MALCOLM TURNBULL’S BOOK about the Australian republican campaign, Fighting for the Republic, begins with an acknowledgement of his family, who were with him all the way to the crushing loss in the 1999 referendum. The diary was published by Turnbull’s old friend Sandy Grant—himself a campaigner—within weeks of the poll, when emotions were still raw. In a few deeply felt lines, Turnbull touched on Lucy’s contribution in drafting the articles of association of the Australian Republican Movement in 1990, then remembered:
When my republican saga began, our two children, Alex and Daisy, were only little kids. They are now seventeen and fifteen years of age. It won’t be long before they will be adults, able to vote one day for an Australian republic. I will never forget the tears in their eyes on 6 November and the way they hugged me after the republic referendum was defeated.1
Six years earlier, Turnbull had dedicated his first book on the issue, The Reluctant Republic, to Alex and Daisy, because this was the cause of the future, ‘and the future, as always, belongs to the young’.2 The kids’ campaign presence was cute media fodder: they gave the odd stump speech, they handed out leaflets. But the campaign that consumed the Turnbull family and took Malcolm away for so many nights didn’t pan out the way they wanted.
Turnbull’s republicanism was obvious early, in the Nation Review journalist-cum-law student analysing the constitutional implications of the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government, and in the Rhodes scholar put off by the ‘dilly’ toffs at Oxford. Beating the British government in court helped, as Turnbull explained: ‘I have always been a republican, but the Spycatcher affair radicalised me.’3 It was Australia’s bicentenary celebrations that really lit Turnbull’s fuse, however, as he wrote in the stirring opening chapter of The Reluctant Republic:
January 26, 1988. Sydney Harbour was glittering in the bright sunshine. A million Australians crowded the foreshores. A fleet of tall ships, their sails full-bellied in the wind, glided past hundreds of yachts and launches and surf skis and sailboarders … This was to be the most important day in a most important year. It was a day that we would wish always to remember, to tell our children and grandchildren about: the spectacle, the fireworks … but not the pride … [T]he nation was not honoured on Australia Day, 1988. Instead of affirming our particular identity as Australians we confirmed—or our leaders confirmed for us—that we were not a nation like other nations, that we were still something less. For at the Opera House I could see and hear the speeches. The most important one, the longest one, the one accorded the place of honour, was not uttered by an Australian … Our two hundredth national day was presided over by an Englishman. Our own national leaders were just warm-up acts for the Prince of Wales … That bicentennial year was a year of shame. Every major event was presided over by a member of the British royal family … When the eyes of the world turned to Australia we showed them … the royal family of another country.4
Turnbull’s righteous anger was undeniable, but not every Australian felt the same that day. Down on the ground, the loyalists and royal-watchers in the crowd were revelling in it. Over at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair and in pockets around the harbour foreshore, the blackfellas were proudly waving Indigenous flags and protesting ‘Invasion Day’—Bob Hawke and Prince Charles were both occupiers, subject to much the same derision. Turnbull soon declared his republicanism in a fiery opinion piece for London’s Sunday Times newspaper,5 started work on The Reluctant Republic and joined the board of Ausflag, whose charter was to get rid of the Union Jack.
The bicentenary celebrations certainly were a low point for Australian republicanism, not only in Turnbull’s office. The Australian Bicentennial Authority had dismissed the republic issue as divisive. The 1988 Constitutional Convention also felt the issue was too emotionally charged and concluded there was ‘no prospect … of a change in public opinion in the near future which would result in there being majority support for a republic’. Instead, it came up with some worthy but dull reform proposals—enshrining basic rights and freedoms in the Constitution, one vote one value, a four-year term, recognising local government—which were promptly voted down at a subsequent referendum after a brilliant campaign by federal Liberal MP Peter Reith, who was then blooded.6
Turnbull did not invent the republican movement in Australia, of course, but it is a history of fits and starts. The colony was born in the shadow of the momentous American and French republican revolutions. The Presbyterian reverend John Dunmore Lang—a minister to Turnbull’s ancestors—wrote the first Australian republican tract in 1850. During the 1880s and 1890s, in the push that led to Federation, a group of ‘hot’ republicans supported by The Bulletin agitated around the constitutional conventions—there was even a proposal for direct election of the governor-general—and the term ‘commonwealth’ expressed a republican sentiment. After Federation, a republic went off the agenda for sixty years, but the decline of the British empire—marked by the fall of Singapore in 1942, Indian independence in 1947, the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the UK’s move to join the European Common Market in the early 1960s—prompted soul-searching as Australians faced a future in Asia alone. Donald Horne envisaged an Australian republic in his 1964 book The Lucky Country, in what would later be labelled a ‘patriotic minimalism’,7 which set the tone for what was to come in thirty years time:
How Australia will become a republic, and when, is not predictable. However one knows that the older generations to whom such a change is unthinkable are going to die, and that in the younger generations there is likely to be little interest in preserving Australia as a monarchy … it will become politically practicable to make this break; all that is needed is some push from events, some dramatic reason for making it … When Australia becomes a republic a president might be appointed by pretending that nothing really had changed: just replace the governor-general as quietly as possible with a president. One might think that such a dignitary would have to be elected by the people but the Australian political leaders might prefer to sneak him in through a back door.8
The dismissal would provide just the push Horne anticipated: a new non-party group, Citizens for Democracy, formed that year to campaign for reform of Australia’s monarchic constitution—what Horne called the ‘governor-generalate’. Horne chaired a huge meeting at Sydney Town Hall in 1976 and joining him on stage were Aboriginal magistrate Pat O’Shane, historian Manning Clark, Jim McClelland (senator in the Whitlam government and stepdad of Fiona, whom Turnbull was dating at around this time), then education officer for the NSW Labor Council Bob Carr, political cartoonist Bruce Petty, unionist and environmental agitator Jack Mundey and Labor activist Franca Arena. The meeting, attended by 2500 people, resolved that ‘to symbolise its maturity as a nation, Australia should become a republic’. Just like Turnbull thirty years later, Horne then found himself personally attacked by monarchists who called him a ‘little known author’, ‘leader of the republican stormtroopers’, ‘undistinguished’, ‘pathetic’, a ‘self-appointed prophet’ and the ‘high priest of republicanism’. The slurs continued during the Queen’s visit in 1977. Covered by Turnbull as a young journalist at The Bulletin, it was the first royal tour to be met by substantial opposition. Republicans were called radicals, ratbags, political stirrers, professional protesters, larrikins, louts, anarchists, tasteless demonstrators, notoriety seekers, Marxists, socialists, two-bob republicans, rootless intellectuals, mental midgets, pseudo-academics, and a vocal minority who should be sprayed with DDT.9
The rage at the dismissal was not maintained for long, however. The republicans suffered from what has been described as the movement’s Achilles heel: ‘inevitabilism’—the false assumption that change will happen by itself, without struggle. So republican sentiment flared and faded fast. As historian Mark McKenna wrote in his Captive Republic, ‘it may well be that the most important effect of Kerr’s act on the Australian electorate was to convince the people that the head of state should be elected and directly accountable to the people’.10
The idea for the Australian Republican Movement originally came from Franca Arena, who became a NSW Labor MP and in 1989 lobbied Neville Wran to set up a national committee of prominent Australians to lead the republican debate. Wran approached celebrated novelist Thomas Keneally, who wrote later:
The lunch at Jill Hickson’s and Neville Wran’s table had now reached the point where nearly all the fish they bought the day before at the Sydney Fish Markets had been eaten. In a manner all too typical of generous Sunday lunches in Sydney, a number of bottles of Hunter Valley Chardonnay had also been drained. Neville Wran leaned over the table and said, ‘The other thing I want to see happen before I bloody well die is an Australian Republic’.11
The image of chardonnay-sipping republicans would dog the movement forever after.
