THE QUEEN - A FOREIGNER?

Queen Elizabeth is the Head of the Commonwealth, and Queen of sixteen Realms. In Australia the Governor-General is the constitutional Head of State and The Queen is Sovereign. The Queen is part of each Federal and State legislature, and (titular) head of the executive government of the Commonwealth and each State. The Queen is an integral part of our constitutional governance.

The Queen has borne the official title 'Queen of Australia' since 1953 when the Australian Parliament passed the Royal Style and Titles Act, 1953. She is ours too. The Governor-General is Australia's constitutional Head of State and all Governors-General have been Australians since the appointment of Lord Casey in 1965. There is no discrimination in the appointment of the Governor-General who can be from any background or religion and of either sex.

Being foreign implies citizenship of some other place. The Queen is not a citizen of any nation. As The Queen of Australia how could she be foreign? She has reigned as our Queen for more than half the life of the Commonwelath of Australia. She is intimately  linked into the life of our nation 

Thousands of ordinary Australians (including Arthur Boyd, the 1995 Australian of the Year) don't permanently live here either. Three million of today's Australians (including some of our recent leaders) were not born here.

REPUBLICANS ASSERT

The Queen is an Englishwoman.

ACM'S RESPONSE

The Queen is in law not a subject. As with many Australians she is associated with more than one country. She is the Canadian Queen as much s the New Zealand or Australian Queen.And how could The Queen of Australia “ be a foreigner? Just as the English language is Australian, the common law Australian, our Westminster Parliaments Australian , so is our Queen.

QUOTES FOR THE DAY!

'The Queen was always about a desire in people for a figure above politics, and that is what the Pope is also about. When crowds pour into the streets to see a queen pass by or a pope to kiss the ground, it is appropriate to reflect on the implications of giving political power to a charismatic president able to command adulation on that scale for his own purposes. Elsewhere in the world and through history the consequences have been disastrous.' - David Barnett (Journalist) Column 'This Week in Canberra' "Advocate" 21 January 1995

'After this country was begun, English, Irish, Scots and Welshmen comprised the great bulk of convicts and settlers who came here. These people, who all came from the UK, very quickly began to be transformed into a person called an Australian and today they make tip about two thirds of our population. With the newcomers had come the English Law and direction of the government process from London where the King or Queen resided. All those people who came to this country have had the same monarch and that state of affairs continued after Federation and the creation of our Constitution in 1901, and even after we obtained our independence from Great Britain in 1942, and accepted the Queen as the Queen of Australia in 1952.' - The Hon J.A. Lee (Chairman, ACM Legal Committee) ACM/ARM forum, Killara, NSW 14 November 1996

'So far as the government is concerned, many of the blessings we enjoy derive not from the written text of the Constitution, as such, but from the centuries of heroic struggles in England which preceded the Australian Federation. By those struggles the people asserted, eventually, their own paramountcy over the Crown and other powerful interests. Our Constitution is part of this lineage of the constitutional struggles of the people of England. We should never forget it. The political conventions by which we live are part of our heritage of an English-speaking nation. The text of the Commonwealth Constitution Act may be uninspiring and austere for some readers. But it is for Australians, and the end product of a continuous stream of constitutional instruments from which it takes character and strength and a new start for the government of a new nation. Its forebears include the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the Act of Settlement of 1701, the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the United States Constitution which, in turn, was very largely the attempt of the American settlers to enshrine in one document their conceptions of the essential features of good government which had been won by the English people at home but which were being partly denied in the settlements and plantations in North America.

It has become fashionable in some quarters to deny the past links with the United Kingdom and even to rewrite history. But we cannot expunge something so indelible as the lineage of our constitutional form of government' - The Hon Justice Michael Kirby (ACM Charter Signatory) Address: 'The blessings of the Constitution' to the Australian Constitutional Foundation. 13 August 1996