TRANSCRIPT:
(This transcript is derived from an automated process. The video recording is authoritative.)
Dr Chris Reynolds:
The Constitution. My goodness, you think that's going to be a lovely, fun evening, isn't it? It is. And I'm going to show you some stuff about this incredible country and this incredible document and really sort of wake us up to where in fact even our future is going.
Once we look at this document tonight, a lot of fun I've got here the original first printing of our constitution. Oh yeah, Lord. Without them crossing bits out all over the place. And it starts off really powerfully. I'm going to need my glasses, but I know what it says. It says the people where the people, whereas the people of these states, I thought a bit roped in there where the people of these states do constitute to form a federal government. Now the first thing I notice, it doesn't say, whereas the peoples, it doesn't say. It doesn't say, whereas most of the people, and it doesn't say. Whereas most people, except for all those little ethnic communities living in urban ghettos in the urban parts of Australia, it doesn't exclude anybody. It actually just says, whereas the people, that's us who form this constitution. Now the thing is that of course we'll probably know it was formed under the British government. It was an act of the British parliament, and what they did was only form another colony.
Just like they wrote the legislation for New South Wales and South Austral and Tasmanian Victoria. It was the same group, the parliament that then said, well, we're now going to form another colony and we'll call it the Commonwealth of Australia. So there was a problem right off, but there's a context of why on earth we still remain British. Of course we did, but I'm going to get around to the context. What has happened is that since that 120 odd years ago, since we wrote that there has been an eroding of what that document says. There's such a point that what we have now is not the document and the parliament, the government that we signed up for here, we've got a problem. And when we first started there was three levels of government and we had an executive officer, which was like, if you think about the American system, maybe you've got a president, a legislature and a court, but our executive section doesn't exist or operate. It exists, but it doesn't operate. Lemme give a bit of background in this. I think it's about, lemme see if I've got a date here.
No, it's about 1215. Let me go with that one. Magna Carter, did I get it right? Oh, thank you very much. What a guess. What happened was that King Richard went off the fight in the campaigns in the Middle East. What were they? ADEs the Crusades. And he left his brother, prince John, to look after the country. Well, prince John was a bit of a bugger for one of any other word, and he caused a lot of trouble and he upset the barons. That was the barrens that had the money of course, that funded the war and funded the government. And it got to the point that John was doing anything he liked. So the Barrons got together, they wrote this document and they forced him to sign it, called the Magna Carta. Now this document separated out the power of the executive, the king from the parliament.
We're going to form a parliament and we're going to write the laws. Obviously the courts were over there sort of on the side and this sort of principle continues on. The separation of powers is one of the two main political as I several I suppose communisms in the theories or principles of how we form government. And that's what you see with America when if you ever go to the United States and you've seen that building with the big dome on it and they put that up all the time. When you walk in there these days, there's nothing in there but tourists, it's empty. That sort of moved everything else into other rooms. But if you push your way through, the tourists just there on the right. When you walk in, there's a glass cabinet. And the first time I was there, I walked in, I turned to the right, and inside this glass cabinet is one of the five Magna Carters that were written in 1215.
And I mean I was just so impressed that I'm looking at one of the original documents that separates the power, that principle of the separation of powers is so fundamental to our western democracies. It's not just Australia or America or South Africa or Canada or New Zealand or even I think the Israel, and I think India's in there too, but there's others that are on that principle that you divide the powers. So it was a few months ago, it must be about a year ago now. I was in Parliament House in Sydney and I got introduced to, I've got to get his name right, his excellency, sir General Peter Cosgrove.
This is Peter, this is Chris and how are you? And he stood there with a beer in our hand and we had a chat and I said, and how did you get on Peter being Governor General as you would mate? And he said, I went off to America to go to a funeral or something and he said, I couldn't say a word. I wasn't allowed to represent Australia. He said, I didn't understand it. I said, well mate, maybe you hadn't noticed, but the office of Governor General has been reduced to nothing but a cypher. You do what you're told. And I wish I'd had the foresight to say to him, mate, they reduced that office to nothing but an auto pen.