The ARM was created in late 1990 and run out of the offices of Turnbull & Partners, where it was reliant on financial and in-kind support from Turnbull, who was following in Gordon Barton’s footsteps and putting his money into a cause—whether out of altruism or as an exercise in vanity politics. The timing was good. The looming centenary of the first Constitutional Convention in 1891, and of the foundation of the Labor Party in NSW that same year, kicked things along, and the ALP’s June national conference in Hobart committed the party to achieve a republic by 2001. The ARM held its public launch at The Rocks in Sydney the next month, releasing the following declaration signed by its fourteen high-profile foundation members, including Keneally, Horne, Wran and Turnbull:
We, as Australians, united in one indissoluble Commonwealth, affirm our allegiance to the nation and people of Australia. We assert that the freedom and unity of Australia must derive its strength from the will of its people. We believe that the harmonious development of the Australian community demands that the allegiance of Australians must be fixed wholly within and upon Australia and Australian institutions. We therefore propose, as a great national goal for Australia—Australia shall become an independent republic.
The ARM was non-partisan and opted for the narrowest possible form of a republic, proposing simply that the Queen and governor-general be replaced by a president elected by a vote of both houses of parliament.12 For all its professionalism, resources and high-calibre founders, however, the ARM might easily have fizzled like earlier republican efforts if it were not for Paul Keating, who wrested the Labor leadership from Bob Hawke at the end of 1991. Keating would become the first Australian prime minister to make the republic an integral and active part of a party political platform.13
In Turnbull’s account, Keating’s embrace of the republic happened almost by accident. The Queen visited in January 1992 to mark the sesquicentenary of Sydney; Keating congratulated her on her forty years on the throne and reflected on how things had changed, commenting that ‘just as Great Britain some time ago sought to make her future secure in the European community, so Australia now vigorously seeks partnerships with countries in our own region. Our outlook is necessarily independent.’ The remarks did not offend the Queen—and Buckingham Palace later put out a statement saying so—but they did offend the opposition, with John Hewson, Tim Fischer and Alexander Downer all denouncing Keating’s short speech as ungracious, embarrassing or worse. Keating was surprised and thought ‘perhaps this was a soft spot that called for more prodding’.14 The kerfuffle continued when Keating touched the Queen on the back in an effort to guide her at a function, sparking headlines on Fleet Street like ‘Hands Orf Cobber’ and ‘Lizard of Oz’. Keating revelled in the upset and launched into the Liberals in parliament:
You would take Australia right back down the time tunnel to the cultural cringe where you have always come from … These are the same old fogies who doffed their lids and tugged their forelock to the British establishment … we will not have a bar of it. You can go back to the fifties, to your nostalgia, your Menzies, your Caseys and the whole lot. They were not aggressively Australian, they were not aggressively proud of our culture.15
Even the party was taken aback, one senior Labor figure telling Turnbull: ‘Geez, mate, I don’t know what went wrong. Some bloody fool in his office gave him the speech notes for the IRA fundraiser on Saturday, and it was too late before we realised the mistake.’16 But polls showed a jump in popular support for a republic, and Keating grabbed the issue with gusto. He made the republic a feature of the March 1993 election, alongside an all-out scare campaign on Hewson’s GST.
Within weeks of being re-elected, Keating appointed Turnbull as chair of the Republic Advisory Committee, tasked with examining not whether Australia should become a republic, but the constitutional options were it to choose to do so. Turnbull was intensely proud of the five months he spent chairing the committee, which visited twenty-one cities, took hundreds of submissions and produced a two-volume report totalling more than five hundred pages. The Reluctant Republic, which had been held up by the work of the committee, was finally published that same year. It included a copy of the Constitution at the back, marked-up with the ARM’s proposed amendments. By the end of 1993 Turnbull was an expert on the Constitution who could match wits with anyone in the land.
There is no doubt that Keating’s fiery, divisive rhetoric on a republic provoked a powerful backlash. Australians for Constitutional Monarchy was launched in mid-1992, and the following year, after Hewson’s defeat at the polls, his staffer Tony Abbott joined to become the ACM’s first national director. Turnbull would spend the next five years in pitched battles with Liberal Party figures who already were, or would become, the most senior conservative politicians in the country.
A 1991 debate with then senator Bronwyn Bishop, moderated by compere Jana Wendt and broadcast on Channel Nine, was an early sign of how emotional the republic issue would get. It is one of the rare occasions when Turnbull has lost his temper on live television, and an ice-cool Wendt was happy to let sparks fly.
Turnbull: ‘[T]he reality is if you change Australia into a republic, the only thing that would change is that the governor-general would become a president and would be the head of state as opposed to the head of state’s deputy … almost all republics in the world have a president as a constitutional head of state with only ceremonial powers.’
