In 1999, at the end of that heady period, Australia officially got the chance to become a republic. A specific proposal for change was put to a national referendum. But although the polls had unfailingly said that most Australians wanted a republic of some kind, voters balked at the particular model of republic on offer. Only 45 per cent of people went for it. Moreover, not one of Australia's six states voted in favour of the model. And a referendum requires the approval of at least four states, as well as a majority of the national vote, to succeed. The result was a stunning defeat for republicanism. The movement has never recovered from it, and the enthusiasm of the general public has been on the wane ever since.  

An outsider might be forgiven for thinking that Australians have had ample time over the last decade to recover their appetite for a republic. But it doesn't feel like that long ago, not to those of us who lived through the campaign. It was like spending two or three years rolling a boulder to the top of a hill — or almost to the top of a hill. One reason it didn't get there was that there were people pushing on the other side of it. Some of them were monarchists, which was fair enough. But many of them were renegade republicans, who felt that the republic on offer was the wrong kind of republic. Their combined weight sent the boulder crashing all the way back to the bottom of the hill.

A decade later it's still lying there, with the limbs of many a squashed republican protruding from underneath. Who's got the energy to get it moving again? We all know, now, how devilishly hard it is to become a republic. It isn't enough — it isn't nearly enough — that the bulk of Australians should vaguely agree that the country needs an Australian head of state. Getting one of them means changing the constitution; you can't change the constitution without passing a referendum; and you can't hold a referendum until you have a detailed proposal about what sort of republic Australia should become. Should the president be popularly elected, for example, or should he or she be appointed by the federal parliament? This question caused a disastrous and bitter cleaving of the republican vote back in 1999. Before there can be a serious prospect of another referendum, republicans need to sort the answer out. They must find a model of republic they can all live with, and then they must all join hands and get behind it. 

If they'd done that last time, Australia would almost certainly be a republic right now. But they didn't and it isn't. The question of the republicans' preferred model had ominously raised its head in 1998, during a "people's convention" sponsored by the Liberal government of John Howard. Keating had been voted out of office in 1996, but he had successfully put republicanism on the front burner. His conservative opponents, some of whom were more royalist than the Queen, were obliged to deliver the constitutional convention as a concession to the general republican mood.