Within 24 hours of Queen Elizabeth II’s death, the first cracks were forming in a carefully choreographed Australian response to the death of its head of state.
During a televised match between the Australian Women’s Football League (AFLW) teams in Melbourne on Friday, players stood to attention to hear a Pledge of Allegiance followed by a minute’s silence for the Queen.
However, controversy over a statement that the players stood on “unallocated” indigenous land was followed by a tribute to the country’s former monarch which he claimed was uncomfortable for some.
By Saturday, all other minutes of silence for AFLW matches had been canceled and the manager of one of the clubs, the Western Bulldogs, issued a statement saying the tribute “unearths deep wounds for us”.
The incident demonstrates the lingering pain felt by Australia’s First Nations people since their country was taken over by British settlers in 1788. In other Commonwealth nations, the Queen’s death has sparked cries – some louder than others – for quit movements of the British Monarchy for Democracy. But in Australia, despite Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s pro-democracy views, there is no concerted push in this direction.
In interviews and press conferences after the Queen’s death, Albanese has repeatedly said that now is not the time to talk about a democracy. And on Tuesday, the Australian Republican Movement appeared to agree, suspending its campaign on the issue until after the mourning period “out of respect for the Queen”.
But for Albanese, the reluctance to push for a republic right now is not just a matter of respect for the late monarch. The Labor leader made a campaign promise to hold a referendum on recognizing Australia’s First Nations people in the constitution within his first three-year term if he won office.
When asked about it on Monday, Albanese said: “I said at the time that I couldn’t imagine a situation where we changed our head of state to the head of state of Australia but still didn’t recognize First Nations people in our constitution and the fact that we live with the oldest continuous civilization on Earth. So these are our priorities this term.”
Changing the constitution requires a majority of Australians across the country, as well as a majority in most states, to vote yes in a referendum, a notoriously difficult task. Since Confederation in 1901, only eight of 44 proposals for constitutional change have been approved.
The last rejection came in 1999, when the country’s citizens were asked if they wanted to replace the Queen and governor-general with a President.
Back then, the campaign focused on severing ties with an archaic monarchy and advancing as a bold new multicultural nation intent on forging its own path. Indigenous issues were not high on the agenda, although Australians were asked a second question, to approve a new preamble to the constitution honoring First Nations people for their “kinship with their lands”. This also failed, with Aboriginal elders at the time complaining that they had not been consulted on the wording.
It was no surprise. Indigenous people had long complained that their voices had not been heard by successive governments, so much so that in 1999 Yawuru man Peter Yu, now Vice-Chancellor of First Nations at the Australian National University (ANU), took the advice of a local elder to take their message to the queen.
“A very old leader said, ‘You’d better go see this old girl abroad… because they pronounce her the wrong way here,'” Yu recalled. The old man meant that the only time Aboriginal people heard the queen’s name was when they were captured, Yu told CNN. “They felt that given the community’s respect for the Queen, her name was being sullied and her reputation was being tarnished, and therefore we had to go and explain the situation,” he said.
So they did.
Yu and a delegation met Queen Elizabeth for about 30 minutes at Buckingham Palace and received a much warmer welcome from the monarch than any government in the UK or Australia, he said.
Today, Yu says views within Australia’s Indigenous community about the Queen are mixed – as in most communities.
“There are strong emotions,” he said. “And we continue to suffer the full consequences of colonization. But do we hold her personally responsible for this? I don’t,” he said. “The one I hold responsible for this is the Australian government … governments that have willfully neglected their duty of care. That’s why I’m angry.”
By the end of his first term, Albanese promised a referendum on Voice in Parliament – a constitutional body that would for the first time give indigenous people a say in laws that affect them.
John Warhurst, emeritus professor of political science at ANU and former president of the Australian Democracy Movement, says a referendum on Voice to Parliament is “undoubtedly the first priority” over a democracy.
“You’re not going to have disagreements on this among Republicans,” he added.
Voice to Parliament is important for a number of reasons, Warhurst said. “It’s a line in the sand for Australia’s colonial past. It’s a line in the sand for race relations in Australia … and I think the message internationally would be shocking, too, if we fail to pass this referendum.”
However, not all natives support the idea.
Telona Pitt, a Ngarluma, Kariyarra and Meriam woman of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, is the administrator of the Vote No Constitutional Change Facebook group, which has 11,000 members.
He believes that many indigenous people were not given a say in the drafting of the document that led to plans for a Voice in Parliament. And he says the government is already aware of Indigenous problems but hasn’t done enough to fix them – and that won’t change with a referendum on Voice to Parliament.
“All it’s going to do is just weaken Aboriginal people and empower Parliament against us,” he said.
Pitt says a referendum should be held among indigenous people to see who supports the change before any questions are put to the general public.
Warhurst says Voice’s approval in Parliament would make it easier to pass further constitutional changes – but on the other hand, rejecting it could mean a longer road to a democracy.
He said after Voice to Parliament passes, Australia may be ready to consider life after the monarchy.
That may not happen for another five to 10 years, but campaigning on the issue should start early “from scratch” as Australia is not the same place it was in 1999, he said.
Potentially, convincing Australians it’s time for a democracy may be easier by then, as the nostalgia of a life under the Queen’s reign will have passed for older generations, who grew up with much closer ties to the British monarchy.
“Queen Elizabeth’s presence was influential for some in maintaining the status quo,” Warhurst said. “Well, I think now that we’ve moved on to a new King, some of the reluctance in the Australian community has gone away.”
However, Yu, from the ANU, said the issue of Indigenous Australia must be addressed before any talk of democracy.
“How can you have a democracy without settling the issue with the First Peoples?” asked. “To me, it’s nonsense. It has no integrity. It has no sense of morality or soul.”