Bishop: ‘The United States does not Malcolm.’
Turnbull: ‘I know that, the United States and France are two … you tell me one other exception in the democratic world …’
Bishop: ‘… in Eastern Europe there are plenty of republics there that people who came here were very pleased to leave.’
Turnbull: ‘… that’s right, the time has come for you to kick the communist can … are we all agents of the communists, are we?’
Bishop: ‘Of course not, don’t get the red herring out, Malcolm …’
Turnbull: (Finger pointing) ‘Senator, with great respect … you are patronising the Australian electorate (throws up hands) …’
Bishop: ‘Most Australians like what we have, they are well served by it …’
Turnbull: ‘If you are seriously suggesting that by having a president as opposed to the Queen as our head of state, that that is going to prejudice our democracy and have the tanks rolling in, then surely you’ve gone right over the edge of alarmism!’
Bishop: ‘The case for you to put is why we need change.’
Wendt: ‘Malcolm Turnbull, do you think this is a question of maturity? Do you think we’re mature enough as a nation, to be weaned from the mother country?’
Turnbull: ‘I think we are. I’m sorry that Senator Bishop wants to continue with this sort of grovelling approach to the royal family …’
Bishop: ‘Oh, rubbish Malcolm’ …
Wendt: ‘You say grovelling (turns to Bishop), what’s your response to that?’
Bishop: ‘My response to that is I’ve just been insulted! How dare you say to me I grovel! I do not! I am perfectly satisfied with the system of government we have. I feel free, fully independent, and Australian.’
Turnbull: ‘Bronwyn (leans over) Bronwyn, how many countries in the world have a head of state that is not a national of that country? You name them!’
Bishop: ‘Malcolm we are discussing our country…’
Turnbull: ‘Which ones!’
Bishop: ‘… my country and your country.’
Turnbull: ‘Do you think the French would tolerate a head of state who wasn’t a Frenchman? The Americans would tolerate it? The reality is you are not proud as an Australian.’
Bishop: ‘Malcolm, I am extraordinarily proud as an Australian. How dare you tell me I’m not!’
Turnbull: ‘No you’re not! You want an Englishwoman as your head of state!’17
The unmistakeable menace, the barely controlled fury, when Turnbull leaned towards Bishop, growling through his teeth, was not a good look. Bishop is ultra-conservative—a devotee of the far-right novelist Ayn Rand—and anathema to Turnbull, politically. But it was still a downright ugly performance and would have alienated most of the audience as well as earning him the lasting enmity of Bishop. Wendt kept her poise, signing off before the break: ‘It’s going to be an interesting ten years, isn’t it!’
Another to cop a Turnbull hectoring was then Liberal opposition leader John Howard, on the Willesee TV show at the time of Turnbull’s appointment to Keating’s republic committee. Howard was deeply suspicious of Keating’s committee, questioning why no monarchists had been appointed, and stuck to his mantra: Why change something that’s worked so well?
Turnbull: ‘Can I say this to you, there comes a point where a democratic politician has got to consider whether he’s going to participate in the democratic process or not …’
Howard: ‘What do you think you and I are doing?’ …
Turnbull: ‘But you participate by saying stop, stop! We can’t have it [a republic]!’
Howard: ‘No, I participate by arguing the merits of the present system … Why is the PM unwilling to allow both sides of the argument to be analysed?’ …
Turnbull: ‘No, no, John, you’ve got to stop demonising your opponents …’
Howard: ‘Don’t start appealing to me on the basis of the Australian interest. I mean the prime minister last night said in one breath “I want to include the Liberal Party” and then in the next breath he said we’re a bunch of no-hopers, and in the face of that you ask me to accept that he is serious about genuine debate on this subject. You’ve got to be joking, Malcolm.’
Turnbull: ‘He didn’t say you were a bunch of no-hopers. He said you had a very important contribution to make …’
Howard: ‘Yeah, yeah … when Paul Keating starts saying nice things about me, I get worried.’18
Turnbull’s head-on confrontations with Tony Abbott laid the groundwork for a lasting rivalry. It did get nasty. At one point Turnbull phoned Abbott, accused him of deliberately misquoting him, demanded an apology and hung up with, ‘You’ll be hearing from me.’ Abbott complained to the media: ‘That’s lawyers’ speak for “I’m going to sue you” … it’s the third time he’s threatened to sue members of this organisation this year.’19 Abbott quit ACM in 1994 to successfully contest a by-election in the federal seat of Warringah on Sydney’s northern beaches, but he remained a committed loyalist and wrote his first book, The Minimal Monarchy, in defence of the status quo. When Howard defeated Keating in 1996, there was a tense hiatus as the new government debated whether to deliver on its pre-election commitment to hold a constitutional convention to determine a consensus proposal that could be put to the people in a referendum in the following term. The convention would be half-appointed by Howard and half-elected by the people, and the Coalition wanted voting to be voluntary. The enabling legislation was blocked in the Senate by Labor and the cross-benchers—who thought it was a thin-end-of-the-wedge proposal to abolish compulsory voting—which led to a stalemate: no referendum without a convention; no convention without voluntary voting. Howard, an avowed monarchist in no hurry to debate a republic, was prepared to walk away.
In July 1997, journalist David Koch’s Face to Face program got Turnbull and Abbott together to argue the toss. Turnbull said more, and clearly believed he had it all over the scrappy parliamentary secretary, but two decades on it seems the very young-looking Abbott had his measure. Turnbull launched into Abbott, blaming him for the defeat of the enabling legislation, and challenged the government to go straight to a referendum based on an agreed set of constitutional amendments that could be approved by parliament. Off-camera, when they went to the ad break, Koch cautioned Turnbull to tone it down a bit:
Koch: ‘Malcolm, a good fiery first break. Let’s have the stoush over and let’s get into some facts, OK?’
Turnbull: ‘OK.’
Abbott: ‘You told us there’d be no ear-biting in this!’
Turnbull: ‘Tony’s ears are too gristly. They’re cauliflower ears. I’d never be able to digest them.’
But almost as soon as they returned, they were back into it, with Turnbull firing the opening shot:
Turnbull: ‘… it would be helpful also Tony if you didn’t go round saying the convention will never have a consensus.’
