Australia's republic referendum and Indigenous Voice to Parliament can help reshape nation

Clearly this overestimated the ideological zeal of ordinary citizens and underestimated the mitigating role of unions and the welfare state.

When Australians from all walks of life pushed for a republic in 1999, revolution could not have been further from the agenda. Yet voters demurred, anyway.

Republicans merely wanted to swap out the Queen's representative, the governor-general, for an identically powered Australian head-of-state, albeit elected by a two-thirds majority of the Federal Parliament.

This was strategic incrementalism at its best - and possibly its worst. Keen to avoid fears of radical change, republicans proposed a reform so unrevolutionary it struggled for shape in the public imagination.

Despite its obvious Australianness, it proved hard to romance voters with change that in functional respects, aped the status quo.

Plus, by rebadging the time-honoured machinery of empire, republicans surrendered the scope to argue it was dysfunctional.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," was all the constitutional monarchists needed in rebuttal. And on the other end, the case for empowering voters to choose a president directly, more-or-less made itself.

Here lay the proposed republic's dilemma - that of being simultaneously too big and too small.

John Howard's role in widening this chasm needs no rehearsal here.

Suffice it to say, change in Australia often dies in this space between a shameless timidity and a divisive idealism that fractures progressive unity, and saps momentum. Think carbon trading or (potentially) the Uluru agenda. More on that in a moment.

Part of the problem for the republican pitch is that it is directed as much at the heart as the head. Like the lawyer in The Castle, republicans quickly find themselves reaching for "the vibe" of the thing - unquantifiables like the claim that once formally separated from Britain, Australia would be more forthright and would be regarded more seriously in the world. Proper countries, the argument goes, don't pay fealty, don't bend the knee to foreign monarchs, or historical patrons.

Neither do they surrender their flag, making it precisely the opposite of what a flag is meant to be - an unconfused identifier of a nation.

Formal legal self-containment could have positive flow-on effects internally, lifting national morale, engendering a greater confidence and purpose.

READ MORE:

This in turn might bring moral courage leading to such things as treaties with this continent's original inhabitants, a more independent foreign policy and perhaps a greater self-reliance in defence capability.

These are all worthy prospects and in my view, easily justify the change. But they are neither certain nor uncontestable.

Encouragingly, the Albanese government has appointed an Assistant Minister for The Republic, Matt Thistlethwaite, but Labor has made it clear it intends to proceed with the referendum to enshrine The Voice in the constitution first. Only once that is secured, will the republic be revisited.

There would be a certain poetic justice if the republic could be decided positively in 2025 - to coincide with 50 years since the Whitlam Labor government was summarily dismissed by the Queen's man, governor-general Sir John Kerr.

Yet the priority given to the Uluru Statement from the Heart means even that three-year timeline is unlikely.

As things stand, the government's order is appropriate because the opportunity afforded by the 2017 Uluru agenda - itself timed to mark the 50th anniversary of the successful 1967 referendum - has to be grasped right now.

Still, it is intriguing to consider whether Australia's reluctant progress towards a truth and treaty process might already have been advanced had the 1999 referendum succeeded.

After all, a serious post-settler republic would want to lengthen its lineages to land and people, strengthening internal bonds and building an inclusive national story to which all can subscribe.

That begins with acknowledging unpalatable truths omitted from history books which in what W.E.H. Stanner called in his 1968 Boyer Lectures, "The Great Australian Silence".

This "silence" was the deliberate and near-universal absence of the Indigenous perspective of British arrival from dispossession, rape and annihilation, to exploitation and more than two centuries of racist marginalisation.

"It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape," Stanner said of Australian historical writing and its teaching.

"What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned, under habit and over time, into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale."

The historian Anna Clark later called Stanner's observation, an intervention that had "redefined the discipline [of history] in terms of what it left out".

It is a silence that even in these more enlightened times, finds its poisonous expression in the premium placed on retaining historical ties to the Crown over urgent reparations with the people systematically dehumanised in its name.

The more I consider these impasses, the denial of recognition and the inability to renew and complete the Australian national project via a republic, the more I realise how causally related and morally interdependent they are.

READ MORE MARK KENNY COLUMNS:

The creation of the republic, and recognition of original inhabitants are intertwined, two sides of the same nation-creating project. Neither is whole without the other.

Together, these apparently separate objectives promise a richer and more meaningful sense of Australia than any anachronistic ties to the Crown can ever provide.

And it's worth noting in conclusion that the feckless incuriosity of the current Governor-General in repeatedly commissioning secret ministries shows the Crown provided no protection, anyway.