You just sign things. When I worked for the New South Wales government years ago and they'd pass all their legislation, have their arguments on Thursday afternoons, they'd say it's, oh, it's your turn, Bob, take something over to see the governor and over. They'd go on and have a drink of wine and he'd sign everything that they gave him. Boom. There is no power in the executive office of this country anymore. And there is in the document, there is in our constitution when this business happened with Bondi and they ran out to see Governor General Sam and they said, Sam, I understand you've been getting calls to dismiss the Prime Minister because he's such, think of a word, a pathetic individual that he won't
Do anything. She says, oh, I don't have any power to dismiss the Governor General. I mean I haven't read the Constitution. I just them a social worker. I listen to people tell me about all their problems and I go home taking in all their pain. And I couldn't believe
That this woman did not know the Constitution. Were you alive when Kerr decided that he'd had enough of Whitham and he just said, I'm giving you the sack and I'm giving you the sack for these reasons. It's in the letters patent, boom, boom, boom, that the queen said I can do it. And it's in the Constitution clause one, two and six bang. And he was out the door. Well, may you save, save the queen because nothing's going to save the Governor General. That was all hot air, wasn't it? Because he had the right under our constitution to dismiss the Prime Minister not be a social. It's absolutely ridiculous. But that's where even the intelligence has gone that we understand our country has no longer got an executive office. Now, I dunno what I've got here in the points. I'm just going to tell you what I've got Anyway.
In that constitution that I gave you, I showed you, I'm going to show you another one. This is the original typed up draught of the Constitution that was written by one man out of Tasmania. It's a phenomenal story and we're going to say a few things about it. Well, this is a great story. I'll get into it. What happens is that there's an economic crisis in Australia. Massive amounts of money have been borrowed from England. I mean we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars. They didn't care. It all came in, it was invested. The English thought it was lovely, just push it into Australia, wheat, sheep, gold, they're rolling it back in and the government's just borrowed like they do today, just took it all in because it's a huge amount of money. And Victoria was particularly in debt. And so the guys from Victoria said to the guys in New South Wales, I think we need to have a chat.
And a little bit of background in this is that since the 1860s, England had been pushing Australia to federate and Earl Grey said, I am sick to death of all of you premiers and a lot of you writing me endless letters to complain about any blasted thing that's upsetting you, will you please federate? So I've only got one lot of letters to deal with. Instead of six, please said Earl Grey, will you federate? Well that just fell on Delphi because they all wanted their own independence and they wanted their own money, et cetera. But the time we're getting up to the 1890s, it's become a financial crisis. And so when I looked at this document and I discovered that it was Victoria that was actually pushing to form a federal government so they could push all their debts onto the federal government, I stopped and I sneakered and I thought to myself, nothing's strange much has it?
Nothing's changed much. And that's what it was about. And they started to do some deals. So we're going to have some conferences, we'll have a convention, we'll call discuss a constitution. Does anybody know anything about Constitution, by the way? Must be somebody out there apart from Americans. Anyway, we'll have a convention we'll get together in New South Wales. Well, while we were planning it, the fellow from Tasmania, Andrew English Clark was the attorney general and a young fellow member of the Parliament. And he'd formed an American club. And I thought to myself, how do you get an American club going in Tasmania? I mean, where do you sort of get the numbers for quorum? I suppose invite a couple of penguins in on Thursdays or something. But anyway, there he was with his penguin. I mean he's, he's American club. And so Tasmania was in a bit of trouble.
So he had to go off to England to defend Tasmania where right, and whoever else was wrong. And on the way back, he stopped into Washington because it was great for him to be there and mixed with a few of the celebrities in Washington. And they got into his head and gave him a few ideas. So he gets back on the boat, he writes this thing on the boat that I've just shown you. He shows up in Sydney just a few days before he gets up to the conference and there they are sitting around, George, how are you getting on? There's been probably
Some months or years or so. Said, what did you call that little colony of yours in the end? Oh, Adelaide, oh yes,
It's only 10 minutes to morning tea time. I mean somebody's got to come up with an agenda, I suppose, of this next week. Anyway, while they're all sitting there and talking about their swans and their tea, in walks young English, he comes up to the main desk with Griffith and a few others and he walks up, he looks at 'em and he slaps 96 clauses for a constitution on the table. And they're looking at it and they're turning the pages and he's written it. And while they were looking at it and he said, have you thought of a name, A name, a name? He said, well, yes, you're going to Vee and become a nation. What are you going to call it? Well, I dunno. He said, call it the Commonwealth of Australia. The Commonwealth of Australia. Why? He said, well, that's what the British do.
They have the Commonwealth, Virginia, Commonwealth of Philadelphia and Delaware. That's what the British do call it, the Commonwealth of Australia. And while they're thinking about that, he opened his satchel, pulled out this old rag from Tasmania, held it up and he said, and what about this for a flag? The flag the name and the constitution come from one man in the Tasmania. And I bet we've never even heard of him and we don't even teach him in school. We have one founding father and we don't tell our children about how our country was formed. What's the matter with us?