Abbott: ‘It’s interesting Malcolm, isn’t it, how easily distracted the republicans in the Senate were, that they should allow this red herring of compulsory or optional voting … to deny the Australian people a chance to get this process up and running before the year 2001.’
Turnbull: ‘Well obviously that was your purpose, to distract them.’
Abbott: ‘Malcolm, the government wanted and still wants a constitutional convention with half the delegates appointed and half the delegates elected … Why does the republican movement try to frustrate that?’
Turnbull: ‘… The tragedy is that we’re having this convention at all. I mean, we have got in the federal parliament several hundred MPs and senators, every single one of whom is directly elected by the people, every single one of whom is being paid for by our taxes. It is their constitutional duty to consider amendments to the Constitution …’
Abbott: ‘Well, it’s not up to the government to draft a republican constitution.’
Turnbull: ‘Rubbish! Read the Constitution, Tony! … I mean, what were you doing over at Oxford? Spending all your time boxing?’
Abbott: ‘Look, Malcolm, there’s nothing to stop you getting one of your supporters in the parliament to put up a private member’s bill to do just that. Why don’t you go ahead and do that? The reason why you don’t go ahead and do that is because you can’t agree on the kind of republic you want …’
Turnbull: ‘There would be absolutely no difficulty doing that, and if we felt the government would treat it at all seriously, I think we’d probably do it. We have put up our republican model … certainly on the last occasion, Tony, you and I spoke with the prime minister about it, when you were very critical of the idea of a convention and together with me urged the prime minister not to go ahead with it and instead to have a direct vote …’
Abbott: ‘I thought that was a private conversation …’
Turnbull: ‘Well, it was private until you told the press about it, now I’m free to talk about it too. But the fact was that everyone is pretty much on side in terms of the type of republican model you’d have.’
Abbott: ‘But that’s not true Malcolm …’
Turnbull: ‘It is true!’
Abbott: ‘… the Australian people say that if we’re going to become a republic, they want to elect the president.’20
Abbott, of course, would be proved right—not that he was proposing to do anything to give the Australian people what they wanted. Abbott’s position was nuanced: in the lead-up to the Constitutional Convention, weathervane-like, he updated and retitled his book, now called How to Win the Constitutional War. It extended an olive branch to the republicans, proposing to make the governor-general the Australian head of state in place of the Queen, whose face would disappear from coins and banknotes and so on. ‘I’m conceding the emotional incongruity of sharing a head of state with another country,’ Abbott said.21 Turnbull called the proposal an admission of defeat, which it may have been conceptually, but certainly was not politically, and the idea got no traction. In his later book, Battlelines, Abbott slammed Turnbull for helping to fund the 1996 ‘Flagging the Republic’ exhibition of new Australian flags, including a design by artist Hany Armanious, all letters, reading: ‘Fuck Off Back To Fagland’.22
In retrospect it was not surprising that Turnbull was happy to antagonise a generation of conservatives at this time. By all accounts he was close to joining the Labor Party. Turnbull said he was approached by Keating.23 Graham Richardson once claimed that in 1993, Turnbull asked him for a safe spot on Labor’s Senate ticket:
I told him if he wanted to be a Labor senator, the first thing he might like to do is join the party. After that little detail had been taken care of, he would have to spend around a decade attending meetings in draughty School of Arts halls all around the state.24
Turnbull baulked on that occasion, but there is no doubt there were conversations going on. Greg Combet wrote in his memoir that he and Kim Beazley had dinner with Turnbull a few years later, planning to sound him out about a Labor seat.25 Former foreign minister Gareth Evans, a staunch republican who was a frequent adviser to the movement and participated in the Constitutional Convention, serving on the Yes committee, recalled:
I was certainly one of those talking to him periodically about joining the Labor Party … because he seemed to be sort of wobbling at that stage. He had all this blue-rinse, silver-tailed background—Tom Hughes, Lucy and all of that—and was very much part of the conservative establishment, but his values were always totally civilised and totally decent, not only on civil libertarian stuff but just about any substantive issue. Particularly the kind of Labor Party that we were in the Hawke–Keating period, which is the classic Third Way stuff, dry-as-dust economics combined with very moist social policy … combined with liberal internationalism, I mean they’re the … core of our governing ideology and Malcolm was completely at home in it. The relationship with Wran seemed to be a natural avenue for launching out of that. But there was always something holding him back, and it’s a very interesting question why he ended up being a Tory rather than being at the moderate end of the Labor Party spectrum, and capable of commanding a very big constituency within the Labor Party. There was certainly a sense that Malcolm was a really major potential figure in Australia’s future and whatever positions he might have taken, he was potentially attractable and potentially catchable.26
While he was flirting with Labor, Turnbull certainly was deeply out of love with the Liberal Party, telling one interviewer: ‘The Libs are trying to defend something that doesn’t exist any more. The party is largely composed of geriatrics. They’ve become a joke.’27
Monarchists had certainly linked Turnbull and Keating, and in the lead-up to the convention elections, the outline of their counter-attack suddenly got clearer. The ABC’s Four Corners program got hold of a memo from Howard adviser Gerard Wheeler to Kerry Jones, who had taken over from Abbott as national director of ACM, suggesting possible themes and messages:
Keep in mind … it is only possible to reinforce existing prejudices, not generate entirely new ones. I see this election essentially as a battle between the mainstream and the elites—it’s us against them. We need to reveal all those qualities of the ARM candidates which set them apart from the mainstream—their wealth, their backgrounds, their elitist interests. This battle should be presented as real Australians’ greatest chance ever to vote against all the politicians, journalists, radical university students, welfare rorters, academics, the arts community and the rich that deep down they’ve always hated.28
It was a despicable memo, and hypocritical, as Turnbull made clear, calling out the monarchists for ‘advocating that the richest, most elite woman in the world, and the most hereditary family in the world, is more suitable than any Australian to be our head of state. So who’s elitist? The Crown is indefensible … So the best thing they can do is to be negative.’29 But Turnbull, with all his education and wealth, was uniquely vulnerable to an anti-elite strategy, and it was not enough to point out the tactic was unfair. And Abbott knew it. One of his strategy documents encouraged the monarchists to attack Turnbull personally: ‘As their public face, Turnbull is arrogant, rude and obnoxious—a filthy rich merchant banker, out of touch with real Australians. He is the Gordon Gekko of Australian politics.’30 What was needed was a campaign strategy that would trump the monarchists’ negativity—looking back, it is obvious the ARM never came up with one.
