Are we grown up enough to be a republic?
- Grant McLachlan
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Jacinda Ardern says New Zealand will be a republic in her lifetime. She has not said what problem it solves — or whether we are mature enough to do it well.
Dame Jacinda Ardern, promoting her memoir in an interview with The Times, has repeated her belief that New Zealand “will become a republic in my lifetime.”
Ardern concedes it is “not top of the agenda” and that the picture is “complex because of the Crown’s relationship with indigenous New Zealanders.”
It is a confident prediction. It is also a hollow one, because it names neither the problem a republic would solve nor the design that would solve it.
Four of the Five Eyes share King Charles III as head of state, and being the outlier is not, by itself, an argument.
The real question is not whether we could sever the constitutional cord, but whether a country that still fumbles the basics of self-government is ready to rebuild its foundations.
On the evidence, we are not.
Contents
The empty throne
Remove the King and something has to fill the space.
Who? Chosen how? Wielding what powers?
Australia discovered how unforgiving those questions are.
For years a clear majority of Australians told pollsters they wanted a republic — then in 1999 they voted one down, 55 to 45, because republicans had split over the model: a president appointed by Parliament, or one elected by the people.
Agreement on the destination counts for nothing without agreement on the machine.
We have not even begun that argument.
A republic is not a mood. It is a machine — and we have not designed the machine.
Sovereignty, and to whom
There is also a problem that is ours alone.
In 1835, the United Tribes declared their independence and asked the King to protect their fledgling state. In 1840, the rangatira ceded sovereignty to the Crown — not to a settler legislature that did not yet exist.
The body that would inherit the Crown’s place, that same settler Parliament, is the one with the record to answer for.
Settler government is the worst thing to ever happen to Maori. Settlers fuelled a war so to confiscate Maori land, created Maori Land Courts to alienate them, introduced Maori electorates to marginalise them, then ran a country that treated them like second class citizens in their native lane.
In 1877 the Chief Justice, James Prendergast, dismissed the Treaty as “a simple nullity” signed by “primitive barbarians.” Four years later, with the sympathetic governor conveniently dispatched to Fiji and Prendergast himself standing in as acting governor, the government sent troops into the peaceful settlement at Parihaka on the eve of an election.
Right now, several politicians in government believe that the Maori electorate seats should be abolished, and that the Treaty should have no role in legislation. Imagine what would happen if their property speculator donors pushed for a republic.
Sovereignty isn't something that can be re-gifted. Maori should be asked first if their Treaty partner should be transferred.
Why would Maori swap a distant, neutral Crown for the very Parliament that dispossessed them?
The checks we threw away
A grown-up constitution restrains power. Ours keeps throwing the restraints away.
We abolished our upper house in 1950, so a government with a majority can now drive law through under urgency with no revising chamber and, often, no select-committee scrutiny.
When Sir Geoffrey Palmer proposed an entrenched, supreme-law Bill of Rights in the 1980s, it was watered down into an ordinary statute whose section 4 expressly forbids the courts from striking down legislation that breaches it.
Twice we chose to leave Parliament unchecked.
Most of our constitution is not even written down. It runs on convention, and on the restraint of whoever happens to hold power.
Look across the Pacific to see how fragile that is.
The United States has a written constitution, three co-equal branches and an entrenched Bill of Rights — and even there, in a union its founders only ever dared call “more perfect,” a president has spent the past year testing how far the guardrails hold, defying court orders and withholding money Congress had appropriated.
If written restraints can be strained that hard, unwritten ones offer less, not more.
A republic would hand that same unchecked Parliament the head of state as well — and trust to convention what sturdier constitutions can barely hold.
How we treat failure
Consider how we deal with institutional failure.
We replaced the Privy Council with our own Supreme Court in 2004, on the proud argument that we had come of age. Within a few years one of that court’s own judges, Bill Wilson, faced findings of apparent bias and a judicial-conduct inquiry — and it ended not in a public determination but in a settlement: a year’s salary, with his legal costs met by the Crown.
The acting Attorney-General assured us he had not been accused of a crime, only “a sustained lapse in judgment.”
Our watchdogs are under-resourced, and our reflex is to pay a problem to go quietly rather than resolve it in daylight.
We are not corrupt, we tell ourselves — mostly because no one is looking.
The same reflex governs how we treat the most vulnerable.
The Royal Commission into Abuse in Care found that as many as 200,000 children and vulnerable adults were abused in state and faith-based institutions — and that survivors who came forward were routinely disbelieved, downplayed or dismissed, while the Crown spent years and millions defending itself against their claims.
We apologised, eventually, on camera, long after the people who spoke out had been left more exposed than before.
And the instinct travels.
As I have argued, our most senior officials tend to rise unchallenged at home and are only ever brought to account by someone else’s watchdog.
A grown-up country faces its own reflection; we have made a habit of waiting for someone else to do it for us.
The price of a knighthood
Then follow the money, and the honours.
New Zealand’s political-donation rules are rated among the weakest in the developed world — no caps, generous anonymity, and trusts that veil who is really paying.
It is the same donor-class politics now on open display in Washington, where the wealthiest backers expect a return on their money — and it is taking root here, where developers trade donations and ministerial selfies for access and approvals, confident the network will behave like a network.
And in 2009 the same political class that cannot muster the maturity for a republic restored knighthoods and damehoods, scrapped nine years earlier as a step toward one. The prime minister who brought the titles back, John Key, later took one himself.
A country genuinely outgrowing the Crown does not pour its energy into reinstating the Crown’s baubles.
The relatives we perform for
Watch how we carry ourselves abroad.
We behave like a little brother trailing Australia, a distant cousin waving at Canada, the adolescent son still angling for the approval of the King.
We crave the good opinion of overseas media and arrange our self-image to earn it — while the uglier habits stay behind the curtain at home.
We sent the All Blacks to apartheid South Africa in 1976 with the government’s blessing — having for years let selectors leave Maori players behind, then sending them as “honorary whites” — and 25 African nations boycotted the Montreal Olympics in protest.
In 1981 the same government waved the Springboks in again. The “stand” against apartheid that we now fold into the national story was made by protesters in the streets, not by the state that let the tour proceed.
We banned nuclear ships and basked in the moral glow, while sheltering all the while under the very alliance we lectured — what critics fairly called free-riding on others’ security.
We keep performing maturity for an overseas audience, and mistaking the applause for the thing itself.
The flag rehearsal
Want to see how we would run a republic referendum? Watch the replay of the flag one.
A $26 million process; a panel that consulted a shoe designer rather than a vexillologist; a prime minister who put his thumb on the scale for his favoured design and then watched the public reject it.
Canada changed its flag in 1965 and got an icon; we got a party-line shouting match and kept what we had.
A people that cannot calmly choose a flag is in no condition to choose a head of state.
Becoming a republic is not a coming-of-age party. It is the exam you sit once you have already grown up. New Zealand has not done the homework — and a prediction is not a plan.
