Archives for November 2009

November has been a blur. We've had Tigermania in Melbourne and Malcolmmania in Canberra - and both have ended with a crash. Add to that the 10th anniversary of the republican referendum, a hike in interest rates, Schoolies week on the Gold Coast, the national apology to Forgotten Australians and former child migrants and a 25-minute face-to-face with the prime minister - it was hardly Frost/Nixon, but we reckon it is the longest interview Kevin Rudd has given since coming to office in 2007 - and it's been a pretty hectic month.

It ends, of course, without the deal on an emissions trading scheme which Kevin Rudd hoped to have in place before the Copenhagen climate change conference. The deal negotiated between the government and Malcolm Turnbull handed a staggering $A127bn ($116bn; £70bn) to industry in the form of various sweeteners, but the opposition rebels still will not swallow it. They reject the scientific case for anthropogenic climate change, and believe the ETS will be ruinous for a resources-based economy. But will their opposition be ruinous for the Liberals? Manifestly, according to Malcolm Turnbull, who launched an attack over the weekend on the "climate change deniers", as he calls them, who were intent on wrecking the Liberal Party and leading it to an electoral catastrophe. So outspoken and vitriolic was his attack that it probably scotched any remaining hopes of retaining the leadership. That will now surely pass - or should that be hospital pass? - to Joe Hockey after the Liberals meet on Tuesday morning. Hockey will then likely block the enactment of the ETS until after Copenhagen - thus providing Kevin Rudd with a trigger to call a snap election. So will the prime minister pull it?

SCHOOLIES: Schoolies, the annual post exams binge drinkathon, was an experience. It also threw up some startling statistics - pun unintended. Since 2000, the number of alcohol-related hospital admissions amongst 18-24 years olds has increased by 130%. More remarkably, it is now estimated that alcohol-related problems account for 80% of police work in Australia. There are calls for the drinking age to be raised to 19. What do you reckon?

SPORT DEBATE: The blog on the funding of elite sports, and whether Australia should retain what might be called its Olympian "Midas focus" got fogged out by the emissions debate. It's an interesting and angry debate. On the sports front, a fascinating study is underway to discover why small country towns, like Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, produce so many champion sports stars.

AUSTRALIAN JOURNALISM: On the night of all those front bench mass resignations from the shadow cabinet, Australia's journalists gathered, mobiles and Blackberrys in vibrating hands, for the annual Walkley awards, the Oscars for Aussie "journos". You can read the full list of winners here. But a few stand-outs for me were Jo Chandler of The Age, who won the commentary category for her outstanding reporting from Congo ; Sarah Ferguson and the team from ABC Four Corners behind Code of Silence, the headline-making documentary on player behaviour in rugby league; and Tracy Grimshaw from Channel Nine's A Current Affair for a riveting interview with Matty Johns, the former player at the centre of the Four Corners investigation. Gary Hughes of The Australian won the gold award for his coverage of the Victorian bushfires, of which he and his family were victims. Briefly leaving the smouldering ruins of his house, he borrowed an old laptop to file his first dispatch. The most moving part of the ceremony was when his wife and daughter were presented with three Walkleys trophies, which replaced those burnt in the fire.

BEST FOOD EXPERIENCE OF THE MONTH: I have to say that the Lamingtons on offer in the foyer of Parliament House on the morning of the national apology were an absolute delight. In a year of economic sugar-hits from the government, here was the real thing.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH: "I'm as rapt as a dunny roll." The words of a gentleman I interviewed on the first morning of the Australian Masters on the outskirts of Melbourne, as he savoured the prospect of seeing his golfing hero, Tiger Woods. When I asked him to translate for British listeners - a dunny is Australian slang for toilet - he said he was as happy as a dog with two tails...

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This week I have been up on the Gold Coast doing a story about Schoolies, that great Australian rite of passage where thousands of teenagers descend on Surfers Paradise in search of a booze-fuelled nirvana.

Had I wanted to experience some really chaotic party action, however, I should have stayed in Canberra. The Liberal Party has offered much better entertainment and been far worse behaved.