After the biggest mailout in the country’s history, almost six million Australians voted in the Constitutional Convention elections, just under half the electorate. The ARM won the most votes by far (1.6 million), followed by ACM (1.2 million)—only five other individuals/groups got more than 100 000 votes.31 Of the seventy-six elected seats, the ARM won twenty-seven and other republicans seventeen, outnumbering twenty-eight monarchist representatives and four fringe candidates. The appointed half of the 152-seat convention was made up of forty federal and state parliamentarians—largely conservative, in line with the governments in power everywhere but NSW—and thirty-six prime ministerial appointees chosen to ensure a mix of women, youth, Aboriginal and local government representation. It was the votes of the appointed delegates that were up for grabs, and as more senior Liberals declared themselves in favour of a republic—including six federal front-benchers—the outcome was wide open.
Against all predictions the convention, held in Canberra’s Old Parliament House over a fortnight in February 1998, was a runaway success. Over 17 000 Australians turned up to watch the proceedings, cramming themselves into the public gallery or watching screens outside, while many more round the country tuned in to the ABC’s rolling coverage. Comedian and lawyer-cum-businessman Steve Vizard—later chastened over insider share deals done while he was a director of Telstra—was the third-placed ARM delegate for Victoria and wrote a hilarious and uplifting account of the whole experience, Two Weeks in Lilliput: Bear-baiting and Backbiting at the Constitutional Convention.32 The convention, it seemed, was not a two-sided exercise in politics-as-usual, but a bubbling and unpredictable mix of pros and amateurs, left and right, young and old, monarchists and republicans, Liberal and Labor, state and commonwealth—all suffused with a patriotic goodwill and recognition that this was history-in-the-making.
Because ARM was the biggest and best-organised bloc, it drew the most flak, and Turnbull as the leader quickly became the focal point of the criticism. Vizard likened him to Piggy in Lord of the Flies: too outspoken, picked-on by all and sundry—the direct electionists, the monarchists, the media, everyone. Turnbull did not deserve the savagery meted out in the newspapers slipped under the hotel door each morning, Vizard wrote, and the highly personal criticism took a toll. After a few days, the ARM realised the glare of the media spotlight had to be shared among the other accomplished performers on the team, like former broadcaster Mary Delahunty. Turnbull, receiving a concerned republican delegation in his hotel room straight out of the shower one morning, towel round his waist, gladly agreed to duck the daily press conferences. But he couldn’t help himself: the next day he was spotted in a hallway outside the ARM presser, lining up a few reporters and convening a one-person briefing, gazumping his own colleagues.33 This sort of stuff rankled, but there was no question about Turnbull’s energy. As Vizard wrote:
Outside in the corridors, Malcolm Turnbull is everywhere. He’s rounding up support for the hybrid ARM model, garnering last-minute numbers with the intensity of a man possessed. Where I walk there is Malcolm. Laughing with youth delegates. Professing solidarity to socialists. Not just one but teams of Malcolms, a tribe of them working the rooms, a dozen Turnbulls doing whatever it takes. Whatever. Painted in ochre dancing the brolga corroboree with Aboriginal leaders. Exorcising demons from the old Cabinet rooms with archbishops. Kicking soccer balls with ethnic European delegates. Eating yumcha with Asian delegates. Headbanging to Motley Crue with twenty-year-old youth delegates. Malcolm, the team of Malcolms, are men possessed.34
Turnbull was unapologetic about his wheeling and dealing in closed-door meetings with Howard and Costello, Wran and Beazley: it was necessary to get an outcome. But it undoubtedly alienated people. Appointed delegate Shane Stone, the Northern Territory’s Liberal chief minister, lashed out on day three: ‘I think that we’ve all had a gutful of having the ARM view rammed down our throats. There is another view out there.’35 Pat O’Shane, a direct electionist for a ‘Just Republic’, a cause she had supported since the 1970s, branded him ‘Turnbully’. It wasn’t just a good line; she was speaking from personal experience. O’Shane believed then and believes now that an appointed president would give Australia a ‘Claytons republic’. So when Turnbull called her out of the blue in the lead-up to the convention and asked her to join his ARM group, she said no. ‘He started to yell at me over the phone and I’d never spoken to him ever before and I said, “Malcolm, I don’t know you … you have no place to speak to me like this at all, never mind on the phone”, so I put the phone down on him.’ O’Shane takes no prisoners herself and she clashed with Turnbull throughout the convention—at one point Turnbull launched into her in front of a media contingent outside the ABC studios, who asked O’Shane what was going on. ‘It’s just Malcolm being Malcolm,’ she said, and added: ‘I don’t give him any oxygen myself.’36
When Turnbull raised the concern that monarchist delegates opposed to change would vote for the republican model most likely to be beaten at a referendum, he infuriated Sir David Smith, former secretary to five governors-general: ‘This is not a $50 million frolic to indulge Mr Turnbull’s personal fantasies. It’s to enable the people of Australia to consider a very important situation. He has insulted us and he owes us an apology.’37
At a deeper level, the convention was the first time in Turnbull’s career that he had had to bring people along with him, not just impress the judges with a display of individual brilliance. And the wheels were falling off. Veteran journalist Mungo MacCallum, a one-time colleague of Turnbull’s at Nation Review, joked:
At the beginning of the week everybody was saying, OK, well Malcolm might be a bit abrasive, he might be a bit full-on, but he’s spent an awful lot of time, he’s spent an awful lot of effort, he’s spent a lot of his own money [on the republic issue]. But equally, at the end of the week, probably the only motion which would have got through all but unanimously on the floor of the convention was one telling Malcolm Turnbull to shut up and go away.38
But Vizard acknowledged another side of Turnbull after observing Malcolm and Lucy quietly holding hands at a function outside the convention:
Where are the press at moments like this? Moments of translucent humanity and mundanity? Where were the press as Malcolm, for seven long years, week upon week, traipsed from empty town halls to rickety kindergartens and preached to crowds as sparse as Beckett over stale Swiss rolls and chipped coffee mugs? When he flew from city to city, town to town, seducing would-be candidates for his ARM team, shouting meals, buying drinks, exchanging winks and bending ears, long before this convention was fashionable, or even dreamed of?39
