>At 04:15 AM 2/20/99 +1100, angela wrote:
>>our esteemed prime minister has just informed us that he will be
>>writing the preamble that will go to the republic referenda later
this
>>year. this preamble will, he says, mention god.... i assume he
wants
>>to refer authorship of the nation to god; so perhaps we are doing a
wojtek asked:
>Is that the only nonsense his majesty has or will say?
sure we could simply practice without beleif, but as althusser said pascal said: "kneel and you shall beleive".
then again, the more important aspect of this is that the preamble will, after a referenda on the constitution, actually have implication in a way that the current references to the queen and god do not, since this presence has more or less been, in practice, absent - a kind of absentee owner.
two more things to mention re the constitutional referendum:
1. the preamble, according to howard (mr mealy-mouth) will "acknowledge god, the prior occupation of of aborigines, equal rights of men and women before the law, and respect for democratic representation within federation". the god-thing, i've already mentioned. constitutionalising 'PRIOR occupation' will make dispossession into a legal fact that it previously has not been, and remove one and for all the possibility of recompense. the phrasing of equal rights before the law will almost certainly enshrine a version of 'sex-blindness' that has resulted in our affirmative action and equal opp laws being the most effective set of laws for ensuring the success of claims brought by men against women. and, the federal system, as everyone knows, is highly undemocratic, so to protect that as outside the democratic injunction is pretty awful as well.
2. it's likely there will be two referenda questions: the preamble and substituting a president for the queen, most likely maintaining the largely ceremonial powers rather than the US model. given our federalism, any referendum question has to get a majority of votes in a majority of states before being passed. this means that each tasmanian, for eg, has an effective twice as many votes as someone from new south wales. hence, it is more than likely that the preamble will succeed and the republic question not. not that i really care for the republic question...
angela