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Why the Queen is not our head of state.

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HOORAY! We may yet get a decent debate going on the question "Who is our head of state?" At last a leading republican (George Winterton, "Who is Our Head of State?" Quadrant, September) has tried to respond to my claim that the governor-general is our head of state. I say "at last" because we now have a response to the case which I first put on the public record almost fourteen years ago, and have done so repeatedly ever since; and I say "tried" because Professor Winterton has concentrated his attack on the messenger rather than the message. Let me take you through his article seriatim.

Professor Winterton is correct when he points out that I used to describe the Queen as our symbolic head of state and the governor-general as our de facto head of state. In those early days I accepted the conventional wisdom that the powers and functions of head of state resided with the Queen but were exercised by the governor-general, and I tried to find some way of differentiating their roles.

As I continued my research into more than ninety years of judicial pronouncements and legal opinions on this subject, I discovered that the powers and functions of head of state do not reside with the Queen. Since then I have described the Queen as our monarch or sovereign, and the governor-general as our head of state.

In this I was influenced by a number of factors: the words of two of Australia's leading constitutional scholars, A. Inglis Clark and W. Harrison Moore, in 1901; the words of Lord Haldane, the Lord Chancellor, in two constitutional cases before the Privy Council in 1916 and 1922; legal opinions given to Prime Minister Menzies by Solicitor-General Sir Kenneth Bailey in 1953, and to Prime Minister Whitlam by Solicitor-General Maurice Byers in 1975; and the 1988 Report of the Constitutional Commission, of which Gough Whitlam was a member, and which was advised by a committee chaired by Sir Zelman Cowen. Professor Winterton does not mention these.

Professor Winterton accuses me and my colleagues of increasingly diminishing the Queen's role until she was virtually invisible. This is a glib accusation, easily made but difficult to substantiate. The Queen and...