The surprising thing about the referenda held on the first Saturday in November is that anyone was surprised by the results. Of the 13 proposed amendments supported by both the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader of the day, eight succeeded. Of the 31 not supported by both, none have succeeded. Though the indirect-election Republic proposal defeated on Saturday was the only amendment ever put to the people not supported by the incumbent Prime Minister, it conformed to this pattern of bipartisan or bust.
Coincidentally, 31 is also the number of amendment proposals that a majority of the Australian electorate has rejected outright: or 66% of the 44 amendments put to the people. University of Melbourne Professor Brian Galligan's advice that progressive elites and federal governments should stop pestering the Australian people with referendum proposals that are unnecessary or that attempt to centralise power in Canberra was not heeded. Indeed, this record of elite failure to persuade is itself a powerful argument for a popularly elected President. (And those who say that a popularly elected President would change the way we are governed by creating a competing power centre to the Prime Minister may have to face the dreadful prospect that that may be, in fact, precisely what many people want).
The whining about John Howard's refusal to compromise his monarchist principles demonstrates perfectly the intolerance of Australian "progressives": no opinion which disagrees with theirs is legitimate. More to the point -- given the absolutely clear history on the necessity of bipartisanship -- why were the official Republicans so determined to put it up under a monarchist PM anyway? One can't help feel that a mixture of ego -- wanting their constitutional monument -- and a desire to humiliate John Howard had something to do with it. John Howard had promised to go ahead with the referendum, but there was nothing stopping the republicans from declining the offer until "further discussion of the proposal" had taken place.
The longstanding media antipathy to John Howard was very much on display throughout the campaign and its aftermath. This is essentially self-interest on the part of the media. Journalists have always tended to be captured by whoever is their most important source of stories: thus crime reporters generally report the police perspective, industrial relations reporters the union perspective, education reporters the teacher union and education bureaucrat perspective, environment reporters the green perspective, and so on. Modern journalism has discovered an even lower form of professional prostitution: reporting on the basis of what makes them appear "kosher" in their attitudes to their fellow journalists. On a range of issues, this involves denigrating the values and aspirations of most of their fellow Australians.
This has been seen with unparalleled explicitness in the republic debate. According to a February 1998 Morgan opinion poll, if Australia is to be a republic, only 27% of the electorate wanted a republic where the politicians choose the President: 68% wanted one where we do. But the media "knows" what is good for them and has tried to ram it down their throat. In exactly the same way they have attempted to do on indigenous issues, immigration, etc. etc.
Hence the self interest in their antipathy for John Howard, for if Howard's social conservatism has any validity, then a whole range of attitudes through which the media (and other members of what Les Murray calls "the Ascendancy" and others "the new class") mutually agree demonstrate their own moral superiority do not: so despising Howard is a way of defending their status-giving moral assets. This was particularly notable over the Hanson debacle. Hanson got prominence by pushing a whole range of issues (migration, crime, indigenous policy) where the gap between the Sneerer's Guild (led by Chief Sneerer Paul Keating) and the general population was greatest. Yet who did the media blame for Pauline? John Howard, of course: when Pauline was fairly obviously Paul's bastard political child. But to admit that would completely undermine the Ascendancy's moral assets and self-awarded status. (It is no accident that the Ascendancy's favourite former PMs -- Whitlam and Keating -- are the two most electorally rejected PMs of the last 30 years).
The proposed preamble, on the other hand, falls into that very select group of proposals (now five out of 44) which both the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader supported but was rejected by the electorate. The people have declined to be told what their values are. But people were also asked to vote for a preamble not available for a last minute perusal at the ballot box: it became far too much like buying a "pig in a poke". Some of us are grateful that no further excuse for judicial frolics by judges rapidly disappearing up their own moral vanity were added to the Constitution.
Only five proposed constitutional amendments (or 11%) have garnered a majority of votes but failed to carry a majority of States. Special majorities are, however, normal in Federal Constitutions: the US Constitution requires the support of three-quarters of the States for changes. Since the Constitution sets the fundamental rules of the political game, such a special majority is entirely proper: protections against the "tyranny of the majority" should be part of any decent Constitutional structure. The persistent refusal of voters to support changes to the basic rules of the game which do not have the support of both sides is also quite rational.
Referendum proposals never get significantly more support than the combined Senate vote of political parties endorsing them, though they often get significantly less. Referendums held separately from general elections have tended to do particularly badly on this score, scoring on average 19 percentage points less than the combined Senate vote of supporting parties: this average is unchanged by the 1999 referenda.
In other words, it is relatively easy for politicians to convince their supporters to vote "No", harder to convince them to vote "Yes", particularly if voters are considering the issue separate from the distraction of a general election. The ALP, Democrats and Greens had a combined 1998 Senate vote of 48%. Add some percent for pro-republic Liberals, and we can see that the Republic proposal's 45% vote represents a better than average failure to persuade. The preamble, on the other hand -- supported by the Coalition as well with a total combined Senate vote of supporting parties of 86% -- represents a loss on par with the record failure of the "nexus" question of 1967, which proposed to eliminate the requirement that the House of Representatives be no more than twice the size of the Senate.
Another way of looking at it, however, suggests that the republican campaign was a remarkable success. The ARM only scored 30% of the vote for the Constitutional Convention, on par with the 27% support for a politician-chosen President. On that basis, pushing the vote up to 45% was a remarkable feat of persuasion.
Yet polling support for a republic has been significantly ahead of support for the monarchy since 1993. Which leads to the question, not of how did the official republicans do comparatively well in persuading people to vote for a republic they didn't want, but why the republicans did not offer the people the republic they did want?
The official republicans did a remarkably poor job of arguing against a directly-elected President. The "Yes" campaign had two clear, and unfortunate, subtexts. One was yes, we know you want to elect the President but we are not going to give you that option.
This was reinforced by the subtext of ... and we don't trust you to choose the right sort of person to be President.
Opinion polling indicated lower income people were particularly strongly against the indirect-election republic, since only popular election of the President enables them to participate: a result confirmed by the electorate results. The strong country and outer-State vote against the republic also feeds into this, showing a clear distrust of East Coast urban elites.
It is perfectly clear that there are two Australia's: an inner city Australia centred in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra and the rest of Australia. The fact that the media overwhelmingly lines up on one side and then preaches at the other is not helpful. One of the best ways to break down the division would be for the Australian media, either directly or through its chosen commentators, to stop preaching: particularly in such a self-righteous and one-sided way. Dismissing those who voted No as unpatriotic (before the vote) and as emotional and uneducated (afterwards) just replicates this unsavoury trend. Given the massive pro-republic media bias, the defeated republicans complaining about an "uneducated" public is a double criticism of themselves and their media supporters.
The republican proposal was clearly not without significant flaws. The instantly-sackable President was not a positive feature. Nor was requiring the President to follow advice from the Prime Minister, Executive Council or Minister without any indication of what happened if they disagreed. Importing into the Constitution terms -- reserve power, convention -- of uncertain ambit was another legal minefield, the result of which would have been to make it quite unclear when Presidential actions were or were not subject to High Court oversight. But the republicans were under no real pressure to get their hodge-podge proposal right since the media could be, and was, relied upon to avert such scrutiny.
Which suggests a major reason why the republicans served up a republic that the people did not want -- they thought the massed ranks of media support would be enough. Clearly, it wasn't. But what does such a calculation say about the Australian media?
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