I had occasion the other day to dig up a piece I had written 50 years ago for Geoffrey Dutton’s symposium of 1966, Australia and the Monarchy. What prompted me was a speech on Magna Carta by John O’Sullivan, editor of Quadrant. He had been addressing a meeting at Sydney’s Parliament House of the Australian Monarchist League on the 800th anniversary of King John’s sealing the charter. He considered it a foundation moment of constitutional monarchy, since it purported to subject the monarch to the law of the land. What, I wondered, had been my ideas about monarchy and republicanism 50 years ago, and have I changed? Australia and the Monarchy was one of the first books put out by Sun Books, a paperback publisher established by Dutton, Max Harris and Brian Stonier. It was an early and mild manifesto of a new republicanism being promoted by native sons like Rupert Murdoch, Donald Horne, Max Harris, Richard Walsh and others to express their impatience with what they saw as the sleep-walking conservatism of monarchists. In those days republicanism was usually the creed of a small minority commonly regarded as ratbags or American sycophants. When Dutton wrote an article in the Bulletin foreshadowing his book, the letters to the editor, mainly from academics, were ironical when not contemptuous. Ho! Ho! they wrote. Why limit yourself to the monarchy? Why not abolish free speech, the rule of law and the Church while you are at it? Ho! Ho! The very word Australia makes you laugh!

But this was the 1960s, the end of the Age of Menzies, and the times were changing. Dutton, who sprang, he wrote, from ‘an ardently royalist family’, had assembled a group of cautious republicans to open up discussion on the issue. He invited me, as then editor of the Bulletin, which in its early years had been ‘ferociously republican’, to write a chapter commenting on the symposiasts. (In those days people who disagreed still talked civilly to each other.) So how does it read 50 years later? It’s a curate’s egg. I called it ‘The Phoney Debate’, meaning that since both republicans and monarchists believe in representative government, most Australians are content to leave more arcane questions to the effluxion of time. We already have, I wrote with some sanctimony, ‘the most successful liberal democracy the world has ever seen or is ever likely to see.’ Why the hurry to change it? It was an argument more from pragmatism than principle and would not have satisfied those republicans committed heart and soul to their cause who believed Australians badly needed ‘a new sense of identity’. But since most Australians did not hanker for ‘a new sense of identity’, it was up to republicans to show why we should and how it would do us good. Horne, for example, thought a bit of shock therapy, a ‘shock of reorientation’, would do us all a lot of good. I was sceptical.

I still hold to my scepticism. But my piece was sympathetic to two strands of the republican creed. One concerned our Head of State. In my chapter I sympathetically sketched the view of the conservative (or in Les Murray’s term: ‘vernacular’) republicans that our Head of State should be ‘one of us’, an Australian, not someone whose life is centred in another country. I am no longer dazzled by the charm of this idea. As things stand we have the best of all worlds. We have as Head of State a monarch who links us to several kindred free countries including Canada, New Zealand, Britain and a dozen smaller states; and we also have an Australian Governor-General with limited if essential powers who serves Australia uniquely. Visionaries may imagine different arrangements but it is hard to see how they would be better. The other idea I have since rethought is the inevitability of a republic. The 1999 referendum, held at the height of public enthusiasm for a republic, failed in every state. It is extremely difficult to foresee circumstances in which a referendum would be carried by a majority of Australians or of our states. Short of some national catastrophe, republicanism is a lost cause.

O’Sullivan also put a different argument to his already convinced audience in Sydney, one that I have not heard before. It turns out that the World Bank favours constitutional monarchies over republics. Drawing on some 30 constitutional monarchies ranging from Japan to Morocco and Bhutan (and including the constitutional principality of Monaco and the constitutional grand duchy of Liechtenstein), the World Bank finds that constitutional monarchies have an average GDP per capita of $29,106.71 and an average life expectancy of 75.6, whereas the republics have an average GDP per capita of $12,518.76 and an average life expectancy of 68.3. If you throw in the UN’s Human Development Index of 2011, the monarchies dominate the top ten countries. A few famous republics score well by these tests but numerically the monarchies easily win the argument.

In 1988, according to O’Sullivan, a group of distinguished Catholics advised PM Thatcher that British Catholics would consider any major celebration of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as offensive. So to its shame, her government celebrated the event as ‘Three Hundred Years of Anglo-Dutch Friendship’. O’Sullivan, a Catholic, thought this decision ‘absurd’ and ‘cowardly’. But at least it meant that some British Catholics had heard of the Glorious Revolution. Very few people today could tell you what 1688 and the Bill of Rights was about. Is the same true of Magna Carta? The great republican dictator Oliver Cromwell breezily shrugged it off as Magna Farta. At least he knew what it was about.