Australia Needs More Than Law of Averages

According to his own description, Peter Hollingworth has always been a rather average man.

Australia's governor general once hesitated over taking up the priesthood, thinking himself to be unworthy of the role. He felt the same when he was appointed as de facto head of state.

Mr Hollingworth has been under attack for more than a week following the publication of a report criticising the way in which he dealt with paedophile priests during his time as archbishop of Brisbane.

On Thursday, it was revealed he was being sued over allegations that he raped an 18-year-old woman in the mid-60s. His wife is fighting breast cancer. Last night, he stepped aside from the post he has held for the past two years.

It is hard to kick a man when he's down, but the fact is that Mr Hollingworth is right: he is a very average man - not necessarily a bad one, but certainly unsuited to the post to which he had been elevated.

Had a more searching inquiry into abuse in the Brisbane archdiocese been permitted, the public might have had reason to think Mr Hollingworth worse than merely average.

However, the conclusions drawn by the published report pinpoint weakness rather than wickedness: a lack of judgement which may make him unsuitable for the governor general's office, but does not make him impossible to have sympathy for.

As Mr Hollingworth disappears from the public eye, with most expecting that his standing aside will eventually turn into resignation, the question now emerging is of who, and indeed what, should replace him.

This should not just be a matter of scanning the ranks of the military, judiciary and political classes for a suitably uncontroversial figure: the role of governor general must itself be scrutinised.

The position was initially created as a way of binding Australia closely to Britain. Acting as the Queen's official representative in Australia, early governors general were, for the most part, British aristocrats on working sabbaticals downunder.

That tradition was mercifully abandoned in the 30s but, in one way, the governor general still links Australia and Britain. In a peculiarly British way, the post is a largely pointless one, sustained only by nostalgic sentiment and legal fiction.

For years, republicans have been calling for the governor general to be replaced by a directly elected Australian president, and the idea has its merits. It would cut the last atavistic ties binding Australia to the British monarchy, and would also establish a head of state favoured by the country as a whole, rather than just a small section of the Canberran political elite.

In fact, the only problem with the idea of a directly elected president in Australia is that no government would dream of establishing such an office. It would be a rare politician who allowed the emergence of a genuine rival to their own power.

During the 1999 republic referendum, the prime minister, John Howard's, choice of question - "Do you support Australia becoming a republic with a president chosen by a two-thirds majority of the parliament?" - was seen by most as no more than an attempt to destroy republicans' support base by forcing an unpalatable political arrangement on them.

In truth, it was more than this. A president chosen by two-thirds of the parliament would inevitably have favoured the government, since any viable candidate would need the backing of the majority party to win.

A directly elected president, on the other hand, could become a genuine rival to its authority, with a direct mandate numbered in the millions rather than a prime minister's thousands.

Politicians do not like giving up power, as Tony Blair's epic fudging of Lords reform proved. The chances of Australia getting a president with significantly more formal power than the governor general are as slight as the chances of Mr Howard calling a second referendum on the republic.

So, should Australia just muddle through and make do with what it has? Defenders of the status quo can be found in the strangest places. Support for the role of governor general on the left of Australian politics has, in recent years, been vastly invigorated thanks to the tenure of William Deane, whose advocacy of Aboriginal rights was seen as a constant embarrassment to the reactionary Mr Howard.

However, people should not cling to this feudal office simply because its holder can occassionally upset a government on which the opposition is unable to land a palpable blow.

Mr Deane's support for Aboriginal rights may have made some nice headlines and allowed Mr Howard's opponents to believe that there was still some goodness left in Canberra, but it did not change the situation on the ground any more than Mr Hollingworth's commitment to social equality has stopped the economic bifurcation of Australian society.

The most persistent line of support for the governor general's office, however, comes from the constitutional theorists, who go into dewy-eyed rhapsodies about the importance of the crown as a way of vesting governmental authority in an impartial, supra-political institution.

Wrapped up in Bagehotian pieties about the sublimity of the English constitutional arrangement, this rhetoric should be exposed for the nonsense it is. Constitutional theorising, especially in the English common law system, is little more than a tissue of romantic fictions serving to cloak the nakedness of raw political power.

Speaking of the authority vested in the governor general is a pretty, but delusional, piece of casuistry. The only time in Australian history that a governor general has ever demonstrated true authority was during the 1975 constitutional crisis, when John Kerr sacked Gough Whitlam's Labour government.

That crisis was precipitated because the Liberal-dominated federal senate refused to pass the Whitlam government's bills, and boiled down to an unresolved contradiction at the heart of the Australian constitution over which house of parliament holds primacy.

It is ridiculous that this contradiction existed in the first place, and even more ridiculous that, nearly 30 years after the constitutional crisis, it has still not been resolved. A single clause added to the Australian constitution would solve the issue at a stroke.

But the only time in its 102-year history that the constitutional absurdity of governor general has ever been of any political importance has been in the resolution of this other constitutional absurdity. Remove one, and you remove the need for the other.

The best solution to the problems of the governor general is to abolish the office altogether.