Looking into Australia Together - Part 2

Strategies for reform of Australia's Constitution.

In this series of articles I’m providing brief summaries featuring some of the Targets and Strategies in Australia Together.

Australia Together is the nation’s first long term, integrated plan for a better future for everyone. It is being progressively developed by Australians for Australians so that we can tell our governments what we want them to do for us as a cohesive, democratic community.

Issue No. 7 of Australia Together, released in February 2024, contains data and factual information on 312 indicators of the nation’s current wellbeing and security, and for every indicator there are corresponding Targets and Strategies aimed at helping Australians build the level of wellbeing and security we want and need as expressed in the Vision for Australia Together. This Vision describes in one page the sort of nation and country Australians aspire to live in by 2050 or sooner. It’s a draft based on the responses of Australians about the best future they can imagine whenever they have been asked about that in surveys, community forums and research programs in the 21st century. You can read the latest draft Vision for Australia Together here.

In Part 1 of this series, I summarised the Targets and Strategies in Australia Together to fix Australia’s housing crisis. Today I’ll summarise the Targets and Strategies for constitutional reform. This includes summaries of Strategies designed to provide for the human rights of Australians in domestic law. This is a priority in Australia Together because rights available to Australians in international law are not accessible by them at home because the vast majority of those rights are not available in our domestic laws. Those that are available are tenuous.

As I noted in Part 1 of this series, Australia Together is a map through time of the safe routes to a destination of wellbeing and security for every single Australian by 2050 or sooner. Every Target and Strategy has a coloured map reference number. You can follow the map by using the reference numbers or simply by searching on keywords which relate to your topic of interest.

I’ll start now by talking about the dangers of Australia’s current Constitution and how it’s a threat to democracy and to everything we value and want. The research behind this is fully documented in my recent book, The People’s Constitution: the path to empowerment of Australians in a 21st century democracy, accessible on the ACFP website.

The dangers of Australia’s Constitution - it’s a threat to democracy and to everything we value and want

Australia’s current Constitution is more than 120 years old and is now entirely unfit for securing our future as a modern, democratic nation of political equals. It’s unfit because it encodes a system of governance designed to protect and promote the interests of a foreign monarch, regardless of the interests of Australians. It is entirely silent on the interests of Australians. It is not a constitution for a democracy because it gives no rights or powers to the people. Australia is a constitutional monarchy not a constitutional democracy. Even the right to vote is not secured within the Australian Constitution.

Currently the Constitution is also a serious barrier to our ability to make the Vision for Australia Together a reality. In no way can it help Australians realise their aspirations for a better future. On the contrary, it’s geared to ensure governments can disregard our aspirations, values, rights, needs, and wants with impunity.

You can find out more about some of the failings and serious dangers posed by the current Constitution for our continued wellbeing and security as individuals and as a nation in this Fact Sheet: How is Australia’s Constitution inconsistent with the Vision for Australia Together?

The fact sheet also shows how what Australians value and want can only be secured if they collaborate to build a new People’s Constitution - one in which we the people of Australia are at last accorded a share of rightful power in our own governance arrangements and in which we state four as yet unstated but absolutely necessary requirements for the foundation of a democratic nation. The four things we must state in a new Australian People’s Constitution are:

1. our most sincerely held values as an indissoluble commonwealth (the values that hold us together and define what we stand for as a nation);

2. the human rights we wish to confer on ourselves and each other as equals;

3. the government’s obligations to the people in observance of those human rights;

4. an additional right of the people to a Voice in how the nation should chart a course to a better future.

You can find out everything about a People’s Constitution on the ACFP website where you can also find out more about the possibility of establishing a Constitutional Convention led by the people of Australia, using a fully open and democratic community engagement program called the National Collaborative Process for Development of a New Australian People’s Constitution.

Strategies for reform of Australia’s Constitution

Targets and Strategies designed to set Australians on a course towards a rightful share of power in their own democracy appear in Australia Together under map reference numbers in the Governance and Society chapters.

Taken together these Strategies add up to a program in which Australians can lead themselves in their own Constitutional Convention using a fully open, seven-step, collaborative process for design of amendments to the current Constitution which they can then vote on in a series of democratic plebiscites and referendums. You can find information about this seven-step process in the Fact Sheet on the website called Making a new Australian Constitution – by collaboration.

