What Republicanism Means to us
PART ONE , THE REPUBLIC
1. What a Republic Actually Is
Ask most Australians what a Republic means and they will tell you it means getting rid of the King. That is part of it, but it is the smallest part. If that was all a republic meant, it would barely be worth the effort. Swapping a king for a president and changing the letterhead on government buildings would not change a single thing about how this country actually works, who owns it, or who gets a say in running it.
The word republic comes from the Latin res publica. It means the public thing. The common wealth. The idea is older than any monarchy still standing, and it is simple , a country belongs to the people who live in it and keep it running, not to a ruling family, not to an aristocracy, and not to whoever happens to have the most money. In a real republic there are no masters and no subjects. Nobody rules over you by birthright, and nobody rules over you because they own the ground you stand on or the job you depend on.
That last point matters. Republicanism has never just been about who wears the crown. From the very beginning, republicans understood that a person can be unfree in many ways. You can be unfree because a king commands you. You can also be unfree because your landlord can put you on the street, because your boss can sack you for speaking up, or because the bank owns everything you will earn for the next thirty years. The old republican word for this condition was domination. It means living at the mercy of someone's decisions, having to keep your head down and hope the powerful treat you kindly. A republic, properly understood, is a country organised so that nobody has to live like that.
This is the tradition we stand in. Not the polite, official republicanism that wants to change the Constitution and nothing else, but the older and more serious tradition that asks the real question , who actually rules here, and in whose interest?
Ask that question honestly about Australia today and the answer is uncomfortable. We have a parliament, we have elections, we have all the furniture of democracy. But the major decisions that shape our lives are not made in parliament. They are made in boardrooms. Whether your rent goes up, whether your job is secure, whether your town keeps its bank branch and its hospital, whether your power bill doubles, none of that is decided by anyone you voted for. It is decided by people whose names you will never know, who answer to shareholders, and who will never have to live with the consequences of what they decide.
A republic that leaves all of that untouched is not a republic. It is the same arrangement with a new coat of paint. The Republican Workers Party exists because we believe Australians deserve the real thing , a country where the people who do the work and create the wealth are the ones who decide how it is run. Everything else in this document follows from that.
2. The Republican Tradition in This Country
People on this continent have been fighting against unaccountable power for as long as that power has existed here.
It starts before federation, before the colonies, with the First Nations peoples who resisted the seizure of their land by an empire that claimed it by decree. The Kalkadoon in Queensland and the Noongar in the west did not fight for symbolic recognition. They fought against a system that took everything from them and answered to no one. Their resistance is part of the longer story of people on this land refusing to accept that power from above is legitimate simply because it is powerful.
The convict rebels at Vinegar Hill in 1804, many of them Irish republicans transported for the 1798 uprising, carried that tradition here in chains. The diggers at the Eureka Stockade in 1854 swore an oath under the Southern Cross to stand by each other against a colonial government that taxed them without representation and policed them like criminals. The shearers who struck in the 1890s, the wharfies and miners who built the union movement, the Aboriginal stockmen who walked off Wave Hill in 1966 and stayed off for nine years until they won, the workers at Port Kembla who refused to load pig iron for a war machine. Every one of these struggles was, at its core, republican. Every one of them was ordinary people insisting that they were not subjects to be managed but citizens with the right to decide.
It is worth being clear eyed about what happened to that energy. At the end of the nineteenth century, the strength of the organised working class in this country was channelled into a parliamentary project. The Labor Party presented itself as the political arm of the workers, but from the start it functioned as a compromise, a way of managing working class demands within a system built to contain them. It took the movement off the streets and out of the sheds and put it in suits, where it could be negotiated with, watered down, and eventually absorbed. More than a century later, the results speak for themselves. The party that claims our tradition privatised our assets, capped our wages, and restricted our right to strike, while telling us there is no alternative.
The lesson of our own history is plain. The tradition is not the institution. The tradition is the people who fought, and what they fought for , equality, participation, and genuine self government. That tradition does not belong to any parliamentary party. It belongs to the working people of this country, and it is ours to pick up and carry.