If I had a dollar for every time a drunken teenager ran up to our camera and shouted "Schoooooollllllieeees 09", I would almost be as rich as Malcolm Turnbull - whom I dare say might have been happy to swap places. Better to have drunken teenagers shouting at you than a party room of Liberal rebels baying for your head.

At the time of writing, Malcolm Turnbull's support for the government's revised emissions trading scheme (ETS) appears to have cost him the leadership of his party. With a series of mass frontbench resignations on Thursday, and an open challenge from Tony Abbott, a senior party figure, even his supporters now concede that he is political roadkill.

Turnbull's support or the government emissions trading scheme was founded on four broad strands of thought.

• First, like the former Prime Minister John Howard who proposed an ETS at the last election, he thinks that Australia has to reduce its emissions by attaching a price tag to carbon.

• Second, he thinks the Liberal Party could disappear off the map, like a low-lying atoll, if it positions itself as the party of climate change sceptics and deniers.

• Third, he felt the need to assert his leadership over the climate change rebels to demonstrate that he is still in control of his fractious party - although that tactic has clearly boomeranged.

• Fourth, if the Senate does not pass the government's emissions trading scheme - remember, the Rudd government does not have a majority in the upper house - it would provide the trigger for a double dissolution election, where every Senator and MP would have to seek re-election. Given Kevin Rudd's enduring popularity, an election would be ugly for the Liberals.

But the climate change sceptics reject the Turnbull policy, along with the political pragmatism which underpins it. This, for them, is a matter of high principle. They do not accept the scientific case that man is contributing to global warming, and think the emissions trading scheme would be unnecessarily ruinous for a resources-based economy.

Climate change for the Liberals has become like Europe once was for the Conservative Party in Britain - a polarising and emblematic issue involving unshakable principles. Given that, party discipline has gone out of the window, as it did for the Tories in Britain during their own wilderness years.

There's also a strong personal element to the Liberal rebellion. Within the party, there is an instinctive distrust of Malcolm Turnbull's great wealth, cosmopolitanism and metropolitan polish. And many backbenchers resent his over-weaning ambition - which is something that it hard to disown when you are trying to become the prime minister. Under John Howard, the Liberals became a party of battlers, and it hasn't warmed to a bluebood like Turnbull (even though, ironically, he is essentially a self-made man).

I've written before that Turnbull's obvious talents have not easily been transferred into the political realm. His business background makes him act sometimes like a domineering CEO who does not have much regard for his company's shareholders. His legal background makes him sound like a blustery barrister - although having started off in that vain at the national apology to the Forgotten Australians in Canberra last week, his speech became highly personal, highly emotional and highly effective.

Yet for all his faults, Turnbull has the "plausibility factor". It does not require a great leap of imagination to picture him occupying The Lodge.

That cannot be said for the two men vying now for the leadership. Tony Abbott is widely seen a highly erratic figure, sometimes referred to as the "Mad Monk" because of his devout Catholicism. Joe Hockey is a bulky, jocular individual who still has the feel of a political lightweight. He owes much of his popularity to his early morning duels on breakfast television with Kevin Rudd, and were he to win the leadership it would set up what observers are already calling a "Sunrise election", because of the name of Channel Seven's brekkie show. But while nobody doubts his likeability, you surely have to wonder about his electability.

As for Malcolm Turnbull, he is the man with the gold-plated CV. But surely it will not now be embellished with the job title he has made the target of his life - that of prime minister of Australia. It will be an abrupt end for a political career so rich with promise.

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In a room adorned by paintings by Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, I interviewed Kevin Rudd this morning on the prospects for the Copenhagen summit. Along with the Mexican President Felipe Calderon, he's been appointed a "friend of the chair", and is therefore set to play a leading role in the negotiations. He says that there will not be a legally-binding treaty at Copenhagen, but there will be what he calls an operational framework agreement - the hope being that a political agreement will be codified into an international treaty sometime in 2010.

