Both sides of this paradox have been on display in Australia over the past three months, during which Queen Elizabeth II made a successful and generally well-regarded tour of Australia, including Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne and Perth. The tour was built around the Queen’s official visit to Perth, where she opened the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting held in October.

But in a recent address to the National Press Club, leading Australian businesswoman Heather Ridout — possibly the closest business leader to the current Gillard government — went out of her way to close her address with a heartfelt plea for an Australian republic. As CEO of one of Australia’s largest business lobby groups, the Australian Industry Group, and a recent appointee to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s board, Mrs Ridout stated her view that while support for a republic in the polls is currently insufficient for a successful referendum to be held, the cause would eventually re-emerge as the mainstream view, due to ‘the importance for our opportunities in the Asian century of us having an Australian head of state’. Mrs Ridout is far from alone and would speak for most of the Australian business community’s top end — though they may be wary of speaking out just yet.

Days before Queen Elizabeth arrived in Australia, Philip Flood — a former Secretary of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) — made similar personal comments in a memoir of his diplomatic career, Dancing with Warriors: a Diplomatic Memoir. Mr Flood, also a former ambassador to Indonesia and high commissioner to Bangladesh, was Australia’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom at the time of the 1999 referendum.

In his memoirs, Mr Flood affirms that the British monarchy’s role in Australia is ‘no longer compatible with our sense of national identity. An Australian head of state, an Australian living in Australia, who is exclusively our own, would unequivocally represent and symbolize our nation’. He concludes: ‘A change to a republic is part of the natural evolution of our nation, a natural outcome of the changes we have made over the past century’. Mr Flood represents the views of a long line of republicans at senior levels of DFAT, including Richard Woolcott. Mr Woolcott was also formerly Secretary of DFAT and Australia’s ambassador to Indonesia, and firmly described the British monarchy as an anachronism in Australia. In his own memoirs, The Hot Seat, Mr Woolcott wrote that an Australian republic is fundamental to the nation’s future.

The republican cause in Australia is often seen as a symbolic issue and relegated in importance behind other bread-and-butter political issues, such as the economy. Yet both Mr Flood and Mrs Ridout point to the practical benefits in terms of representation and identity in international diplomacy and trade. They do not overemphasise this element of the argument but they are firm about it. According to Mrs Ridout: ‘we will not have a truly Australian brand until we allow ourselves to produce our own head of state’. She quotes with approval Paul Keating, the former Australian prime minister who has done most to advocate an Australian republic, that Australia must cease being ‘the branch office of Empire’.

Mrs Ridout concluded her press club address by referencing an editorial in the Adelaide Advertiser, noting that an Australian republic ‘better reflects our place in the global economy and system of government, [and] in due course, a republic is in the best interests of modern Australia’. Many leading Australians share this conclusion. It is up to them to play a role in convincing the nation at large.

John Warhurst is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University and Deputy Chair of the Australian Republican Movement.