The challenge for Turnbull and the ARM was to try and wrangle, out of the hotchpotch ‘Con Con’, a majority of votes for a republican model that could be put to the people in a referendum. The single biggest decision came early on, during a debate on codifying the powers of the president, which effectively ruled out direct election in favour of parliamentary appointment. This was inevitable, given the direct electionists were in the minority and faced the implacable opposition of monarchists and conservatives from Howard down, as well as that of a good number of Labor figures. Nevertheless, it split the republican movement and was an immediate PR disaster amid accusations of a deal between Turnbull and the PM. Real Republic group founder Clem Jones attacked Turnbull on the floor, saying ‘had that man done as he promised to do, to take note of the wishes of the people and to meet them, he could have retained the title of father of the republic. Unfortunately I think he will become known as the mother of destruction.’40 At which the TV cameras zoomed to Turnbull who, taking notes, looked up and smiled broadly—his instinctive, unflinching response to confrontation, and a sure sign of impending retaliation. There were concessions on the ARM side too: Turnbull had to abandon his preferred model for codification of the president’s powers, and added a new committee to receive presidential nominations from the people as a concession to win over disappointed direct electionists. The resulting unwieldy model was described as a camel by constitutional expert Greg Craven, to which Turnbull responded: ‘I take “camel” as a compliment. Camels have great endurance, are fleet of foot and survive in the desert long after other animals have died of thirst.’41
In an emotional vote, the hybrid ARM model scraped over the line on the convention’s last day, as the three final questions were put to the attendees. The first vote was on the question of whether Australia should become a republic in principle. As delegates were called to stand up, more and more did so, until the republican majority became overwhelming—eighty-nine in favour—and tears flowed on the floor and applause erupted from the gallery as someone yelled ‘Up the republic’.42 Then the clincher: whether the convention would adopt the parliamentary appointment model agreed to the day before. Victorian ARM delegate Eddie McGuire gave a rousing speech: ‘Voting for a republic, as we did earlier today, is a bit like voting for free beer. A good idea, but we need the model to get it up.’43 But only seventy-three delegates stood up this time; undoubtedly the ARM model had more support than any other, but it was just short of a clear majority. A couple of direct electionists moved to close the convention, saying there had been no consensus. But Howard made a spur-of-the-moment call and committed the government to a referendum in a magnanimous speech:
The only commonsense interpretation of this convention is, firstly, that a majority of people have voted generically in favour of a republic … Secondly, amongst the republican models, the one that has just got seventy-three votes is clearly preferred. When you bind these two together, it would be a travesty in commonsense terms of the Australian democracy for that proposition not to be put to the Australian people. It would represent a cynical dishonouring of my word as prime minister, the promises that my Coalition made to the Australian people before the last election.44
That was enough: the convention had delivered an outcome for the republicans. The third and final vote, on whether a referendum should be held, had an overwhelming result, with 133 in favour—the monarchists were clearly behind it—and the convention then broke down into spontaneous group hugs, including a warm embrace between Turnbull and Howard. Conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey summed it all up well: ‘I do congratulate the republicans on their victory and even I felt a slight lump in my throat when I saw your jubilation and the jubilation of the people in the gallery when you had the numbers.’45
After all his travails, Turnbull, too, got a rousing round of applause. But in fact, precisely what he had feared had come to pass: there were now eighteen months in which to find fault with a compromise hammered out in two chaotic weeks—the republicans had been outmanoeuvred. Interviewed straight afterwards, ACM convenor Lloyd Waddy looked like the ‘cat that got the cream’.46 Vizard, dumping his thoughts on paper just weeks after the convention, was also convinced the monarchists had won:
Like Howard, they believe the model to be put is the one least likely to succeed. Not the seductive populist proposal of a directly elected head of state, not the readily explainable minimalist position of the McGarvie model, but the hybrid complexity of parliamentary appointment, partial codification of powers, and a new consultative council. Too hard, too complex.47
Years later, John Howard argued the elation among republicans at the conclusion of the convention proved the referendum was not set up to fail:
They were ecstatic. They felt that they had been given the opportunity to win a republic from the Australian people. It was obvious from their reaction that they believed that I had been fair to them, and they had gained from the convention all that they might have expected.48
But the republican question that was voted down in the 1999 referendum was the wrong question, and it was surely no accident that that question was framed at a convention where monarchists were over-represented. It underlined the wisdom of Keating’s original idea: to first have a non-binding plebiscite asking simply ‘Do you think Australia should have an Australian head of state?’ then to sort out the details of which republican model options to put to the people.
It is old ground, how the republican position slowly deteriorated over the next eighteen months, as obstacle after obstacle popped up: the distraction of a new constitutional preamble, the deliberate wording of the referendum question, a dishonest ploy by Peter Reith urging a No vote on the pretence that a plebiscite for a directly elected president would be held soon afterwards, and a decisive intervention for the No case by Howard himself. In the republicans’ favour was a tailwind from a largely supportive media and a growing number of high-profile backers including former prime ministers Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, who shared a platform as they had in the 1991 battle for Fairfax.
At the beginning of 1999 the movement got an important boost from the launch of Conservatives for an Australian Head of State, spearheaded by former Liberal party director Andrew Robb, a key architect of Howard’s victory in 1996. Turnbull had tried hard to recruit conservatives to the cause, and it was a coup to have someone with such impeccable right-wing credentials as Robb on side. Then handling government affairs for Packer, Robb roped together a bunch of businesspeople to form a committee, called on the politicians to take a back seat in the debate, and appealed to those naturally cautious voters who did not want wider constitutional change:
A lot of conservatively minded people are saying they think it is not a bad idea but they are not sure a whole lot of other things would not come in with it that they would not like. I have satisfied myself, and asked other members of the committee before they come on board to do the same, that the model that came out of the constitutional convention provides for an Australian head of State while preserving and protecting our current system of government. It is not some great leap.49
Robb argued for a Yes, lest a No vote give rise to a more radical republic.50 He joined the Yes committee and became a key Turnbullally. O’Shane and Tim Costello and a group of direct electionists launched a ‘Yes and more’ campaign, arguing direct election could be dealt with at a subsequent referendum.51 Despite the broadening support, six months out from the vote, ANOP pollster Rod Cameron was so pessimistic he believed any Yes vote over 40 per cent should be counted as a win.