I asked him about the prospects for a political agreement, since two years of negotiations have so far failed to produce one, and he was upbeat. I also probed him on what, to many international observers, is his highly anomalous position: urging others to sign up to an agreement while at the same time leading a country with the highest per capita emissions of any developed nation and the world's biggest exports of coal. Moreover, he's committed his government to an unconditional emissions target of just a 5% cut by 2020 - rising possibly to 15%, depending on what other countries do - which by international standards is small. He's also piling a lot of federal infrastructure money into the expansion of the coal export facilities in New South Wales and Queensland.

I was asked by Justin Webb on the Today programme whether Mr Rudd was a good man for the job. His friendship with Barack Obama certainly helps, I said - a senior administration official is on record as saying that Mr Obama feels more comfortable with Kevin Rudd than any other leader. His Mandarin might help him sway the Chinese - although it has not translated into warm relations between Beijing and Canberra. Quite the opposite, in recent months.

But three other things might stand him in good stead. First, his round-the-clock work ethic (he's been staying up late for video hook-ups with other key negotiators ahead of Copenhagen). Second, his fluency in, and enthusiasm for, jargon (there will be a lot of it at Copenhagen). And finally, his love of detail. Most people find it rather devilish. For Mr Rudd, it is something almost heavenly.

Here is an excerpt of the interview, so you can make up your own mind on what he had to say at the beginning of a week in which the Rudd government is hoping to push its emissions trading scheme through parliament...

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If you were to compile an Australian power list - we must do that sometime - I wonder where you would insert John Coates, the pit-bull of a man who runs the Australian Olympic Committee?

Like Australia at the Olympics, I reckon he might just get in the top six. But, like Australia at the Olympics, he might struggle to maintain his lofty perch over the coming years.

Always a man for a headline-grabbing soundbite - remember his jibe at the Brits in Beijing that the UK medal haul was impressive for a country with so very few swimming pools and such poor standards of personal hygiene? Mr Coates this week flashed his teeth at the businessman David Crawford, the author of a new report on sports funding, who argued that it is not "sensible" for Australia to aim for a top five finish at the Olympics.

Crawford also recommended that more money should be spent on popular, high participation sports rather than being targeted at the elite Olympic sports.

In a rip-snorter of a press conference hours after the report had been released, this is how Mr Coates greeted reporters: "Good afternoon. Obviously this is going to be one of the last occasions I see you. The Olympic Games will not be important enough for your editors to bother sending you in future, if Mr Crawford is correct."

He then went nuclear, describing the report as "un-Australian".

Here is his quote, in full: 'It just seems un-Australian for me to settle something for second best. We gain tremendously in terms of international reputation by our performance at the Olympic Games. I thought that was recognised, it hasn't been by this panel."

You can hear a report on the press conference here, and it is well worth a listen and read an editorial from John Coates here.

With Britain devoting squillions to winning more golds at the London games, and rich club nations like France and Italy following suit, David Crawford says it is unrealistic for Australia to try to match them.

He's proposing that Olympic funding remain at its present level, rather than giving it the $100m boost that the Australian Olympic Committee is seeking.

As David Crawford points out, a niche sport like water polo actually receives more money than golf, tennis and bowls combined.

Having married into an Aussie family which can boast an Olympic gold medal, I know the value attached to that sporting bullion.

At my relative's 50th birthday party, we even got to relive the famed commentary from Norman May: "GOLD, GOLD for Australia, GOLD" - which described his medal-winning race at the Moscow Games, and which still to this day sends shivers down Australian spines (it's the Aussie equivalent of "They Think It's All Over").

Clearly, this has long been a country which has projected itself internationally by flaunting its sporting prowess - a statement repeated to the point of sporting cliche.

And remember, the Australian Institute of Sports was set up after the country returned from Montreal - horror or horrors! - without a single gold, when Malcolm Fraser, the then prime minister, hit the panic button.

But could the money, as Mr Crawford suggests, be better spent on grassroots, high-participation sports?