The seven-step program envisages an orderly and well-informed collaboration that will allow any and all Australians to freely express their sovereign will for the Commonwealth they wish to form for the 21^st century and to design a Constitution containing all the things they need to build their preferred future as a nation. The collaborative process, if we can get it off the ground, is expected to take five years or more and is intended as far as possible to prevent the politicisation and corporate or interest group capture of the community’s deliberations. It is to be driven by Australians, independent of their parliaments and governments. After all, it’s their nation. And the concept here is that Australians must therefore be able to design their own Constitution recognising that it must function as the law that governs how all other laws may be made.

In short before Australians elect parliaments and governments they need to set out principles that must be taken into account and lines that may not be crossed whenever those we elect exercise the power they have been granted in elections. The current Constitution does not do this and as a result Australians are experiencing a proliferation of abuse of their rights and freedoms.  

Nevertheless, the general objective of the program of constitutional reform in Australia Together is not to replace or remove the powers of the parliament, the executive government or the judicature. Instead the objective is to augment the sphere of power so that the people of Australia actually have rightful powers of their own, including:

• rights to a voice about their preferences for the future; and

• an ability to develop terms of trust with those they elect to the federal parliament.

It is to transform the current merely representative system of governance into a full participatory democracy in which all Australians have agency as political equals.

There are several Strategies in Australia Together aimed at achieving this. They start with the two Strategies mentioned already for:

1. a Constitutional Convention driven by Australians rather than by governments or either house of parliament (Gov04.01); and

2. the National Collaborative Process for Development of the Australian People’s Constitution (Gov04.01.01).

But these are integrated with several others that are crucial to the formation of a democratic governance system for Australia.

1. The first is for a National Agreement on Human Rights and Obligations enshrined in the Constitution itself, not just in legislation (Gov03.01) and a national community engagement process for development of this Agreement (Gov03.01.01).

2. The second is for new constitutional provisions which automatically grant all Australians the rights granted at any time in accordance with any international law, treaty, covenant, convention or declaration signed by Australia, whether or not Australia’s parliament has ratified the law, treaty, covenant, convention or declaration. This is a fundamental change to the way rights are conferred on Australians in our laws. It’s necessary because for over 60 years governments have withheld even basic human rights from Australians. They can also withdraw rights regardless of whether it is in the public interest, and can lawfully abuse the rights of Australians without accountability (Gov03.01.02). Most Australians will not think this is possible, but the rights of Australians are frequently abused by our governments. Evidence for this is documented in detail in Chapter 6 of The People’s Constitution. 

3. The third Strategy is for constitutional recognition of First Nations peoples including the possibility of recognition of the principle of the coexistence of sovereignties (Soc02.01).

4. The fourth is for establishment of a First Nations’ Voice in the Constitution in line with the need to simultaneously establish a National People’s Voice for all Australians (Soc02.01.01 and Gov01.04 respectively). The need for the simultaneous establishment of these two voices is vital to Australia’s capacity to achieve greater equity in sharing the benefits of being an Australian. The proposal for the two co-existent voices is also vital to achievement of that element of the Vision for Australia Together which arcs towards reconciliation between First Nations people and non-Indigenous Australians.

5. The fifth strategy is for establishment of a Makarrata Commission (Soc02.01.02), to ensure just and fair treatymaking between First Nations, the People of Australia and the Crown – or the State, if the Crown is removed from its place in the Constitution.

6. The sixth is constitutional reform to eliminate racism and permissions for racism in Australian law (Soc07.03).

7. The seventh is an Independent Commission for National Engagement and Integrated Planning and an Institute for National Long Term Financial Planning. This aims to establish participatory budgeting for the federal budget – in other words it aims to give the people of Australia some say on how national income and wealth may be raised and shared.  (Gov01.04.01 and Gov01.05 respectively).

8. The eighth strategy is about discussion within the Constitutional Convention I’ve proposed already of matters including rights to voluntary assisted dying (Gov03.01), electoral funding reform to increase equality for citizens as electors (Gov.08.02), and protection of refugees seeking asylum (Gov11.03).

9. The ninth is for establishment of provisions in the Constitution guaranteeing parliamentary supremacy in decisions on entry into wars or warlike operations in foreign countries. This includes prohibition of participation by Australia in illegal wars (i.e., wars unauthorised by the UN Security Council). It also includes prohibition of parliamentary and executive approval of entry into wars in other countries without explicit demonstration of how it will serve the national interest and will be consistent with the values and rights of Australians as expressed by them in their People’s Constitution (Gov12.06).

