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British RoyalsQueen Elizabeth II

The day Australia said no to being a Republic

The Queen’s historic reign has seen many milestones, one of which is the Australian Republican Referendum in 1999 that saw the country debate replacing her with an elected head of state.

Republicanism has long been debated in Australia, dating back to the early 1900s. At the Australian Constitution Convention in 1998, it was proposed that an amendment be added to the constitution to abolish the Australian monarchy.

The proposed law was “to alter the Constitution to establish the Commonwealth of Australia as a republic with the Queen and Governor-General being replaced by a President appointed by a two-thirds majority of the members of the Commonwealth Parliament.”

For a constitutional change to take effect in Australia, it required a double majority vote: a majority of overall voters needed to agree with the proposed amendment; and then a majority of the Australian states needed to agree with the proposed amendment.

On 6 November 1999, Australians rejected the idea of becoming a republic and retained The Queen as their head of state. All six Australian states voted no on becoming a republic, with the overall result being 54.87% of voters saying no and 45.13% saying yes to a republic.

What led to the rejection is largely a result of the republican side being unable to come to an agreement on how a proposed elected government would be chosen, and when a consensus could not be reached that appealed to all of the campaigners, they stopped supporting the referendum.

With the rejection of republicanism, then-Prime Minister John Howard assured Australians that the government would turn its focus onto matters that directly affected the country and not continue a protracted discussion on constitutional monarchy.

The following year, The Queen gave a speech on a visit to Australia and declared: “As I said at the time, I respect and accept the outcome of the referendum. In the light of the result last November, I shall continue faithfully to serve as Queen of Australia under the Constitution to the very best of my ability, as I have tried to do for these past forty-eight years. It is my duty to seek to remain true to the interests of Australia and all Australians as we enter the twenty-first century.”

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In the decades since the 1999 referendum, Australians have continued to discuss becoming a republic following The Queen’s death. The leading campaigner for the ‘yes’ side, Malcolm Turnbull, became Prime Minister of Australia in 2015, but announced that he would not pursue republicanism during his tenure, and instead focused on other issues. He did, however, remove The Queen’s portrait from the Prime Minister’s office.

Turnbull met The Queen in 2017 and told the press that he was “Elizabethan” and still believed that Australia should become a republic after The Queen’s death. In 2018, he was defeated and replaced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has called himself a constitutional monarchist and had the portrait of The Queen re-hung in the office.

The general consensus among Australian politicians in the years since the historic referendum is that any discussions on republicanism will only occur after The Queen’s death, though a 2021 poll conducted by Ipsos showed that a majority of Australians support a constitutional monarchy, and only 40% support a republic.

About author

Jess Ilse is the Assistant Editor at Royal Central. She specialises in the British, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish Royal Families and has been following royalty since Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee. Jess has provided commentary for media outlets in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Jess works in communications and her debut novel THE MAJESTIC SISTERS will publish in Fall 2024.