The government will deliver its verdict on the report later in the year.

With the Australian newspaper already calling the Crawford report "a national tragedy" would Kevin Rudd risk offending the great Australian sporting public by giving its findings the rubber stamp?

PS: A further example of the Ozification of world sport: Thierry Henry appears to have become proficient in the skills of Aussie Rules Football.

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Foreign correspondents often like to boast that they watch the world unfold from a front row seat on history, but at the national apology in Canberra on Monday it was standing room only.

It was a rare privilege to be in the Great Hall of Parliament House, as Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull sought to right some appalling wrongs. It was an extraordinarily rich experience, and I hope we did not intrude on peoples' private thoughts and very public emotions.

We were close to Sandra Anker from Melbourne, a former child migrant shipped to Australia at the age of six, whose testimony many of you will have watched on television or online. 'Well done Australia,' she said as she stood to applaud Kevin Rudd at the end. 'Now its Britain's turn.' The loveliest of ladies.

What I particularly liked about the event was that it took on the personality of the hundreds of victims who gathered in the room - who cried, cheered, occasionally barracked and, collectively, seemed to derive great comfort from the soothing words of the prime minister and opposition leader.

I enjoyed the whoops of happy recognition when relatives spotted their loved ones on the big screens, and the spontaneity of the ovations for people, like Margaret Humphreys of the Child Migrant Trust, who have made seeking justice and redress their life's work. The victims owned the ceremony. They made it what it was. To use an Australianism, good on them.

The blog that appeared earlier in the week - Shamed into an Apology - was actually penned as a piece of brief analysis that was supposed to appear on the Sunday. It did not capture the special quality of the day, which was more about remembrance than recrimination. Whitlamite, who it is good to welcome back from semi-retirement, said it was day for healing rather than blame, and I could not agree more. But thanks for your comments.

After a couple of all-nighters in Canberra - on the big stories I work the Australian day, then the British day, and then repeat the whole thing again - I managed to make it back to Sydney in time to meet Jan Utzon, the son of Jorn, the architect of the Sydney Opera House.

He'd just opened the new western foyer, part of the ongoing attempts by the SOH to renovate and revitalise the building. Lovely bloke, who, like his father, has a quiet charm and charisma. I walked through the bowels of the building with him, watching him meet and greet Opera House workers who have clearly come to know and greatly admire him since his family was re-engaged by the New South Wales government in 2000. The Utzons are held in awe by the people who work in the building.

Regular readers of the blog know that I'm a bit obsessive about the Opera House, whose interior was finished by a local architect after Utzon's forced resignation. Will Jan live to see his father's glorious vision for the opera theatre finally realised? He certainly hopes so. He wants to be there on opening night in his very own front row seat on history.

My third treat of the week was to watch the recording of 'An Audience with Michael Parkinson,' a 90 minute monologue delivered without notes or an autocue, and punctuated by clips from some of his most famous interviews and near perfect grammar.

Like Richie Benaud, Parky is another unifying figure, national treasure both in Australia and Britain. In my fantasy dinner party, Parky would be an early inclusion on the guest list, and would probably have interviewed most of the others.

Sir Michael said that one of the main things which endeared him to Australia was that he rarely comes across the kind of Englishmen for whom he hasn't got much time. He didn't expound on that, but I dare say that thought will resonate with many of the Poms who have made their home down under.

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The scandal of the child migrants sent to Britain's distant dominions was uncovered over two decades ago by a British social worker, Margaret Humphreys. But no British prime minister has ever delivered an official apology, despite repeated demands from victims' group. Gordon Brown now plans to do so sometime in the new year.

Following a report from a House of Commons Health Committee in 1998, the British government said the child migrant programme, was "wrong" and expressed regret. The Blair government also helped fund family reunions, along with the Child Migrants Trust, which had been set up by Margaret Humphreys in the late1980s to help victims locate their surviving mothers and fathers, or siblings.

In the gardens of the British High Commission in Canberra, I asked the new high commissioner, Baroness Amos, why it had taken so long for the British government to say sorry.