10. The tenth strategy is for establishment of a permanent, independent constitutional review commission (Gov04.03). This is necessary to ensure that Australia doesn’t suffer another 120 years of haphazard consideration of the document which more than any other makes Australia what its people want it to be.

It’s worth mentioning here, as an aside, that there is also a Strategy in Australia Together for a referendum on whether Australia should become a republic. This is a strategy for a referendum, not one that insists a republic should be the outcome. The need to implement or not implement this strategy will be dependent on whether the people of Australia will deem a republic to be consistent with the governance arrangements they prefer under a new Constitution. In Australia Together there is a sequence in the way Australians might efficiently contemplate and decide on their preferred arrangements for their democratic governance in the 21^st century. In this sequence, their decisions about constitutional reform are assumed to precede their decisions on a republic; and it may be that if Australians prefer to establish a people’s constitution, a referendum on a republic would no longer be required. The question may have already been resolved in the terms of the new Constitution itself, especially if those terms ascribe no role to a foreign Crown as part of Australia’s governance and parliament.    

You can stay tuned to developments in this strategic sequence by visiting the webpage ACFP has recently established for the National Collaborative Constitutional Convention proposed in Australia Together. This process is in its infancy and there will probably be many political blockages to it. But we’ve made a start with the publication of the seven-step program for a national collaboration on a new Constitution. The webpage for the collaboration can be found at https://www.austcfp.com.au/collaborative-constitutional-convention    

Reading about constitutional reform in Australia Together

Targets and Strategies for constitutional reform can be read in full in Australia Together. They are primarily located in:

• Chapter 8: Governance 4 - Constitutional reform, Governance 1 - Strength of democracy, Governance 3 - Human & other rights, Governance 8 - Electoral system & funding reform, and Governance 12 - Peace & security; and

• Chapter 5: Society 2 - Indigenous heart.

Targets and Strategies for constitutional reform do not work in isolation from the wider agenda we can craft by working together to build a long term, integrated plan for the Australian nation and country. They are linked to, and integral to, the success of dozens of other strategies. In fact, Targets and Strategies for constitutional reform - particularly to provide Australians with human rights in law - are absolutely central to achievement of Strategies aimed at fixing critical problems like poverty, the housing crisis, physical and mental ill-health, intergenerational inequity arising from climate change, and entry into wars that are not in Australia’s interest.

You can see how these linkages work to keep us on the safe paths and away from the unsafe ones simply by reading across the three-column structure used for every Target and Strategy in the plan. This will allow you to form a picture of where we are starting from and what we are aspiring to and it will show how pursuit of each Target or Strategy will help the nation become what we want it to be, rather than what we don’t want it to be.

National Integrated Planning & Reporting - inclusive, community-driven national planning

Australia Together is generated using a process developed by ACFP called National Integrated Planning & Reporting or National IP&R. This is a fully democratic process. It allows any and all Australians to select Targets and Strategies that are safe and discard ones that are unsafe or that will have the effect of disabling other safe Strategies. The plan contains 57 generic safe Direction statements for our society, environment, economy and governance. These function as a signpost system for arriving at our preferred future without excluding anyone, without tripping each other up and without slowing our progress.

Find out how to suggest inclusion of a Strategy in Australia Together here.

National IP&R gives everyday Australians a guidance system for generating safe Targets and Strategies. If you would like to suggest a Target or Strategy, the planning process in National IP&R gives you the means to assess whether your idea is likely to follow the safe routes towards the Vision for Australia Together. ACFP hopes that Australians will become more and more involved in using National IP&R as the decade passes. Perhaps by 2030 it will be the standard practice of an inclusive Australian nation and civil society charting its own course to the best future we can imagine.

You can read the current draft of the Vision for Australia Together on the ACFP website at all times. If this describes the life and country you want by 2050 or sooner, then you can help make this Vision a reality by becoming involved in building Australia Together.

Feedback on the Vision for Australia Together and suggestions about the Targets and Strategies in the plan is always welcome by email at info@austcfp.com.au. Complete surveys to give us your opinion on the Vision for Australia Together here.

Next week in the State of Australia Substack

Next week in the State of Australia Substack I’ll post about: Strategies for stopping climate change. In the meantime, the Australia Together Podcast this week will feature a conversation expanding on the need for reform of Australia’s Constitution.  A link will be circulated in a couple of days.

Find out all about ACFP

Become involved in building plans for a better Australia here.