The world was taken by surprise when Buckingham Palace announced that Queen Elizabeth II had been taken seriously ill at Balmoral—even her family, it seems, who were rushed to the Scottish castle on a private jet to be by her side. Shortly after, at 6.41PM London time, her passing was confirmed—the whole saga unfolding in just over six hours.
While most groups were still busy penning their eulogies to the world’s longest reigning British monarch, who passed away at age 96, notably fast to pay tribute were a group whose primary aim is to abolish the royal institution’s continued influence over Australian politics.
Videos by VICE
While most of the country slept in the early hours of Friday morning, it took the Australian Republican Movement just 24 minutes—a full 19 minutes before Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese—to issue a public statement expressing that the group was “deeply saddened” by the queen’s passing, hailing her “significant contribution” to the country in her seven decades as head of state.
But the group, unsurprisingly, wasn’t singing the praises of the late monarch simply out of allegiance to the crown.
“The Queen backed the right of Australians to become a fully independent nation during the referendum on an Australian republic in 1999,” the statement read.
“Queen Elizabeth respected the self-determination of the Australian people. During her reign the Australia Act 1986 was passed eliminating many of the remaining opportunities for UK interference in Australian government.”
When contacted by VICE World News, ARM declined to comment further “out of respect.” But while the group is taking a more subdued approach to their calls for an Australian republic in the immediate aftermath of the monarch’s passing, others were less shy about declaring the moment a fitting one for Australia to break free of old systems.
“Now Australia must move forward,” Adam Bandt, leader of the political party Australian Greens, tweeted on Friday morning. “We need Treaty with First Nations people, and we need to become a Republic.”
Bandt’s tweet was slammed by former politicians and social media users as “graceless” and “totally inappropriate,” but his sentiments reflect a long-running, if somewhat stalled, republicanism movement in Australia.
While the British monarchy is not involved in day-to-day government affairs, it maintains a strong symbolic presence in Australia—a former member of the British Empire and today a Commonwealth realm sharing the same head of state as the United Kingdom.
In Australia, the monarch assumes a largely ceremonial role, appointing governors and appearing at national events. Regardless, the country has been grappling with calls for republicanism for decades, with the issue officially supported by major political parties including the ruling Labor Party, the Greens, and the Democrats.
In 1999, the last time a referendum was held on Australia’s proposed shift towards a presidential republic, nearly 55 percent voted against the notion. Public opinion today remains divided, and according to a January poll, 36 percent of respondents were in favor of Australia becoming a republic, while 27 percent were against the idea. 38 percent said they were neutral or unsure.
But even within the republican movement there’s division, and while united in their desire to remove a hereditary monarchy, there’s discord over what new system to put in its place.
“The big problem in the 1999 referendum was disagreement about how the new head of state would be chosen. The method chosen for that particular referendum was to let parliament choose the new head of state, rather than the people directly,” Anne Twomey, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Sydney, told VICE World News.
“A significant number of republicans opposed that referendum and joined with the monarchists to defeat it because they wanted a directly elected head of state… That dilemma still exists, there’s still disagreement between people.”
“We largely call it the Commonwealth, but many Aboriginal Australians will say ‘stolen wealth’.”
She added that even if an agreement could be made on the replacement system, the Australian public would still need to approve abolishing the monarchy at a national referendum—a vote in which a majority is also required in four out of six Australian states. All these hurdles considered, she says it’s not going to be a matter of “snapping your fingers and going ahead and doing it.”
Regardless, she believes that abolishing the monarchy seems a matter of when, not if.
“I find it inconceivable that in a thousand years time, Australia’s head of state is still going to be the monarch of the United Kingdom,” she said.
Some of the monarchy’s most ardent critics, among them the Greens, argue that the monarchy’s presence represents colonialism and continued oppression of Indigenous groups. Last month, Bandt expressed his support for Indigenous senator and fellow Greens member Lidia Thorpe after she called the queen a colonizer while reciting an oath of allegiance in parliament.
“We largely call it the Commonwealth, but many Aboriginal Australians will say ‘stolen wealth,’” Sandy O’Sullivan, a professor of Indigenous studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, told VICE World News. “The monarchy has been the center of how colonialism has played out in this continent. And for Indigenous Australians, the monarchy has been an agent of colonialism and ongoing colonization.”
Between 1910 to the 1970s, assimilation policies saw a “stolen generation” of Indigenous children—said to be able to integrate better into white society—forcibly removed from their homes and placed in adoptive families or institutions where they had their names changed and language erased.
While the government issued an apology in 2008 for its treatment of Indigenous communities during this period, Indigenous Australians continue to face marginalization, including disproportionate death in police custody, commercial projects that threaten their land and environment, and a crippling housing crisis. Today, Australia is the only Commonwealth country that hasn’t signed a treaty with its Indigenous communities, an agreement that would, among other things, enshrine land and political rights to the group.
Against the backdrop of systemic exploitation, the queen’s passing was met with little mourning among some Indigenous communities. O’Sullivan said the queen “didn’t speak out” about the treatment of indigenous Australians and called this moment an opportunity to think “about the relationship that the crown and the monarchy has to us.”
“There wasn’t any kind of challenge to what was happening here. And yet they were the head of the Commonwealth,” O’Sullivan told VICE World News. “This idea that we should be magnanimous about the passing of the queen… We never got that respect. We never got that idea that we mattered. And in fact, all we really got was exploitation.”
As Australians contemplate the political and societal implications of the queen’s death, prime minister Albanese—winner of May’s general election, who said in 2019 that the “time has come” for a modern Australian republic—declined to answer questions related to changes within the government.
“Today’s not a day for politics,” he said in a radio interview on Friday morning when asked about the topic. “Today’s a day to pay tribute to the service of Queen Elizabeth as our head of state over those 70 years and to give thanks to her dedication and to her contribution to Australia.”
But even once normality resumes, the issue may not be at the top of his agenda. Cindy McCreery, a British monarchy historian at the University of Sydney, said that Albanese’s government has its eyes set on fulfilling his election pledge of enshrining the Indigenous voice in parliament. A referendum on the issue is expected next year, which would see a constitutional amendment create a consultative body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
“My sense is that they will still maintain their priority of getting the Indigenous voice incorporated into Parliament before any moves to have another referendum on the republic,” she told VICE World News.
McCreery continued that it’s hard to tell whether the queen’s death will sway public opinion towards republicanism in the immediate term, though she believed it will likely “accelerate the process” of bringing about a referendum.
“More Australians really respect the Queen rather than respect the idea of monarchy,” she said, adding that while King Charles isn’t disliked, his reputation is complicated by controversies involving Princess Diana, his first wife who died in controversial circumstances in 1997, and a beloved figure with enduring popularity.
“I think there will be some sympathy and support for Charles, and a feeling that it would be really rude and tasteless to proceed with a [monarchy] referendum immediately,” said McCreery.
“But maybe in a year or so from now, it might be a time when people feel, now that the queen has passed on, this is a more appropriate time to make a major constitutional change.”
Follow Alastair McCready on Twitter