She explained that a number of state governments in Australia had delivered apologies, that the Australian national government was on the verge of doing so, and that the time was now right for Britain to follow suit.

"We've always said that this was an absolutely shocking period in our history," she said. "And there was a lot of thinking that went on in relation to this... it has taken us some time."

She said that the Blair government expressed strong regret after the Health Committee report highlighted the appalling treatment that many child migrants had been exposed to - physical, psychological and, at times, sexual abuse.

"We're now going that one step further and apologising" she said. "And this is the next stage in the process."

But when I asked whether Gordon Brown would have apologised had not his friend and political ally, Australia's Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, decided to do so, she did not really have an answer. She rejected that formulation, but did not come up with a convincing counterpoint.

Many will form the view that the British government has decided to act because the Australian government has decided to say sorry - delivering a national apology to British child migrants at the same time as saying sorry to the so-called Forgotten Australians, tens of thousands of Australians who were abused in institutions and orphanages.

The child migrants that I have spoken to go further: they say that Gordon Brown has been shamed into apologising by the Australian government, which has exhibited what they described as greater "moral leadership".

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With news choppers circling overhead, a scrum of reporters waiting down below and a barrage of puns waiting to be unleashed, Tiger Woods flew into Melbourne on Monday, where he will take part in the Australian Masters golf tournament, attend a gala dinner, play in a charity event for victims of the bushfires, promote Victoria as a golfing destination and pocket a personal appearance fee of A$4m ($3.7m ;£2.2m) for his trouble - more than 10 times the prize money for winning the tournament.

His first visit to Australia in 11 years has the feel of a presidential and royal visit all rolled into one. But then, Tiger has the star power of Barack Obama (I think that a strong case could be made that Tiger helped pave the way for Barack by dominating, and thus winning widespread acceptance in what was long regarded in the US as a whites-mainly sport). He is the undisputed king of golf and, arguably, of world sport.

Awaiting him in Melbourne are an array of tiger treats. A suite at a posh hotel in the central business district which has played home in recent times to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Tickets to the hottest show in Melbourne - Jersey Boys. And the prospect of playing without the jarring staccato of hundreds of clicking cameras. The course has banned spectators from carrying them.

I happen to be in Melbourne covering another story and the front page of the city's tabloid, The Herald Sun, pretty much sums things up: TIGERMANIA.

Admittedly, there are numerous ways to spin this story. Should taxpayers' money be spent on Tiger's appearance fee? Seems like a worthwhile investment, seeing as the four days of the tournament are already a sell-out and that it reaffirms Melbourne's position as the sporting capital of the southern hemisphere, if not the world. State Premier John Brumby, who lobbied Tiger personally, claims his visit will be worth $19m for the state's economy. A figure plucked out of the air, perhaps? But it sounds plausible.

You could view it through the prism of civic rivalries. Sydney tried hard to lure Tiger, but he went with Melbourne instead - a familiar story since the 2000 Olympics, where the Victorian capital has outstripped its long-standing rival.

But I'm going to go with what I reckon is a legacy of the old "tyranny of distance" syndrome. The way that the country lapses still into "aren't we lucky to have a big celebrity visiting little ol' Australia" mode. As I write, I'm watching a news bulletin which is not only featuring Tiger Woods, but the arrival in Melbourne of Britney Spears.

And it's not just big-name entertainers and sports stars. This year we have already had "Christopher Hitchens week", when ABC handed over large chunks of its output to the visiting British polemicist. That followed "PJ O'Rourke week" earlier in the year, when the American satirist was granted the same airtime. Both are brilliant authors, but they hardly merit the red carpet treatment in a country with writers, public intellectuals and polemicists who can rival them. Early next year, we will no doubt witness Prince William week, as he makes his first visit to Australia since crawling around on a picnic rug in one of the happier photo-ops staged by Prince Charles and the then-Princess Diana (there is still a lively Republican referendum debate: ten years on the thread is still going on, by the way).