And this fella slapped and they didn't know what to do with this document. Well, I know what they went and did, but let me keep going and see if I'm going to come back to it. But what they did was there was a problem. And so just after this conference, a few guys got on Samuel Griff boat that he'd come down the coast with lovely sort of a boat. He'd just sort of drift down to Sydney. So they went up into the Hawkesbury and a few of them sat there and the problem came out, money and power. Well, what are we going to do? He's written his blast of thing and he separated out the powers. And I mean we really can't have this, can we? And I'll tell you, here's a good quote that sums it up of what these guys were writing. And here is the point, a couple of years later, one of these fellas wrote, how far more beneficial in every way, how far more likely to extend our revenues and minimise our expenditures?
How far more impressive to the outside world read England and to our creditors in England would be the complete pooling of our debts and our railways, our national establishments. Generally, how much more beneficial will our creditors think we are if we actually just pull everything and push it through one fund? They thought of nothing but the money and how they were going to keep up their relationship with the banks. They did not care. So what they actually did was move the constitution around what Inglis Clarke had written finishes with the principle that already existed with the colonies, right from Macquarie or the next fellow on there was a governor and under Philip and a few others, it was basically a Viceroy, go out there and rule the country, do what you want, write us letters and we'll check with you. Then they invented a council.
Some were elected or appointed and they sit there with the governor and say, well, I don't think that's going to work Lachlan. That might cause, well we better do this. Have you thought about that? And the governor would take it under advice. By the time we get to the New South Wales constitution, the council is half the 36 members and half of them are elected right into the council. So these people are advising the governor who now no longer does legislation. He listens. Now this principle then is picked up in the Australian constitution. The governor general will have a council to advise him that he may accept or he may not, he can have a lieutenant, but he will appoint all the offices and the ministers of state, very American. But that's where the Americans got it from. They didn't take it from Americans. That was the principle of how you ran the British colonies.
So these people that sitting on the boat decide, oh, well this isn't going to benefit us. So they move executive supremacy, the running of the government to parliamentary supremacy and they actually move the document around. So it doesn't run. Here is our preamble about the queen. Here is the executive government about the governor General. Here is the parliament and the judiciary. They shift it and they make the first section about the parliament. We the power in the Parliament and all the people on the council to advise the Governor General. The ministers of state shall be members of the parliament. And we'll, what's another word for you? Think of something, fix 'em. That wasn't what going to say by actually having him under our control. So when they actually came to give us the constitution and we were becoming dependent, it's a bit like the other referendums they throw at us. Just vote yes, yes. The what? Oh, don't ask too many questions,
Just vote yes. But you're saying you're going to invent a fourth arm of government. They'll be just, and who's on it? Oh, just all my mates. What are you talking about?
So you can hear that there's just vote, yes, stuff is just rubbish. And so people didn't even know what was being put before them and how we had been done because you see where is the problem? After they did the federation and everybody came and the massive crowds were there and everybody said, and then after party the next day they said, well, that's all very good, but how are we going to run the country? Well, the same way we always have happened the West Mr system, but that's not the document. Oh we'll just do it and call it convention. Convention. There is no such thing in our constitution as a prime minister, it is constitutionally illegitimate. There is no such thing in our constitution as a cabinet and no such thing as a party. And yet these three elements are running our country and we have replaced the power of the Prince Prince John with the power of the parliament and the power of the prime minister. Our prime minister, regardless of the party is an Acra.
He runs the cabinet or she does runs the parliament and they tell the governor General what to sign. Our prime minister can decide that our prime minister can decide if you're under 16, you can't have the internet. Our prime minister can decide what we're going to do in terms of a royal commission. It comes down to that one position regardless of who they are. And under Morrison when the crisis hit him, he just said, I'm going to be all of these other ministers that took over all their jobs. We have a prince, our tyranny prince running our country that is not constitutional and we have a problem
Though the distribution of power in our parliament is such that our executive office has become unfunctional and we just run it by convention. The second thing is the distribution of power across our country. You see, we seem to think, well we do think that we're a sovereign country. We sort of are, but we're sort of not because we are in fact legally what's called a shared sovereignty country. And that is, as I pointed out before, our states are constituted by the same body that put together the federal parliament and they have equal legal rights as our federal government. Now what they did in our federal government, they took the principle that the Americans have and says that which is not given is retained. The states, if they don't give power, they retain it. And that's why in America you see the states will sue the federal government or the states will file, they've got different rights and you get different laws.