3. Why the Official Republic Debate Gets It Wrong
Every few years Australia has a national conversation about becoming a republic. Should the president be elected by the people or appointed by parliament? Should the change be minimal or sweeping? A referendum is floated, fought over, and either lost or quietly shelved. Then everything goes back to normal.
There is a reason this debate never goes anywhere, and it is not because Australians love the monarchy. It is because the official republic on offer changes nothing that matters. The model put forward in 1999, and every model floated since, amounts to this, take the existing system, exactly as it is, and replace the Governor General with a president. Same parliament, same Constitution in every respect that counts, same ownership of the country's land, resources and industries, same people making the same decisions in the same boardrooms. The monarchy is treated as a piece of decoration to be swapped out, like changing the flag on the building while leaving the building untouched.
Ordinary people sense this, even if they would not put it in these words. When working Australians shrug at the republic debate, it is not apathy. It is an accurate judgement that the thing on offer is not worth the trouble. Why would someone struggling with rent and power bills get excited about a constitutional reshuffle that will not lower either by a single dollar? The official republicans look at that shrug and conclude the public is not ready. The truth is the opposite. The public is ahead of them. People can tell the difference between change and the appearance of change.
There is something else worth saying about the official debate. It is led, overwhelmingly, by the same class of people who run the country now, business figures, former politicians, corporate lawyers. Their republic is designed to be safe. Safe for the banks, safe for the mining companies, safe for the property developers. It is a republic in which the Crown departs and everything the Crown protected remains. That is not an accident. It is the whole point. A symbolic republic is attractive to powerful people precisely because it lets them present themselves as modern and progressive while conceding nothing.
The British Crown sits at the top of our Constitution as a permanent reminder that this country was founded as someone else's possession, and its presence has real effects.
The clearest example is the dismissal of 1975. Gough Whitlam led a Labor government that the people had elected in 1972 and returned to office in 1974. In late 1975 the opposition, which held the balance of power in the Senate, refused to pass the bills that gave the government the money it needed to keep functioning, hoping to starve it out and force an early election. The deadlock was real. What broke it should trouble anyone who believes this country is a democracy. On 11 November 1975 the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, sacked the elected Prime Minister and installed the leader of the opposition in his place. Kerr held his office not by any vote but as the representative of the British monarch in Australia, and it was that inherited Crown authority he used. An unelected official, appointed in the monarch's name, removed a government the people had chosen. It was entirely legal, because the Constitution hands the Crown's representative exactly that power, and that is the whole point. The monarchy is not a harmless ornament. It is a set of powers held in reserve above the parliament we elect, and once, within living memory, those powers were used to throw out a government the voters had put in.
But we refuse to pretend that removing it is the destination. It is the doorstep. What matters is what kind of country walks through the door. A republic of the boardrooms, with a president instead of a Governor General presiding over the same inequality, would be a defeat dressed up as a victory.
4. The Morning After
Try a thought experiment. Suppose the referendum passes tomorrow. The Crown is gone from the Constitution, a president is sworn in, a new flag goes up over Parliament House, and the fireworks light up every capital city in the country. The front pages call it a new chapter in our history. Now ask the only question that matters. Who rules Australia the next morning?
The same four banks that own our mortgages and post record profits while families skip meals to make repayments. The same mining giants that dig up our resources, ship the profits offshore, and pay their executives more in a year than a nurse earns in a lifetime. The same property investors and developers who have turned housing, a basic human need, into a speculative casino. The same media owners who decide which questions get asked and which never see daylight. The same supermarket duopoly, the same energy cartels, the same foreign owned infrastructure funds that clip the ticket on our ports, our airports, and our power lines. Not one of them needed the Crown to rule, and not one of them would miss it. They would send their congratulations, sponsor the celebrations, and go back to business.
This is not speculation. The last century ran the experiment dozens of times. Country after country lowered an empire's flag, raised its own, and discovered that the banks, the landlords and the trading houses still ran everything that mattered. Independence in form, dependence in fact. The hard truth those countries learned is one every republican movement eventually has to face, the real machinery of rule was never the crown or the flag. The real machinery is ownership. Whoever owns the land, the resources, the credit and the essential services rules, whatever the Constitution says, because a power that owns a country does not need to occupy it.