During my first Christmas in Australia a couple of years back, I was astonished by the blanket coverage devoted to Paris Hilton, who had jetted in to celebrate the New Year in Sydney. Why wouldn't she? The pyrotechnics are worth the trip alone.

The tyranny of distance used to come with a felony of international neglect. But that is no longer the case. As the world has got smaller, Australia has got bigger. Tiger's arrival down under, and the media-driven mania which has surrounded it, speaks of both.

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Last week, I ran into John Howard for the first time since election night in 2007, when, outside a ballroom scattered with discarded, half-drunk flutes of champagne, I confronted him with a conversational opening gambit that to this day makes me wince.

My mother-in-law is an enthusiastic fan of the former prime minister, and was a near neighbour in north Sydney long before he became leader of the Liberal Party. So I passed on her commiserations, and then told him that her youngest daughter - who in her early teens had once served drinks at her parent's party fund-raisers - had recently agreed to marry me.

"What?" shouted the departing prime minister through the lip-shrill chatter of crest-fallen party loyalists. I repeated what I said, this time with less conviction, and got in return a look of puzzlement and a grunt of faint recognition. Then he moved past me to yet another Liberal diehard keen to tell him he was the greatest prime minister that Australia had ever had. I, meanwhile, retreated - wondering whatever possessed me to inject a note of personal happiness on a night of such abject political despair.

Last week, at a lunch organised by constitutional monarchists, John Howard seemed happier to be confronted by reporters. Indeed, he seemed to relish the exposure, for it was just like old times. With a thicket of microphones in front of him, he gave a robust defence of Australia's present constitutional arrangements - he is a true Burkean conservative, in the sense that he wants to preserve all that he deems workable and good, and is suspicious of unwarranted change - and his government's approach to asylum seekers. "We stopped the boats," he said with obvious pride.

Last week, he also sat down with the Sydney Sunday Telegraph and gave a more expansive interview in which he unleashed on Kevin Rudd. He branded his successor a "do nothing" prime minister who was all about spin and symbolism. He claimed that he had bungled the response to the surge in the number of boat people trying to reach Australian shores and had achieved little since becoming prime minister almost two years ago.

"The Rudd government comes up very short," said the former prime minister. "I can't think of a major thing it has done, except spent the bank balance that Costello and I left behind. Nothing else."

Howard was effectively accusing Kevin Rudd of political cowardice, which is a criticism you hear increasingly from supporters as well as a partisan detractors. Kevin Rudd continues to enjoy what, by normal standards, are stratospheric approval ratings (an average over the past two years of 68%), yet he has not leveraged much of that personal popularity by championing unpopular issues.

On climate change, as Mr Howard noted, his emissions trading scheme is close to what the Coalition was proposing at the last election, with cautious cuts and targets. He has done nothing to advance the republic, another contentious issue where he risks alienating the swing suburbs. The stimulus package was centred on generous cash hand-outs - a giveaway injection. After the symbolism of his much-vaunted "Sorry", indigenous groups have wondered what he intends to do to close the gap between white and black Australia. On the boat people, he has emphasised the toughness of his policies, rather than setting out the case for compassion.

The conventional wisdom is that Kevin Rudd is a poll-driven prime minister rather than a principle-driven national leader. His focus is on day-to-day managerialism rather than bold, long-term vision. Last week saw an interesting example of this. On the eve of a bad poll coming out, which showed Labour's lead over the Liberals had plunged, Kevin Rudd went on a media blitz with five hastily-arranged afternoon radio interviews and an appearance on ABC's 730 Report, one of the few truly national early evening news programmes. The prospect of a bad poll had apparently produced a flurry of prime ministerial panic.

Even many detractors of John Howard would concede that he was politically bold and daring, from his decision to back gun controls early on to the introduction of the GST, Australia's initially unpopular sales tax. Howard clearly thinks his successor is something of a political wimp. So is he right? Has Kevin Rudd emerged as a do-nothing prime minister?

