Australia Land of Freedom and Democracy

As a British Subject and Australian resident, I am waiting patiently for this nation to become a Republic. It is now old enough to behave in not only a rational and independant way, but a total, top down, bottom up national independant system with no recourse to the Privy Council or the Crown, no Governors, or Governors-General, but an elected President with a bicameral parliament that needs to be not much different than it is now (The Parliament that is)!!

In 1999 a plebisite was held here in (Australia) to (alegedly) ask the Australian Electorate whether they wanted a Republic, or not. For a discussion on this referendum see Michael Lavarch's essay.

I was one of the Republicans who voted no. My reason was fairly straight forward, the minimalist solution presented by the Australian republican Movement as the YES answer was inadequate and represented in my suspicious mind, a sell out to entrenched authority within Australia, and would have resulted in no substantial change in the "British" power structure that exists in this Great Country. The Question on the Referendum for the Repblican. side was so vague and small and minimalist that I couldn't in any good conscience vote yes, as I percieved no actual change, and a backdoor way of maintaining the establishment.

The aftermath of the referendum had the anchronistic Monarchists were claiming victory, even though they failed to put their argiment. The result was definitely a failure by the Republicans to put their argumnet, and this failure stems back to the Constitutional Conference conviened on the subject, and the rise of Richard Margavie's Model as the preferd model

Justification for War in Tatters

The aftermath of the War in Iraq is becoming clear as the US and UK as well as the Coalition of the Willing have now the task of rebuilding this nation. Australia played it's part with honour, however the idea of fighting a foreign war on behalf of an Imperial Power (US and UK) has me concerned, because the idea this bears any resemblance to self defence or "in the national interest" has confused me no end. The intervention in East Timor and the proposed Solomon Island intervention I can understand, but Iraq? The problem in Iraq was a severely disobediant Saddam Hussein. Disobedient to whom? To the United States of course, the US has assisted him in maintaining control of his nation since before Iran went native (When the US supported Shah was deposed by a popular, if fanatical, revolution. Hussein was funded and supplied in what was the Iran Iraq war in the 80's where he used his "Weapons of Mass Destruction" without any complaints from the US or UK at the time. So much for WMD concerns.

Now we are being entertained by the spectacle of false statements emanating from Whitehall for which no one is responsible, least of all the PM.

The claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Nigeria has been proven to be false and that the leaders of Australia and US and UK used information on this subject even though the intelligence community and the US Department of State were aware that the documents were false, only so many months after the event. Today the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard MP, claimed he was unaware of the caveat and that he would be investigating why such an error occured. The only problem is that such errors did not occur in isolation, and in the Australian environment, another national event called the Children Overboard Enquiry also found that false information was handed to the PM and his Minster Phillip Ruddock MP.

It appears that a pattern is emerging (see an article today on the front page of The Australian), pointing to a situation within the Public Service of these great democracies where the public servants fear contradicting the Minister or President as the case may be. In other words, the public service, at least in Westminster Systems has been severely compromised by appearing to be politicised. The appearance of independance of the Public Service is now established as a fiction in the mind of the voting public.

Unfortunately, this makes for a US situation for those same systems when a change of government occurs after an election. Not only will Ministers of the Crown have to be appointed from the Front Bench of the Government but major changes will be required over and above past standards of changes within the Public Service. All this has occured under right wing, economic rationalist, interventionist governments in teh UK/US and Australia. In the UK, you may say that they have a Labour Government, but I say that it is demonstrating a policy one would expect from the Tories. The backbench of the Government at Westminster is the default opposition today, the Tories have nothing much to say as the government is doing everything they want!!!