The major parties are missing an historic opportunity to put the republican debate back on the agenda in the Federal election campaign, according to the author of a new book on Australia’s political origins.
Dr Tony Moore, the author of Death or Liberty, said that Australians need to rediscover the deep republican traditions that arrived here in chains when some 3,600 political prisoners were transported to the Australian colonies.
The title of the book comes from the rallying cry of a stream of political exiles including liberals, democrats and republicans; English machine breakers, trade unionists and Chartists; radical journalists, preachers and intellectuals; and of course Irish, Canadian and even American revolutionaries.
While viewed by the British government with the same alarm as today’s terrorists, the political prisoners are now revered in their homelands as freedom fighters. Yet in Australia, the land of their exile, memory of these martyrs has dimmed.
Dr Moore, Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, will explore these themes at a joint Australian Fabians/gleebooks event tonight with Professor Geoff Gallop, the Premier of Western Australia from 2001 to 2006 and now Director, Graduate School of Government at the University of Sydney.
“In Death or Liberty, I was fascinated by the many parallels between Botany Bay and Guantánamo Bay – both places far away from the centre of empire for people who could not be trusted,” Dr Moore said.
“Many of the political prisoners were transported for their republicanism, transplanting this idea into our colonial DNA from the 1790s, and a significant number contributed to our early achievement of democracy as political activists, crusading journalists, even a Government minister.
“Even today, the Australian republican debate is focussed almost exclusively on the top of the pyramid, with simply replacing the head of state.
“Perhaps we need to look at a republicanism that expands democracy throughout the body politic; at reducing hierarchies in government and making those tiers that remain directly accountable to their communities rather than controlled from the centre in the colonial style.”
Dr Moore said all sides of politics should embrace the principles for which the early political prisoners were transported, such as freedom of speech and assembly, universal suffrage, and one person one vote.
“As we exercise the hard won democratic right to vote we should have a much clearer picture where the parties stand on how Australia will progress to a republic,” Dr Moore said.
Australian Fabians
