When Australians in the middle of this century look back on us, they will be astonished that we supported a national day that insulted the original inhabitants of the continent, we refused even to mention them in our constitution, we stuck a British flag in the corner of our flag, and we had a foreigner as our head of state.
It’s not that the citizens who oppose change to any of these absurdities will have changed their minds by 2050, it’s that there won’t be many of them around.
With declining fertility of our citizenry, immigration is outpacing natural increase as a source of population growth. In the years immediately before the COVID-19 pandemic, net overseas migration accounted for around 63 per cent of Australia’s population growth.
Looking ahead, in the most recent intergenerational report net overseas migration is projected to contribute a whopping 75 per cent of Australia’s population growth in 40 years’ time.
The two biggest source countries for immigrants nowadays? China and India. And the fastest growing countries of birth between the 2016 and 2021 census periods were India, Nepal, the Philippines, Vietnam and China. Not many monarchists there.
Nor will younger Australians of Anglo-Celtic heritage follow in their parents’ footsteps and become more conservative as they replace their parents in the aged cohort of the voting population.
We know this from the ANU election study and other ANU analysis. The Coalition vote among under-35s has slumped from around 60 per cent in 1967 to less than 20 per cent today. And while 40 per cent of those born between 1981 and 1996 previously voted for the Coalition, only 25 per cent do these days.
Celebrating the day of the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 and the proclamation of Australia as a British colony, Australia Day also marks the beginning of the dispossession of First Nations people, the prior occupants of the continent.
A 2021 Deakin contemporary history poll of more than 5,000 people found that while 60 per cent of all respondents wanted to keep Australia Day on 26 January, 53 per cent of Millennials (born 1986-2002) wanted it moved. The Baby Boomers strongly opposed change, but they will be gone well before 2050.
Moving Australia Day to a day that can be celebrated by all Australians will happen sooner rather than later.
Our Constitution fails even to recognise the truth of prior occupation of the continent, relying on the bizarre notion that the continent was unoccupied before the First Fleet arrived.
It took a decision of judges in the Mabo and Wik cases to dispel the notion of terra nullius and replace it with native title. Paul Keating, as prime minister, was obliged to draw on all his guile and determination to press the Senate to pass native title legislation.
The passing of a referendum on the Voice would acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Constitution. Just as the conservatives’ campaign against the referenda of 1988 – if you don’t understand it, don’t vote for it – was highly effective, they are running the same strategy against the Voice, demanding more detail. And when the detail is provided, they will say it’s terribly complex, so if you don’t understand it don’t vote for it.
As for a referendum for an Australian republic, it, too, will come. The 1999 referendum was defeated 55-45 per cent, quite a close result. In an Australia of the 2050s, of rich cultural diversity and in which young people feel no bond to the British monarchy, we will be a republic.
By then our national flag will no longer include the Union Jack. In the post-colonial era, only four countries outside of Britain retain it: Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tuvalu. As Effie Stefanidis of the 1999s comedy show Acropolis Now would say, “How embarrassment!”
Our national anthem will be replaced too, hopefully by an abbreviated version of I Am Australian
In Bob Hawke’s address to the Twenty-Twenty Vision forum series that I co-convened in the early 1990s, he advocated an Australian republic and a just reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Bob’s greatest disappointment was his failure to achieve that reconciliation through a referendum or a treaty. Conservatives in his own party warned him off it and he lamented he shouldn’t have listened to them.
But the future is full of promise and the dwindling number of conservatives among the Australian people will have neither the power nor the numbers to force Australia to cling to its colonial past.
Craig Emerson is managing director of Emerson Economics. He is director of the APEC Study Centre at RMIT University, visiting fellow at the ANU and adjunct professor at Victoria University’s College of Business.