Turnbull was stung by rifts within the republican movement itself. Straight after the convention, one of the ARM’s original directors, journalist Mark Day, called for Turnbull to step down:
The movement also must confront a painful decision about leadership. It owes a huge debt of gratitude to its chair, Malcolm Turnbull, who devoted endless time, energy, skill and money to the cause. He must now consider his position. It is unfair, but it is a fact: many people don’t warm to Malcolm, and the next step requires a less abrasive, [less] confrontational leadership.52
Though the rest of the media hopped in, Day later apologised on pain of expulsion under a peace deal brokered by Wran. Turnbull got a vote of confidence in his leadership and wrote a defensive op-ed for The Australian that tried to take his critics head on. ‘Is it “bullying” to stick to what you believe?’ he asked. Turnbull dropped his guard, only to reveal a fierce determination to carry on as before:
It may be an unattractive side to my personality, but I do not like losing. I live to win. I am sorry if that offends anyone, but nobody is perfect. I like to succeed and I don’t like wasting my time. If we lose the coming referendum, we will have wasted eight years’ work.
Turnbull’s diaries show he was hurt by the constant personal attacks, but who else could he be but himself?53
Turnbull did try to find co-chairs—no-one was interested. One approach was made to conservationist and former Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett, who went in to meet Turnbull at his Goldman Sachs offices. Garrett, himself a lawyer and a committed republican, found he couldn’t get a word in and realised it wasn’t going to work. Towards the end of 1998, Turnbull also sounded out Steve Vizard, who had sold his production company, about chairing the campaign committee. Vizard declined, citing a lack of time.54
Then in May 1999, just six months out from the referendum, a leak to journalist Virginia Trioli resulted in a damaging story in The Bulletin, whose front cover trumpeted ‘Republican coup against Turnbull’. Four months earlier, Jeff Kennett, premier of Victoria and himself a republican, had called for a new face to lead the ARM. Now an ARM insider told Trioli off the record:
I think if Malcolm is directly involved in this thing, it will fail. He is hanging onto it in this really possessive way. He does not admit that there’s anything in the issues that people are talking about, that they are in any way relevant, such as voters still wanting a direct-election model. Anyone who says anything other than you are the sole voice of this movement, he doesn’t want a bar of it.55
Asked if there was a plan to oust Turnbull, the anonymous committee member said: ‘I think everyone is forming their point of view around that now.’56 Turnbull’s response was confrontational: ‘What are you advocating—a timely suicide or should I drop out and just resign?’57
The ill feeling was in part a typical Sydney–Melbourne stand-off: the Victorians on the committee felt they were being railroaded by Turnbull; Turnbull felt the Victorians weren’t pulling their weight or raising their share of funds. Most importantly, there was a fundamental disagreement about the republican campaign strategy: to counter the monarchists’ successful anti-elites campaign, Victorians like Vizard and McGuire felt less emphasis should be placed on high-profile spruikers for the cause, in favour of a more grassroots campaign. In hindsight they were probably right. Turnbull heard but did not listen, and in the end, too often, it was his way or the highway. Turnbull had his supporters, of course. In June, then experienced Liberal Party operative Greg Barns quit as chief of staff for finance minister John Fahey, joining ARM as full-time national director in the crucial months leading up to the November vote. He diarised his first meeting with Turnbull: ‘As I expected—mercurial, restless, brilliant and politically risky, but listens to advice from those who know these things. Without him there would be no ARM and no campaign. The demonising is unfair in my view.’58
From his very first day, Barns knew it was going to be an uphill battle: the direct election campaign was starting to bite; the claim that the republic’s model would involve sixty-nine changes to the Constitution was beginning to resonate markedly; the dismissive ‘politicians’ republic’ line was swamping everything. Barns later wrote that ‘Hansonite resentment against the political establishment is still a dominant force in this country—and the cynical players like [SA senator Nick] Minchin, Abbott and co. know that and will play it for all it’s worth’.59 It was fertile ground for a scare campaign built on furphies and lies: how a Yes vote would mean a new flag, or a new anthem, or we’d get kicked out of the Commonwealth, or we’d have to build a new republican palace, or we’d get a new Weimar Republic stricken by economic crisis and extremism. Most galling for Turnbull was that the No campaign’s best argument—the politicians’ republic—was based on a fundamental misconception: polls showed the people wanted someone impartial as their president, not a politician, but they also wanted to choose the president, which would guarantee they’d get a politician.
A single bright point was a deliberative poll of a representative audience of 350 Australians, held in Canberra on Turnbull’s forty-fifth birthday, two weeks out from the referendum. The audience voted before and after a live debate between the opposing camps, and when the moment of truth came, the results were, according to Turnbull,
an extraordinary vindication of the model. The most significant feature of the results is not the increase in the Yes vote, but the 60 per cent drop in support for a directly elected president and the trebling of support for parliamentary appointment … Support for direct election is largely based on distrust of, and distaste for, politics and politicians. Consequently voters do not want a politician as president … [But] once people understand that a political president is exactly what direct election will deliver, most of them change their mind … This internal contradiction in the direct-election model is the germ of a republican tragedy. Direct election will be used to sink this republic. Then, when direct election is put up, it too will go down in a screaming heap as soon as Australians recognise that it will inevitably give them a politically partisan president. What do we do then? Probably go back to some form of parliamentary appointment. We will have spent three referendums doing what we should have, could have, done in one.60
On 6 November 1999, the republic went down in every state—although with a national Yes vote of 45 per cent, it was better than Rod Cameron had expected. That night, Turnbull gave what might have been the best speech of his ten-year campaign for a republic, perhaps even of his career. After acknowledging that Australia would not become a republic on 1 January 2001, he said:
The proudest day of my life was today, when I cast a vote for an Australian republic. All of us who voted ‘Yes’ can be proud tonight. We did what was right. And when in years to come, our children or our grandchildren ask why Australia has Queen Elizabeth II or King Charles III as our head of state, we can look them in the eye and tell them, truthfully, on November 6th, 1999, I voted ‘Yes’ for our republic.
I thank every Australian who voted ‘Yes’. I thank you for your patriotism and your pride. The republic will come back. It will not be soon. But it will return. Let’s hope we live to see it.