We have run a smaller version of the same experiment ourselves, over and over. We have changed governments, changed prime ministers more often than some people change cars, voted parties in with landslides and thrown them out in disgust. Through all of it, rents kept rising, wages kept stagnating, and the selloffs continued under both colours. The change kept happening in the wrong place. Power that does not sit in the institution you changed does not notice the change.
And the cost of that arrangement is not abstract. It is written into this country's ground , the First Nations peoples dispossessed at gunpoint, the workers killed in unsafe pits and on unsafe wharves, every family broken by poverty in a land of plenty. The institutions that rule us were planted here and paid for in other people's suffering, and they are maintained the same way.
5. What Real Republicanism Demands
If a republic means more than a flag and a president, what does it actually require? We say it stands on three legs. Knock any one of them out and the whole thing falls over.
The first is independence. A republic must be able to make its own decisions. Australia today cannot. Our foreign policy is written in Washington, our defence assets are mortgaged for decades to alliances we were never asked about, and our economic settings are shaped by foreign capital and the threat of its departure. Our resources, our ports, our farmland and our infrastructure are owned, to a staggering degree, by interests with no stake in this country beyond what can be extracted from it. Real independence means the ability to manage the resources and infrastructure of this country ourselves, and to deal with other nations on the basis of mutual respect rather than dependence. You cannot be a republic and a branch office at the same time.
The second is democracy that reaches into daily life. Voting once every three years for a choice between two management teams is not self government. In a real republic, democratic decision making extends to the places where people actually live their lives , the workplace, the neighbourhood, the industries and services everyone depends on. The people who do the work and the people who rely on the services should have a genuine say in how they are run. Democracy that stops at the office door, the factory gate, and the boardroom entrance is a fraction of the real thing.
The third is equality of power, not just equality on paper. Every Australian already has equal rights in a formal sense. The mining magnate and the cleaner each get one vote. But one of them can buy advertising campaigns, fund lobbyists, threaten to move capital offshore, and have ministers return their calls, and the other cannot. Formal equality on top of massive inequality of wealth is not equality at all. A republic worthy of the name has to deal with the concentrations of private power that make a mockery of one person, one vote.
Notice what these three demands have in common. None of them can be met by constitutional redrafting alone, because all of them run into the same obstacle , the ownership and control of the economy by a small minority. That is the wall every genuine republican movement eventually hits, and it is the wall where most of them stop, turn around, and settle for symbols. We do not intend to stop there. Which brings us to the second half of this document , if the republic is the house, what does it run on? What is the economic life of a country that actually belongs to its people?
PART TWO , WHAT THE REPUBLIC RUNS ON
6. Who Creates the Wealth
Start with a simple question. Where does the wealth of this country actually come from?
Not from share portfolios. Not from property speculation. Not from clever financial products. All of those things move wealth around, but none of them create it. Wealth is created when somebody does something useful. A nurse keeping a patient alive through the night shift. A truckie hauling freight up the Hume at two in the morning. A teacher, a sparkie, a farmer, a cleaner, a coder, an aged care worker spoon feeding someone's mum with patience and kindness. Every road, every building, every meal, every service, every dollar of value in this economy exists because a working person made it exist. That is not a political opinion. It is just an honest description of how a country works.
If working people create the wealth, who decides what happens to it?
Not the people who created it. The decisions about where investment goes, what gets built, which towns live and which die, what your labour is worth and how the proceeds are divided, are made by a small group who own the companies, the land, and the capital. Many of them have never done the work in question and never will. And the results of letting them decide are all around us. Record corporate profits sit alongside stagnant wages. Banks post billions while families skip meals to make the mortgage. The people stacking the shelves and driving the trucks during the pandemic were called essential heroes, then offered pay cuts in real terms once the emergency passed.
Here is the principle we draw from this, and we think most fair minded people already hold it , the people who create the wealth of a country are entitled to a fair share of it, and a real say in what is done with it. That is not radical. It is the same principle behind every honest day's work for an honest day's pay, behind every family business where everyone who pitches in gets a say, behind every footy club run by its members. We simply think the principle should apply to the whole economy, not stop at the door of the big end of town.
