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Ladies and Gentlemen, I will not argue here that we should no longer rely on the bloodstock of a single, foreign family to provide us our head of state. If you want to argue the case for retaining the English monarchy as head of the Australian state, you will have to find someone prepared to waste time entertaining you. I can't be bothered. But just because it is obviously long past time we had an Australian head of state, doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge the advantages we have derived from having Queen Elizabeth reign as our monarch.

One of the most striking advantages of having Queen Elizabeth the Second as our head of state is that she has no interest in Australian politics. She really has no interest in interfering with us at all. She rarely visits, and when she does, she is paraded around city streets and agricultural shows and if one collected her entire conversations with Australians, we would probably find more references to marmalade than to economics or social problems. This is the ideal head of state: someone who symbolises 'The Crown' as above everyone equally: the highest and the lowest in the land are as one to her.

So why not keep her, or her descendents as our head of state?

Well, I said I wasn't going to argue about this, but if you insist... Because we have been lucky. We have - purely by good luck and celestial alignment of the stars - been shown the ideal head of state. But the current run of good luck can't continue. Queen Elizabeth will die. One of her relatives will take over the family business and perhaps not them, but the one after them, or the one after that, or the one after that... but eventually, one of them will take an interest in the kingdom of Australia, and when that happens, our good luck ends. As soon as a monarch tries to do something, bad things result. Just look at... well, anything any English monarch has ever done.

But a monarchy - particularly a monarchy which doesn't interfere with us - suits us very well. And as it happens, it provides us with one of the most powerful and useful symbols: The Crown. The idea that you are not loyal to a monarch, but to The Crown is very potent. It reinforces the idea that the individual is not the important thing - the individual merely provides the head to transport the crown. It means our armed services are loyal, not to a person, but to a symbol; a symbol which represents the sum of the country. Our governments in turn draw their authority, not merely from their election, but from the symbol of the crown.

So, before we lose a perfectly good monarch in Queen Bess, we need to capture the essence of the wonderful monarchy we have inherited, identify and eliminate any weaknesses in the system, codify it, and adopt it as our own, as truly Australian.

What weaknesses does the current system have? Haven't I just been singing its praises?

The weakness of all monarchies is that they are hereditary. If the weakness of that isn't immediately obvious to you, I suggest you look at your own family and contemplate what would happen if pervy Uncle Pete, or loopy Aunt Maud were given free rein to reign over us. Every family's got 'em, and if the family happens to be a royal one, eventually one of the less desirables gets their hands on the sceptre.

It doesn't have to be that we. We can design a non-hereditary monarchy. We don't even need to do much designing - we've been living with it for years. What does the queen do in Australia? Nothing. She doesn't have to. She has half a dozen defacto queens whom we appoint for her. We call them Governors or Governors-General. And they do a pretty exemplary job in chatting about marmelade and flowers and cattle dogs when called on.

So instead of relying on a foreign Queen and appointing Governors to do her work, why don't we appoint a monarch? There need be only two conditions for appointing them: 1. Neither they nor their immediate family must ever have been monarch previously (i.e. our monarchy must alway be non-hereditary); and, 2. They must be... please see next chapter