But here we sort of fudge it and we wrote in this little clause on the side that said, well that works until the federal government says it wants to take things over. So if you take for example, a good one is the Mabo declaration where there was this people in the Torres Strait one island who then said, well my ancestors used to be here, not the Torres Strait was part of Australia. I don't think at that time, I'm not sure. It was a funny sort of a nebulous situation and we'll have a look at it. So it made its way down to the federal courts and in this, when they had to read this horrible 150 pages, the first 100 pages deals with the issue of terror. Now you may have heard that term before, you probably have, but very few people realise it's actually Latin.
The Romans used it. It's like Axus, Romanos or Roman and it means terror, land, naali, nobody rules not, doesn't live there, nobody rules. But what the Mabo declaration, not that the case is it wants to say that it tried to say that England didn't have a right to declare Australia to be terror. Well if you did your research, it wasn't England, it was international law, there were books written on it. You couldn't just go and start a settlement or own something unless under the Irish concept of sovereignty you worked the land. So you had to do something. So on even the French main book on the subject on Terra, then of course what it meant was you couldn't just have a military settlement, say we own it, you had to work the land and become part of it. Good concept, ancient concept. And that's why somebody was in the ruler of it or the owner of sovereignty.
So when it came to this, what they wanted to say was the rule didn't exist. Well, you haven't done your homework, so you dunno what you're saying if you're wanting to do that. So these were only judges anyway. So when they got to this, what these judges should have known if they're going to be reading Latin and knowing the law is that terra was replaced with Riga and nobody rules became the king's land. And the moment the king says great ancient judge Blackwell of England, he said, the moment the king put his name to those letters, patent England, the greatest empire in history owned Australia. They didn't even have to arrive once the king said it was his. That was law. And so today we still have crown land because it is the king's land under the rule of terrace rigas. And what happened was at the end of that document of the Mabo thing, they then turned in it.
They then after a hundred pages of it haven't had any good, they turned a land law to try and somehow give native title and failed. And so the last paragraph or class sentence in that document says, this is none of our business, this terra the taking over under letters pattern of New Guinea and that area was done by Queensland. If you want a decision on this, go back to Queensland and ask them why have I read 150 pages for one sentence? But that's what it said. So the next year Paul Keating then wrote federal law over the top of the states, over the top of Queensland and just said, I'm now taking over all the business to do with aboriginal land, et cetera. Because there wasn't any rule in history to say that he could, but he was the prime minister, remember he can do what he wants.
And that was the sort of thing that we ended up with this whole business of how we're in this situation that the Prime Minister could just override the states and whatever. So we've got a problem. We need to go back and let the states have their power. The third problem we got is not with the distribution of power in the government, the distribution of power across the country. It's the abuse of power by those behind the people that you elect. We call the bureaucracy. And when you think you're going to vote for the local member, Mr. Jolly, he is going to have the parliament to represent you. I can assure you 90 something percent, he doesn't have a clue about one parliamentary procedure, political philosophy, the history of English law, and if they make him the minister, whatever defence, you can bet he doesn't have one bit of a gun from the other.
So how do these people get the job? I mean percent lovely lady I got all the time and the welfare for but to make her the minister for finance, the what? The Minister for finance, I mean you're talking reserve banks, you're talking the interest rates and the lab rate and you're talking about international, how you're going to run an economy fiscal policy. You sure Jacinda, you can do this. Well Jacinda is not going to do it, is she? She's just going to head in an office and the bureaucrats are going to come in and give her the same sort of song. When I worked in New South Wales, a new minister would come in and he'd have great ideas of what he was going to do and he'd call up the Department of Main Roads and he'd come in and say, now these are all the things I want fixed.
And they'd say, that's a great idea minister, we think it's wonderful minister, but we've got this schedule that goes for three years. So if you're still in, we got the time in three years, minister, perhaps you could give you some of your ideas and we'll put it into the next schedule. He was neutralised by the time he walked in the door and the best thing you could do would be to look at the little pamphlets that went out before they posted them. I mean you could do nothing for the minister except go on colour ribbon. And that's the way our system works. We have an incredible bureaucracy behind the people that you vote for. You don't know their names, you dunno their power. You don't even know the whopping great salaries that they get paid and try to get rid of them. That is a massive problem.