There is a name for the opposite arrangement, where the many do the work and the few collect the proceeds and make the calls. The name is the one we used in Part One , domination. And a republic, as we said, is a country organised so that nobody has to live under it.
7. Some Things Are Too Important to Run for Profit
Most Australians, whatever they think of politics, agree on this when it is put plainly , there are some things in life that should simply work, for everyone, without somebody clipping the ticket. Water should come out of the tap. The lights should stay on. The hospital should be there when your kid breaks an arm. Your parents should be looked after with dignity when they are old. These are not products. They are the basic conditions of a decent life, and a country that cannot guarantee them to its own people has failed at its first job.
For most of the last forty years, governments of both major parties have run the opposite experiment. They told us that selling off our electricity, our airports, our ports, our aged care, our childcare, our employment services and chunks of our health system would deliver efficiency, competition, and lower prices. The experiment has run long enough to judge the results, and the results are in. Power bills have not fallen, they have exploded, while privatised generators game the market. Privatised aged care gave us a royal commission full of horror stories, because every dollar spent on staff and food is a dollar off the profit margin. Toll roads sold for one off sugar hits now tax every tradie in a ute for decades. Country towns lost their bank branches because a branch that serves a community but does not maximise returns is, in the logic of the market, a mistake to be corrected.
None of this is because the people running these companies are unusually wicked. It is because of what a for profit company is. Its legal duty is to its shareholders, not to you. When an essential service is run for profit, every decision faces the same test , does this increase returns? Staffing levels, maintenance, safety margins, service to unprofitable customers, all of it gets squeezed, because squeezing it is the job. You cannot blame a machine for doing what it was built to do. You can blame the people who keep insisting we feed our hospitals, our power grid and our grandparents into it.
Our position is the one your own experience already suggests. Essential industries and services should be run for the public good, owned by the public, and guided by the people who use them and the people who work in them. Not because public ownership is sacred, but because it is the only model where the purpose of the service is the service. A publicly owned power grid has no reason to gouge you. A publicly run aged care system has no incentive to understaff the night shift. The measure of success stops being the dividend and becomes the thing itself , is the care good, is the power affordable, is the water clean.
The line between what counts as essential and what does not is not fixed. It never has been. A century ago, electricity was a luxury for the wealthy. Today nobody would argue the grid is optional. Banking was once something most working families barely touched. Today you cannot get paid, rent a home or buy groceries without it, which makes it as essential as water, and just as wrong to run as a profit machine. The same is becoming true of the internet, of medicines, of childcare. Every generation gets to ask the question fresh , what do our people now need simply to live a decent life, and is it being run for them or off them? Our answer is that the circle of things run for need rather than profit should keep widening as the country learns how to do it well. We see no natural stopping point, and we are honest about that. The more of our common life we run for each other instead of for shareholders, the freer, fairer and wealthier in real terms everyone becomes. That is the direction we are walking, openly, one essential at a time, and the public can judge each step by its results.
None of this is an attack on the corner shop, the family farm, or the independent tradie. Nobody is coming for the local cafe. The question is not whether anyone can run a business. The question is whether the things every single Australian depends on to live should be anyone's business at all.
8. A Real Say at Work
Here is something every working person knows and almost no politician ever says. The people who do a job understand it better than the people who manage it from a distance. The nurse knows the ward is unsafe before the consultant's report says so. The machine operator knows which shortcut will eventually kill someone. The teacher knows the new reporting system is a waste of everyone's time. Ask workers in any industry where the waste, the danger and the stupidity in their workplace comes from, and they will point up the chain, not down it.
Yet our workplaces are organised as if the opposite were true. Decisions flow one way, from people who often have never done the job, to people who do it every day and are expected to comply in silence. We spend a third of our waking lives in places where we have no vote, no voice, and no protection beyond what we can collectively force. We call ourselves a democracy, and then most of us clock in every morning to a little kingdom.
It does not have to work like that, and where it does not, the results are better. Workplaces where workers have real input are safer, because the people facing the risks help set the rules. They are better run, because knowledge from the floor actually reaches decisions. They hold onto staff, because people stay where they are treated as adults. None of this is utopian theory. It is what every good union delegate, every well run cooperative, and every honest small employer already demonstrates.
