Could we randomly select a citizen as our head of state?

By Chas Underwood

This piece first appeared as a featured article in volume 95, issue six of Pelican. You can view our print archive here.

It’s the final politics column for the year. That means it’s time for something a bit whacky. So here’s the most out-there political idea I could endorse: the Australian head of state should be selected at random from the population.

Why? Well, we need to go over the problems with the current system and the proposed alternatives to understand. Australia is a constitutional monarchy – we have a king, Charles III, and his representative Sam Mostyn is our governor-general.

The Australian monarch nominally selects the governor-general, but in practice it’s the prime minister’s choice. The governor-general nominally has many powers – deciding whether bills can become law, commanding the military, appointing ministers, calling elections, and so on – but in practice these are only ever exercised according to the prime minister’s wishes. All fair enough, considering the prime minister is the one who’s actually won election.

It’s seemingly odd for a system to invest so much apparent power in an official who never ends up exercising it on their own accord, but it works quite well in practice. There are just three problems.

Problem #1: The monarch isn’t very Australian. Charles III is nominally King of Australia, but he and his family live on a small island on the other side of the world and barely come over here. No way would we put him in charge, even nominally, if we were writing a constitution today.

Problem #2: The justification for passing political power down a hereditary line has collapsed. Actually, it’s been collapsed for hundreds of years now. We no longer consider the mere fact someone was descended from the last guy in power to warrant giving them power. Even if we could find a suitable Australian family for a royal line (the Katters? the Irwins? the Abletts?), we wouldn’t give them any power, even nominally, if we were writing a constitution today.

Problem #3: It’s not entirely true that the governor-general only ever exercises their powers according to the prime minister’s wishes. On a few, highly controversial occasions, they have intervened against their prime minister’s advice – most infamously in 1975, when Sir John Kerr dismissed Gough Whitlam as prime minister. We’re averse to unelected officials making highly consequential calls like that.

OK, so far, these are the pretty bog-standard anti-monarchy arguments. People who endorse these arguments usually instead favour some sort of republicanism – where the head of state is a president rather than a monarch.

(Or a governor-general. Did you know there’s a scholarly dispute over whether it’s more accurate to describe the monarch or the governor-general as the Australian head of state? It has its own Wikipedia page and everything.)

Anyway, the available polling suggests a majority of Australians are republicans in principle – the difficulty lies in getting everyone to agree on a particular model. Dozens have been proposed, but let’s simplify these into election models and selection models.

Under election models, Australians would have a direct vote on the president. The simplest version of this model is a straightforward free-for-all, but there are other versions with preliminary stages. For example, the most recent Australian Republican Movement model has candidates selected by state, territory and federal parliaments and only then put to a national vote.

Aside from its simplicity, there’s an obvious advantage to this sort of model: a widely accepted answer to the question of “why should we accept this leader?” is “you elected them”. The counter-concern is that this might work a little too well – the president might feel like their electoral mandate is strong enough to wade in to the political arena and overshadow the prime minister. (And not without justification – after all, we don’t directly vote for the prime minister).

Some republicans are happy to double down here and endorse supplanting the prime minister with a president – moving to an American system. But there’s lots of downsides to this. Chiefly, we would lose the handy feature of the Westminster system where the head of the executive must enjoy the confidence of at least Parliament’s lower house, meaning dysfunctional situations where the government and Parliament are opposed to each other will come up more often.

So, what about selection models? Here, the president is chosen by another official or body – the prime minister, the Parliament, some special council – with no election involved. My favourite of these is the McGarvie model: a group of former governors and judges select the president according to the prime minister’s will.

The main attraction of these models is they are conservative and low-risk – their creators recognise there’s not actually that many problems with the current system and try to preserve as much of the existing system as possible while still solving these problems.

The downside is they’re a bit unpopular – people seem to like the idea of having a direct say on their head of state. The model proposed at the failed 1999 republic referendum was a selection model: the head of state would be selected by a two-thirds vote in Parliament. Even back then, a majority of Australians supported a republic in principle, but this did not translate into majority support when it came down to a referendum.

(Q: “Wait, you’re dismissing selection models because they have trouble getting popular support – but you think people are going to get on board with picking their leader out of a metaphorical hat?

A: “Yes, once they read the second half of the article.”)

So, to sum it all up, we need a system that:

• Solves the constitution’s little anachronistic problems – things like giving immense nominal power to a family who lives on a small island on the other side of the world;
• But doesn’t wreck things that work fine – we don’t need to unduly empower the new president at the expense of the prime minister, for example; and,
• Could be popular enough for it to pass a referendum – people buy into the proposal and don’t see it as elitist.

My eventual argument will be that some system where we select a citizen, at random, to be the president, could do this. But first – why would we even think this would be a good idea in the first place?

The strongest arguments for random selection come back to the value of representation. We want leaders who are aligned with our interests and values. Our go-to way of ensuring this is to hold votes where people can choose whoever they feel represents them best. But this process itself introduces distortions – political candidates are not drawn from the population at large, but rather a subset who have the interest, mindset, resources and capacities to amass a following, campaign and win elections. Not many people are like this! With random selection, we’re getting someone representative of the whole population, not just this subset.

So how would this operate? The purest version would be simply picking one person off the electoral roll, no questions asked. But realistically, this wouldn’t work – for one, some people would simply refuse to take up such a public role. We could let people opt out, but you still have the problem of utterly unsuitable people being selected – lunatics, partisans or complete incompetents.

Realistically, what you would need is a stage of vetting. You could take a preliminary random sample – let’s say 100 willing candidates – and have parliamentarians assess them. To ensure an agreeable selection, the threshold for candidates would have to be fairly high. A threshold of two-thirds support in both chambers should be strict enough to weed out the worst. Whoever is left standing at the end goes into a draw, and the selected person becomes the head of state for the next year.

So, any problems with this system? Well, many, but the most obvious is that a random person picked off the electoral roll, even given a vetting process, is extremely unlikely to be anywhere near as competent as Sam Mostyn at being the head of state. They would very probably lack the prerequisite knowledge of convention, diplomatic manner, community standing and public image.

This is inarguably true, but in some ways, this is a feature. Someone who is uncertain, knowingly deficient in these capacities and recently thrust into a role as a high-profile national figure is likely to be highly tentative and reluctant to act boldly. They will likely be more than happy to defer to their staff and their prime minister, especially when they are acutely conscious they were selected at random and not for their personal qualities. This suits our objective of avoiding empowering the head of state at the expense of the prime minister – though in a slightly perverse manner!

So, how much of that do I actually believe, and how much is just exaggerated for the headline? Well, if this were ever tried out, I’d prefer it done first in a country far away from Australia. If I absolutely had to choose, I’d go with something more sensible like the McGarvie republic model.