To those republicans who voted ‘No’ thinking they will soon get another chance to vote, I am afraid you have been had. Nothing would please me more than there being another, early chance to vote for a republic. But the people who made these promises to you will do nothing to keep them. As the years roll on without a republic, do not forget who told you to vote ‘No’ with the promise of a referendum for a directly elected president—a promise they never, ever intended to keep.
My friends, there is only one person who could have made … November 6 a landmark in our history, and that, of course, is the prime minister … Whatever else he achieves, history will remember him for only one thing. He was the prime minister who broke a nation’s heart. He was the man who made Australia keep a foreign Queen. He could have ended our first century with the same sense of optimism with which we began it. But he chose that we should start the new century swearing allegiance to a British monarchy to which he is devoted, but which most of us do not want.61
As the result sank in at the tally room that night, the pundits marvelled at how many Liberal electorates—including John Howard’s own seat of Bennelong—had voted Yes while many safe or formerly safe Labor seats had voted No, particularly where there were more Anglo-Saxons and fewer ethnic voters. It was country versus city. Battlers versus elites. Graham Richardson admitted on a live TV broadcast that ‘you’ve got to pay tribute to Kerry Jones and John Howard. They’ve out-campaigned the ARM.’ Laurie Oakes responded: ‘It was an unscrupulous, misleading campaign but it was clever, Graham, but wasn’t the “Yes” campaign fairly un-clever?’62 Ray Martin live-crossed to direct electionist Ted Mack, asking whether he felt strange having worked on the No committee alongside the monarchists. Mack was unapologetic: ‘Not at all, because this wasn’t a republic worth having. We are going to become a republic. Australia is now in the process of becoming a republic. This first-sketch plan’s gone back to the drawing board, but we’ll be approving the next one.’ Fifteen years later, Mack admits he was mistaken, but says his mistake was to assume that the ARM would continue campaigning rather than ‘pick up their bat and ball and go home’.63
Turnbull, who had sunk some $2 million of his own money into the ARM, immediately stepped down as chairman. As Greg Barns noted, donations from the broader business community ‘basically failed to turn up’64—it had always been a tough ask, given they were non-tax-deductible. Turnbull’s republican diaries, in which he’d written ‘private life and obscurity beckon enticingly’,65 came out within a month and were seen by some in the ARM as a bit of a baleful spray, laying the blame at everyone else’s door. If Turnbull had planned to use the republic campaign as a springboard into politics, the plan was in disarray. It might have provided entry into Labor politics, but it would prove a big liability moving to the conservative side of politics.
Defeat led inevitably to reform: in a tacit acknowledgement that the critics were at least partly right, the ARM adopted a branch structure with elected office-bearers, but the effort fizzled. Immediately after the referendum, then opposition leader Kim Beazley said the republic would come ‘back into the arms of its friends’,66 but the ALP did next to nothing about the issue until July 2015, when opposition leader Bill Shorten committed the party to a referendum by 2025, and announced he would appoint a minister for the republic as soon as he was elected.67 The ARM got a shot in the arm with a new high-profile chairman, celebrated Herald columnist, historian and former Wallaby Peter FitzSimons. Turnbull and FitzSimons had a long chat at the CEO Sleep-out fundraiser for the homeless at Sydney’s Luna Park in June 2015. FitzSimons wrote: ‘Malcolm Turnbull’s bloody feet keep brushing my head as I jot these words down at three o’clock on a wet Thursday night.’ When they bumped into each other again in the Chairman’s Lounge at Brisbane airport, after FitzSimons had been appointed to the ARM, they had a ‘robust’ exchange—onlookers said there were inches between them—about Turnbull’s contribution to the cause.68 FitzSimons is critical of Turnbull’s argument since the defeat, that the next historic opportunity to return to the republican question will be on the death of Queen Elizabeth II. ‘We’re a mighty sovereign nation. Are we really organising ourselves according to the health of an elderly Englishwoman?’69
Turnbull’s contribution itself divides republicans. Labor politician Lindsay Tanner, a direct electionist, once called Turnbull ‘the man most responsible for the defeat of the republican referendum in November 1999’ and argued the ARM should be disbanded, as it was too closely associated with the ‘born-again Liberal multimillionaire [whose] bucket loads of money have kept [it] afloat for years’.70 Barns believes it’s a myth that Turnbull was a liability: ‘People have said to me, is Turnbull part of the problem, and I point them to opinion polls that we did with Rod Cameron, which showed that he wasn’t a factor—negative or positive—the real issue was people’s understanding.’71 The ARM’s current national director, Tim Mayfield, honours Turnbull’s contribution, as you’d expect, saying ‘nobody in Australia’s done more for the republican movement’.72 But Turnbull’s critics within the republican movement say that’s not the point—his prodigious energy was sometimes counterproductive, and perhaps the point is that Turnbull, given his talents, should have trimmed his sails and done less. As Tom Keneally wrote:
The substance of Malcolm Turnbull’s generosity could not be denied, nor his vast historic and constitutional knowledge. But the drawback was that the ARM could not do without it, and sometimes decisions emerged without consultation with the rest of us. Malcolm did not possess to the same degree then the gifts for dealing with other people he now has, and which are reflected in his justifiable present standing with the electorate.73
FitzSimons, who helped out in the 1999 campaign both in his writing and by organising the group Sportspeople for the Republic, does not blame Turnbull for the success of the monarchists’ anti-elites strategy:
I don’t think Malcolm was responsible. I think it was a brilliant line from the monarchists. I mean you look back upon that and you just think, wow, the chutzpah, to put that line out. On the one side you’ve got the Queen of England and the most aristocratic family on earth, living in a palace in London, and everything that’s come to them is hereditary, and on the other side you’ve got us, who believe in egalitarianism, who believe in meritocracy, who believe that anybody in the land could rise to be our head of state, and yet somehow the monarchists manage to paint us as elitists?74
It is hard to resist the enthusiasm of the very un-lawyerly FitzSimons, who condensed his constitutional formula into a tweet in February 2015, when a punter raised the question of what kind of republic Australia wanted to be: ‘It’s easy mate. Sensible option is exactly the same system as now, ’cept the PM has Parlt. approve GG, not Q. Done! Republic!’75