Anthony Albanese has comprehensively shut the door on the prospect of a referendum to make Australia a republic while he is prime minister, despite acknowledging his personal desire for an Australian head of state.<\/p>\n
Albanese said there would only be one referendum during his time as the nation\u2019s leader, during an interview on the ABC Insiders program on Sunday after his meeting with King Charles in Balmoral, Scotland.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I\u2019ve made it clear that I wanted to hold one referendum while I was prime minister, and we did that,\u201d he said, referring to the 2023 Indigenous voice to parliament referendum.<\/p>\n
Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWe did that. And I think 1759053373 we\u2019re concentrating on cost of living, and on making a real practical difference to people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked by host David Speers, whether he thought it was strange to visit the king of Australia in Scotland, Albanese said King Charles \u201cis fully aware that I support an Australian as our head of state\u201d.<\/p>\n The last prime minister to visit the British monarch at Balmoral castle was Paul Keating in 1993, who told Queen Elizabeth<\/a> there was a \u201cgrowing feeling\u201d that Australia should have its own head of state, and that his view was that the nation should be a republic by the centenary of federation in 2001.<\/p>\n But a 1999 republic referendum under John Howard\u2019s prime ministership fell far short of approving the change.<\/p>\n On Sunday Albanese confirmed he had not discussed future plans to make Australia a republic with the king.<\/p>\n Albanese has long been an advocate for an Australian republic, but has slowly backed away from constitutional change.<\/p>\n In October 2023, after the voice referendum failed, Albanese ruled out another referendum during his first term.<\/p>\n \u201cI made it very clear that this was the only referendum that I was proposing in this term. I made no commitments about any further referendums,\u201d he said during a press conference.<\/p>\n In July 2024, Albanese scrapped the ministerial portfolio for a republic.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Breaking News Australia<\/p>\n Get the most important news as it breaks<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Albanese has said since the May election there wouldn\u2019t be another referendum in this term, but as recently as Friday had kept the door ajar to the prospect of a vote in the future.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve said very clearly, I have no plans to have a referendum during this term,\u201d he told reporters during a press conference in London.<\/p>\n When pushed for whether he believed Australia would become a republic in his lifetime, he said, \u201cThat\u2019s a matter for the Australian people, but I respect his majesty.\u201d<\/p>\n The Australian Republic Movement urged the government to keep the issue on the national agenda. The co-chair, Nathan Hansford, said a visit to Australia\u2019s head of state \u201cshouldn\u2019t require a flight to Balmoral\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe call on the prime minister and all parliamentarians to keep this on the national agenda and set out a path to a referendum. Keep the conversations going and let Australians decide.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anthony Albanese has comprehensively shut the door on the prospect of a referendum to make Australia a republic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174871,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-174870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174870\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}