Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to join in this motion and congratulate the wonderful achievement of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on becoming the longest-serving English monarch—with a term of 63 years and seven months, or 23,226 days. During that time, we have seen our Queen provide continuity and stability. She has done so with grace, dignity and decency.

This is a good opportunity the reflect on how successful a constitutional monarchy has been for our nation. We have seen perhaps a million migrants come to this country from failed republics, and one of the reasons they have come is for the continuity and stability that a constitutional monarchy provides to our nation. Ultimately, the only power that the Queen has in Australia is to deny power to others. That is why our system of constitutional monarchy works—because it prevents a concentration of power at any one level of our society. There are some who still rabbit on about the need for a republic. For 20 years they have talked about it but they are yet to come up with any model that even comes close to our constitutional monarchy. Their latest argument is that we should agree to have some form of republic and a group of elites will at some time down the track work it all out for us—we will give them a blank cheque and they will fill in what the republic is. The simple reason they cannot come up with a better model is that no-one has yet invented one.

The idea of saying yes when asked whether we want a republic and having some group work out what type of republic they will give us is analogous to being asked whether we would like to go on a holiday but not being told where to. Yes; everyone would like to go on a holiday. But if I told you that you were going to go to perhaps Raqqa or Pyongyang you might think again. Likewise, unless they can come up with a model of a republic that they consider is better than our current constitutional monarchy, it should simply be rejected. Long may Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II continue to reign over us.

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