Mr DANBY (3:41 PM) —I second this motion to express the distaste of many Australians for the low road that some opponents of the proposed republic are taking. I do not include the previous speaker, the member for Parramatta. I note, as the member for Gellibrand pointed out in an earlier speech, that those supporters of the current system do not seem—as the character in Fawlty Towers always inveighs against—to want to mention the war. In this case, they do not want to seem to mention the Queen. I respect the views of many people like him, who are constitutional monarchists.

I agree with the member for Hindmarsh in her earlier claims that those seeking to scare the public that the Australian flag will be removed or changed as a result of the referendum are idiotic. Three days after her comments to the Liberal Party room a press release was put out by a parliamentary secretary in the government. It quoted comments by a Mr Harold Scruby and Natasha Stott Despoja as the evidence that the Australian flag would be changed. In his own press release, Senator Campbell points out that the amendments to the Flag Act 1953 allow the Australian flag to be changed by this parliament and that that has always been the case.

One of the principal arguments of the monarchists opposed to the Australian President and a republic is to claim that under the new system the Prime Minister would have greater powers to dismiss a President. The weight of public testimony by constitutional experts to the Joint Select Committee on the Republic Referendum, which I was on, was that the proposed system replicated the current situation. Former Prime Minister the Rt Hon. Malcolm Fraser undermined opponents of the referendum in public testimony to our committee, and now he and former Deputy Prime Minister, Doug Anthony, have written an open letter in which they seek to disabuse those who exaggerate the powers to dismiss the President under the prospective republic. On the Sunday program, Mr Fraser demolished the arguments of his former adviser, the Minister for Vocational Education and Training, in today's Age. A reporter asked Mr Fraser:

But under the proposed system if the referendum goes through, the Prime Minister could just sack the president like that, couldn't he?

Mr Fraser replied:

Well, he could just sack the president like that. But then there are consequences. There's going to be a formal debate in the parliament, and there probably would, if somebody was sacked anyway. The Opposition would make sure that there was a debate about it. But under the proposal, the Prime Minister can't appoint somebody that he wants to appoint. He's got to secure the

support of the Leader of the Opposition so that he'll get the

two-thirds parliamentary majority. In other words, you know,

having a straight political hack, having a stooge for the Prime Minister, somebody who'll do just what this particular Prime Minister wants, is not going to be possible.

Mr Fraser added in his excellent interview on the Sunday program in response to this further question from Laurie Oakes:

You're saying that the proposed republic model would be a more stable situation as far as hiring and firing the president, than the current situation we have with the Governor-General?

FRASER:

Yes, I really would. I don't think, in this context, that we really want to rake up old issues and old passions, but one of the problems in 1975 was quite simply that the Governor-General, he believed he could be sacked at the drop of a hat and that's why he did not consult with the Prime Minister in ways that many people believed he should have consulted with the Prime Minister of the day.

Under our Westminster system of responsible parliamentary government, a Prime Minister had to have the ability to remove the head of state. In the old system, a Prime Minister can remove the Governor-General, as the former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser has explained. Under the new system, the Prime Minister could remove the President. This ability is deliberate and designed in the unlikely event of conflict between the Prime Minister and the President and is designed to remove constitutional impasse.

It enshrines the supremacy of parliament, the elected representatives of the people, over the symbolic head of state. Moreover, the Prime Minister under the new republic will be constrained by having to bring the dismissal back to parliament within 30 days in having to convince the House of his actions. That is not there now.

I want to conclude with one final point—that is, the shameful scare tactics of Mr David Elliott of the Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy comparing Australia to Weimar Germany. My father lived in Weimar Germany, and anyone who compares prosperous, peaceful Australia with Germany of the 1930s is using scare tactics that are not part of the legitimate and thoughtful debate that the Australian public expect us to display in this coming referendum.