while I look down with complacency on the destruction of that perfidious government which upholds its domination by blasphemy of the Most High-which displays its power over man as over the beasts of the forest-which sets man upon his brother, and lifts his hand in the name of God against the throat of his fellow who believes or doubts a little more or a little less than the government standard--a government which is steeled to barbarity by the cries of the orphans and the tears of the widows which it has made.

[Interruption by the court.]

I appeal to the immaculate God--I swear by the throne of heaven, before which I must shortly appear--by the blood of the murdered patriots who have gone before me that my conduct has been through all this peril and all my purposes governed only by the convictions which I have uttered, and by no other view than that of their cure, and the emancipation of my country from the superinhuman oppression under which she has so long and too patiently travailed; and that I confidently and assuredly hope that, wild and chimerical as it may appear, there is still union and strength in Ireland to accomplish this noble enterprise. of this I speak with the confidence of intimate knowledge, and with the consolation that appertains to that confidence. Think not, my lords, I say this for the petty gratification of giving you a transitory uneasiness; a man who never yet raised his voice to assert a lie will not hazard his character with posterity by asserting a falsehood on a subject so important to his country, and on an occasion like this. Yes. my lords. a man who does not wish to have his epitaph written until his country is liberated will not leave a weapon in the power of envy, nor a pretense to impeach the probity which he means to preserve even in the grave to which tyranny consigns him.

[Interruption by the court.]

Again I say, that what I have spoken was not intended for your lordship, whose situation I commiserate rather than envy-my expressions were for my countrymen; if there is a true Irishman present. let my last words cheer him in the hour of his affliction.

[Interruption by the court.]

I have always understood it to be the duty of a judge. when a prisoner has been convicted, to pronounce the sentence of the law; I have also understood that judges sometimes think it their duty to hear with patience and to speak with humanity. to exhort the victim of the laws. and to offer with tender benignity his opinions of the motives by which he was actuated in the crime, of which he had been adjudged guilty: that a judge has thought it his duty so to have done. I have no doubt--but where is the boasted freedom of your institutions. where is the vaunted impartiality, clemency. and mildness of your courts of justice, if an unfortunate prisoner, whom your policy, and not pure justice. is about to deliver into the hands of the executioner. is not suffered to explain his motives sincerely and truly. and to vindicate the principles by which he was actuated?

My lords, it may be a part of the system of angry justice, to bow a man's mind by humiliation to the purposed ignominy of the scaffold; but worse to me than the purposed shame, or the scaffold's terrors, would be the shame of such unfounded imputations as have been laid against me in this court: you, my lord [Lord Norbury], are a judge. I am the supposed culprit; I am a man, you are a man also; by a revolution of power, we might change places, though we never could change characters; if I stand at the bar of this court and dare not vindicate my character, what a farce is your justice? If I stand at this bar and dare not vindicate my character. flow dare you calumniate it? Does the sentence of death which your unhallowed policy inflicts on my body also condemn my tongue to silence and my reputation to reproach? Your executioner may abridge the period of my existence. but while I exist I shall not forbear to vindicate my character and motives from your aspersions: and as a man to whom fame is dearer than life, I will make the last use of that life in doing justice to that reputation which is to live after me, and which is the only legacy I can leave to those I honor and love, and for whom I am proud to perish. As men, my lord, we must appear at the great day at one common tribunal. and it will then remain for the searcher of all hearts to show a collective universe who was engaged in the most virtuous actions. or actuated by the purest motives-my country's oppressors or--

[Interruption by the court.]

My lord, will a dying man be denied the legal privilege of exculpating himself, in the eyes of the community, of an undeserved reproach thrown upon him during his trial, by charging him with ambition and attempting to cast away, for a paltry consideration. the liberties of his country? Why did your lordship insult me? or rather why insult justice. in demanding of me why sentence of death should not be pronounced? I know, my lord, that form prescribes that you should ask the question; the form also presumes a right of answering. This no doubt may be dispensed with--and so might the whole ceremony of trial, since sentence was already pronounced at the castle, before your jury was impaneled; your lordships are but the priests of the oracle, and I submit; but I insist on the whole of the forms.