So our position is straightforward. The say that workers have in their work should grow until it matches the stake they hold in it, and their stake is total. It is their bodies on the line, their hours, their skills, their towns that empty out when a head office in another country decides to close the plant. A say in your own work is not a privilege to be granted when the boss is feeling generous. It is what self respect looks like when it is organised.
This is also why we say every Rmployed member of our party should be in their union, and active in it. The union is not a service you subscribe to like insurance. It is the basic tool by which working people stop being individuals who can be picked off one by one and become a force that has to be reckoned with. Everything in this document, the republic included, is built on that foundation. Nobody hands power down. It is organised from below or it does not exist.
9. We Have Done All This Before
Everything described in the last three sections will be called impossible, radical, and economically irresponsible. So it is worth remembering something that has been carefully removed from the national memory. Australia has already done most of it, and it worked.
The Commonwealth Bank was founded in 1911 as a publicly owned people's bank, created precisely because the private banks were gouging farmers and workers. It kept the private banks honest for decades, funded the nation through two wars, and belonged to every Australian, until it was sold off in the 1990s and became just another member of the cartel it was built to discipline. We owned an airline, TAA, that served the whole country. We owned the Snowy scheme, built by workers from every corner of the world, which still stands as the greatest engineering achievement in our history and was conceived, funded and run publicly from the first day. Our states owned their power grids, their water, their railways, their insurance offices. Public housing was not a stigmatised last resort but ordinary infrastructure, and a generation of working families lived in it, saved, and got ahead.
The Australia of the past did not have power bills that require a second job. It did not have a generation locked out of housing while investors collect their sixth property. It did not have aged care run as a yield play. A worker on one wage could raise a family, own a home, and retire with dignity. Our parents and grandparents took this for granted, and they took it for granted because the essential structure of the economy, banking, energy, housing, transport, was substantially in public hands and answerable, however imperfectly, to the public.
None of it was given. Every piece was won by organised working people, and every piece was taken back the moment that organisation weakened. The selloffs of the last forty years were not economic necessity. They were a transfer of the people's assets to private hands, carried out by both major parties, applauded by the press their donors own, and paid for by us, twice, once when we built it all, and again every quarter when the bills arrive.
So when they tell you our program is impossible, the answer is simple. It is not a leap into the unknown. It is the recovery of what was ours, run better this time, with the people who work in it and rely on it at the table from the start. The burden of proof does not sit with us. It sits with the people who sold the farm and want you to believe you never owned it.
10. The Common Sense of It
Strip away the labels and scare words, and here is the whole of our economic outlook in plain English ,
- The people who do the work and create the wealth deserve a fair share of it and a real say over it.
- The essentials of life, power, water, housing, health, care, should be run for the people who need them, not for profit.
- Workers should have a genuine voice in their own workplaces, because they know the work and they carry the risk.
- The wealth of this country should be managed for the benefit of the whole population, and the decisions should be made here, by us.
- Nobody, no monarch, no Corporation, or a collective of them, no foreign power, should hold unaccountable power over the lives of Australians.
These positions are the common sense of workers everywhere, you look after your mates, everyone deserves a fair go, those who do the work deserve the reward, and nobody should be too big to answer to the rest of us.
What stops people acting on that common sense is not disagreement. It is the careful, expensive work of decades spent convincing Australians that there is no alternative, that the way things are is the only way things can be, and that anyone who says otherwise is a dreamer or a danger. The same voices that call our program impossible also told us privatising power would lower bills, that wages would trickle down, and that the market would fix housing. They were wrong every single time, at our expense, and they have forfeited the right to lecture anyone about what is realistic.
Here is what is actually realistic. A country this wealthy, with these resources, this skilled a workforce and this much know how, can guarantee every one of its people a secure home, reliable essential services, dignified work and a dignified old age. The only thing standing between Australians and that country is the present arrangement of power, and arrangements of power can be changed. They have been changed before, on this very soil, by people with far less than we have now.
That is the republic we mean. Not a flag swap. Not a new title on the same old letterhead. A commonwealth in the true and original sense of the word, the wealth of this country held in common, governed by its people.
If you have read this far and found yourself agreeing more than you expected, that is not an accident. These were always your ideas. We are just the people organised to win them.