PS: I found it hard to suppress a wry smile when Jonny Wilkinson slotted over a drop goal - or field goal, as they are called in Australia - in the early stages of the England/Australia game at Twickenham over the weekend. Memories of 2003. But Australia ended up on top, deserved winners with two tries to zip. Viewers in Britain might have wondered why so many Aussie players were sporting such pathetic, post-pubescent moustaches, some of which looked in danger of being blown away in the south-west London winds. It is, of course, Movember, the month when thousands of men groom moustaches to highlight prostate cancer, depression and other male ailments. In the land of memorable, iconic moustaches - Dennis Lillee, Rodney Marsh, David Boon - they are carrying on a long, and great, Australian tradition. So all power to their whiskered upper lips...

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Ten years after the republican referendum, it is Australia's constitutional monarchists who have the most cause for celebration. And celebrating they are, with lunches in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth to mark what they call "Affirmation Day". Republicans, meanwhile, are gathering on the forecourt of Parliament House in Canberra, to remind their fellow Australians that it is time to mend the nation's heart - a reference to Malcolm Turnbull's anguished rebuke on the night of the referendum to the then Prime Minister, John Howard, whose support for the monarchy was one of the reasons why the referendum failed.

Certainly, these have been fallow years for Australian republicans, and remain so now, even though the prime minister is an avowed republican and the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, used to head up the Australian Republican Movement.

I've just finished reading a book on the subject by the Melbourne academic Glenn Patmore, who, among other things, examines one of the great paradoxes of the 1999 debate: that 88% of Australians told pollsters that they supported an Australian head of state while only 45.1% voted for one at the referendum. In Choosing the Republic, Patmore points the finger at a number of suspects: a wily Prime Minister, John Howard, who knew that the constitutional convention which preceded the referendum would pit republican against republican; a referendum question framed exquisitely to exploit divisions within the republican movement between those who wanted en elected president and those who wanted an appointed president; a No campaign that gained traction by arguing the Australia would get a "Politician's Republic"; the lack of bipartisanship and the difficulty of winning a referendum without the active support of the prime minister of the day.

Add to that the "status quo" argument, voiced most forcefully by John Howard, who believed that the referendum failed "because of the inherent unwillingness on the part of Australians to change something that they haven't been persuaded was no longer working".

But perhaps the overarching argument of Choosing a Republic is that the movement has failed to produce an irresistible and animating vision of a monarch-free Australia. "It was as if the proposal for an Australian head of state was put to the people without any resonance with a philosophy of republicanism," Patmore writes of 1999.

We've spoken before in this blog about the Elizabeth factor: how the popularity of the present monarch presents problems for the republicans. When bold rhetoric is required, her continued presence is perhaps one of the reasons why politicians like Rudd and Turnbull are so timid on the question. Republicans would argue that the popularity of the Queen needs to be decoupled from the uselessness of the institution, but that is the kind of abstraction which goes against the grain. It's a tough one: to divorce the principle from the personality. So for all his talk about accelerating the republican debate when he took over as prime minister, Kevin Rudd has mothballed the issue until at least his second term.

The survival of the monarchy in Australia is endlessly intriguing. From Gallipoli to the great betrayal in World War II, the Brits have not always treated Australia with much respect or consideration. And yet that has never fuelled any significant anti-British backlash, save for the odd sledge on the cricket field or a bit of flippant Pom-bashing in the bar. Equally, you would have logically thought that the character traits which many Australians hold dear, such as their laconic informality, lack of snobbery, anti-authoritarianism (though this is surely exaggerated) and egalitarianism, would have militated against the idea of hereditary privilege.

My sense is that so much cultural space in Australia is occupied by the British made or British influenced that the idea of a British head of state is not as incongruous as it might be. And then there's the demographic factor: the huge, if declining, proportion of Australians whose roots are in Britain.

I've written a longer piece on the whole question which has sparked a debate here. You can read the full piece in full here.

So over to you. Why did the referendum fail in 1999, and why this week was it the constitutional monarchists rather than the republicans who seemed in much more chipper mood as they look to the future?

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