I am charged with being an emissary of France An emissary of France? And for what end? It is alleged that I wished to sell the independence of my country? And for what end? Was this the object of my ambition? And is this the mode by which a tribunal of justice reconciles contradictions? No, I am no emissary; and my ambition was to hold a place among the deliverers of my country--not in power, nor in profit, but in the glory of the achievement!...

Connection with Prance was indeed intended, but only as far as mutual interest would sanction or require. Were they to assume any authority inconsistent with the purest independence. it would be the signal for their destruction: we sought aid, and we sought it, as we had assurances we should obtain it--as auxiliaries in war and allies in peace...

I wished to procure for my country the guarantee which Washington procured for America. To procure an aid, which, by its example, would be as important as its valor, disciplined. gallant, pregnant with science and experience; which would perceive the good and polish the rough points of our character. They would come to us as strangers and leave us as friends, after sharing in our perils and elevating our destiny. These were my objects--not to receive new taskmasters hilt to expel old tyrants: these were my views. and these only became Irishmen. It was for these ends I sought aid from France; because France, even as an enemy. could not he more implacable than the enemy already in the bosom of my country.

[Interruption by the court.]

I have been charged with that importance in the efforts to emancipate my country. as to be considered the keystone of the combination of Irishmen; or, as Your Lordship expressed it, "the life and blood of conspiracy." You do me honor overmuch. You have given to the subaltern all the credit of a superior. There are men engaged in this conspiracy, who are not only superior to me but even to your own conceptions of yourself, my lord; men, before the splendor of whose genius and virtues, I should bow with respectful deference, and who would think themselves dishonored to be called your friend--who would not disgrace themselves by shaking your bloodstained hand--

[Interruption by the court]

What, my lord, shall you tell me, on the passage to that scaffold. Which that tyranny. of which you are only the intermediary executioner. Has erected for my murder. that I am accountable for all the blood that has and will be shed in this struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor?--shall you tell me this--and must I be so very a slave as not to repel it?

I do not fear to approach the omnipotent Judge, to answer for the conduct of my whole life; and am I to be appalled and falsified by a mere remnant of mortality here? By you. too. who, if it were possible to collect all the innocent blood that you have shed in your unhallowed ministry, in one great reservoir. Your Lordship might swim in it.

[Interruption by the court.]

Let no man dare, when I am dead. to charge me with dishonor; let no man attaint my memory by believing that I could have engaged in any cause but that of my country's liberty and independence, or that I could have become the pliant minion of power in the oppression or the miseries of my countrymen. The proclamation of the provisional government speaks for our views; no inference can he tortured from it to countenance barbarity or debasement at home, or subjection. humiliation. or treachery from abroad; I would not have submitted to a foreign oppressor for the same reason that I would resist the foreign and domestic oppressor: in the dignity of freedom I would have fought upon the threshold of my country, and its enemy should enter only by passing over my lifeless corpse. Am I, who lived but for my country, and who have subjected myself to the dangers of the jealous and watchful oppressor, and the bondage of the grave, only to give my countrymen their rights, and my country her independence, and am I to be loaded with calumny and not suffered to resent or repel it--no, God forbid!

If the spirits of the illustrious dead participate in the concerns and cares of those who are dear to them in this transitory life--oh, ever dear and venerated shade of my departed father. look down with scrutiny upon the conduct of your suffering son; and see if I have even for a moment deviated from those principles of morality and patriotism which it was your care to instill into my youthful mind, and for which I am now to offer up my life!

My lords, you are impatient for the sacrifice-the blood which you seek is not congealed by the artificial terrors which surround your victim; it circulates warmly and unruffled, through the channels which God created for noble purposes. but which you are bent to destroy. for purposes so grievous. that they cry to heaven. Be yet patient! I have but a few words more to say. I am going to my cold and silent grave: my lamp of life is nearly e4inguished: my race is run: the grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom! I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world--it is the charity of its silence! Let no man write my epitaph: for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them. let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character; when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.