When I wrote this book of mine, I finished with I think five pages of Rubbishing the Bureaucracy, and maybe that's a bit much. I cut it down to a couple of paragraphs, but they are just riddling what happens in America when a president comes in, he says, right, all you secretaries of state, you're out the gate. Now I've got a whole new group and under them you don't hear about it, but they appoint what's called Level Cs. So anyone that's in charge of anything else is a new appointment under the political party. We just have the same old bureaucrats with all their own commitments to the same departments who come up and leak constantly from the minister's office. They have drinks with their bureaucratic mates on Fridays and they tell one another what's going on and they plan how they're going to do over the minister. I can tell you that because I've been there. We have a massive problem of a lack of democracy in this country. A wonderful absolute mess.
Now the thing is that when we think about why don't we have a Republican? Now here's the problem with that. The Irish and the Scots have hated the English before they even got here and it just goes on for hundreds of years and the United have ever seen the Irish come out, they live in Bondi. I went down into my son, took me down to this basement out of this big hotel was filled with all this young Irish. I looked around, my eyes were all open and they started to sing the old Irish rebel songs against the English. I'm looking at these kids singing all this. They still ate, the English still ate English. So when they actually say, oh, we want a republic, they're only saying we don't like the English is what they're saying. But the labour union movement did not want to federate because it was filled with the Scots and the Irish and they wanted to take on the states rather than the federal government.
You've got to watch what they're saying. And even under John Howard when he decided we're going to have a referendum and maybe become a republic in the last minute you may remember, he said, oh no, I'm going to appoint the Governor General. And that was the end of it. We weren't going to even be able to elect our governor general ourselves because he would continue the same old story and appoint one of his mates down the gutter that went, they just want to keep the same old system going, just vote yes and it's not democracy. What happened with Inglis Clark is he realised that there was money involved in what was going on. His attitudes became far more democratic. Now, Inglis Clark is an interesting character in as much as he was a lawyer, but he was also a philosopher and he'd read a lot of Jefferson, he'd read a lot of all these other great minds, brilliant minds.
And this is what Jefferson said. I put it in a book I wrote in the Shadow of the Crown about how you do a referendum for the former republic years ago. Jefferson writes, and it's in that monument you sometimes see at the end of the water in Washington where they zoom the camera around. Jefferson writes, some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the proceeding age of wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. We must as well as require a man, we might as well require a man to wear the coat that fitted him as a boy, a civilised society to remain ever under the regime of its ancestors.
He says, it's time we grew up and we're able to see that we need change. Now in the work of Andrew Clark, he writes something similar. This is 19 18 91. We are proud to have sprung by the same race as the inhabitants of the British Isles. I believe however, that it is our destiny to produce a different type of manhood from that which exists in those islands. It is politically, it is political autonomy. We now ask for Australia as a whole. And there in 1901 he was pushing for independence and a democracy. We are vulnerable to the insults against our country. We put up with people that will get into our schools and get into the minds of our children. We see the marches on the street and the idiots that would burn our flag. And I think of my father's in their sacrifice in the Second World War, and I had an uncle that was working on the bridge choir, bridge of the river choir and walked out.
He secretly made an Australian flag and led those poor skinny bastards out of that place under his flag and they would be disgusted, absolutely disgusted to see these rat bags on our streets burning our flags and criticising our country. We are vulnerable to the insults that are flung at us because we don't know our history.
We have trouble being proud of our country because we don't know the great men and women that had pride, had faith, had tenacity to build this country and to make something of themselves for this country. The question is not just who they are, it must come back to us and to say, do we have the personal integrity to be able to stand on the shoulders of such people and be able like them to contribute to the future? That's the challenge that we have. We are vulnerable because we don't know our history.
I've written this with as much integrity as I can. I try not to. I don't have a political opinion. If I have an opinion, I'll put it in some funny comment about what was going on. But I have integrity as an academic and an intellectual. And that book is based on the total facts as I can find them because that's important to me. You want Australian history, fall in love with this incredible story. But we need to know our history because at the moment we're having trouble defining ourselves as a country and what's worse.
We are now in a position where we are unable to define our country for our children and we're letting others determine the mess that we're in. Again, why over money and power? And they don't care less about our country. Ladies and gentlemen, we do need change. We do need to have firstly, an understanding of who we are, what our constitution's about. This phenomenal, and it could be even a better document if we actually made it a democracy. Thank you very much for your time.
