In the tsunami of syrup that gushed from the world's media in the wake of the royal baby announcement, a few enlightened flames briefly spluttered.
There was Private Eye's reality-check headline 'Woman has baby'. And here in the remote Antipodes, there was constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey's reality-check answer during an interview with Michael Rowland of ABC News Breakfast. Noting that it might be 70 years before the new prince, as third in line of succession to the Queen, becomes king, Twomey added the sensible caveat: 'What are the prospects of Australia still having the king of the UK as its sovereign in 70 years time? I sort of suspect not great.'
Take the long view and the absurdity of an independent nation retaining a foreign monarch as its head of state is instantly apparent. But it's absurd now, too, and for the same reasons as it would be absurd 70 years from now.
Even avowed monarchists know it's absurd. Remember the 1999 referendum, when no one mentioned the Queen? Monarchists — then a minority — posed as defenders of the constitution ('if it ain't broke don't fix it') rather than the monarchy, while the rest of us argued about whether the republican model on offer was sufficiently democratic. The three-way debate felt acrimonious at the time, especially to those of us publicly engaged in it, but in retrospect it seems bizarrely polite. No one mentioned the Queen.
The oddity of Australia's republican debate is that so many people readily agree that becoming a republic is desirable and even inevitable, while in the same breath insisting that it can't, or shouldn't, happen yet. This preference for deferred satisfaction, so strange in a political culture in which almost every demand is for immediate gratification, is the chief reason that the republic hasn't happened yet. If the preference persists, 70 years from now Australians might well be subjects of King George VII.
Deferred satisfaction is now the default position among Australian politicians who call themselves republicans. Whatever else Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have disagreed about, they've always been in accord on this. The 2020 summit, which the first Rudd Government convened in 2008 'to help shape a long-term strategy for the nation's future', placed the republic at the top of its recommendations for reforming governance. I have never heard a prime minister sound less enthusiastic about a proposal he notionally supports than Rudd did about that one.
And Gillard, when asked about the republic during her tenure, always found reasons for answering 'not yet'. In her case and in Rudd's, 'not yet' effectively means 'it's not worth the effort', which as a line of argument is close in spirit to 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'.
The most common form of the delayed-satisfaction argument is associated with Coalition frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull, who led the Australian Republican Movement during the '99 referendum. Turnbull hasn't given up hope: he and former deputy Labor leader Wayne Swan have contributed forewords to Project Republic, a book of essays aimed at rekindling the republican cause. But he now thinks that the republic will have to wait until the death of the present monarch, because we apparently hold her in such high regard.
The thought is encapsulated in a neat Turnbullian turn of phrase, which he has used in several speeches and repeats in Project Republic: 'There have always been many more Elizabethans than monarchists in Australia'.
Have there? Perhaps. But respect for the way in which Elizabeth Windsor has conducted her office, and even affectionate regard for her as a person, were also widespread in Australia during the referendum campaign in 1999. Republicans did not then think of such sentiments as an obstacle, and the reluctance of monarchists to mention the Queen suggests that they agreed. So why should they be treated as an obstacle now?
No one, in 1999 or since, has been in any doubt that the referendum failed because voters did not like the model. The result had nothing to do with lingering affection for the Queen who did not get mentioned in the campaign. In 1999 polls indicated majority support for a republic and a wider majority in favour of popular election of the head of state. In other words, even some voters who preferred the status quo wanted to be able to participate in choosing the head of state if the system was going to change.
If the referendum model had matched the popular mood, offering an elected rather than an appointed presidency, Australia would be a republic now.
Fourteen years on, support for a republic has dropped below 50 per cent. The appearance of Project Republic, whose contributors range across the political spectrum and across the elected/appointed presidency divide, is a welcome sign that republicans do not intend to let support drop even further.
The book is not without rancour: Turnbull and some other contributors blame direct electionists who supported a 'no' vote in 1999 for the languishing of the republican cause. Theirs was a dishonest campaign, Turnbull maintains, for they promised they would continue to advocate a republic after the referendum but have done nothing.
I know from personal experience that this accusation is false. I and other direct electionists did continue to write and speak publicly after 1999, and in doing so we made common cause with many who had supported a 'yes' vote, including contributors to Project Australia such as the historian John Hirst and the late George Winterton, the constitutional lawyer who was the principal architect of the referendum model. It is the politicians who have been largely absent from this debate, and who consign the republic to irrelevance each time they say 'yes, but not yet'.
Until there are political leaders who are willing to treat the republic as a matter of urgency, it will remain in the too-hard basket and voters will continue to lose interest in it.
Ray Cassin is a contributing editor.