J. Marc Schmidt of Australia says that he doesn’t want a president.

“Our head of state ought to be one of us. We rejected the idea of our own president once, and with good cause, because a president is not what we need,” says Schmidt. “We need something more; a living, breathing symbol of our land.”

That said, Schmidt doesn’t want Queen Elizabeth II as Australia’s head of state, either. He thinks that Prince Harry should become an Australian citizen and become their king.

Read his article below:

Australia is lucky to have a great democracy, which, as most people will tell you, works quite well. But Australian voters are sick of politicians. In the 1999 constitutional convention and referendum, we could have finally become independent from Britain, but we said no. Our parliament-appointed head of state would have been just another government employee, meaning little or nothing to ordinary people.

We don’t want another dark-suited, distant bureaucrat who won’t listen to us once elected. We have plenty of those. We want something else, but what? In 1999, many supported the idea of a popularly elected president, a leader chosen by and representing the people rather than the government.

It’s nice to fantasize about a popularly elected president like, say, Dick Smith, someone who listens to our needs and wants and hopes, and connects directly with the soul of our land. But the reality is we would more likely end up with someone like George W. Bush. And Bush wasn’t even all that popular! Something like 48% voted against him in the 2004 election. In the final year of his presidency, he was quite unpopular. Many Americans and others hated him and spoke ill of him whenever possible.

We do need someone with executive power, and it would be great if that someone represented and symbolized Australia, too. These are the job requirements of any head of state: To be an executive and symbol.

Queen Elizabeth is a terrible head of state. She does not fulfill either job requirement well. She’s not Australian and she lives overseas. Her anachronistic monarchy discriminates on the grounds of sex and religion. Her use of executive power in 1975, though the Governor-General, was a deeply embarrassing moment in Australian history. We must cast her off.

A president or Queen Elizabeth will not do. What we need is our own king.

Our own king can’t be just anyone. It has to be someone with royal blood. This is how these things have have always been done. We already have a queen, so our first king should come from her family. I choose young, handsome Prince Harry, whom otherwise has little chance of ever being our king. In the past, other monarchies have separated like this. For example, in 286 AD the Roman emperor Diocletian divided the Roman Empire into sections, each with a separate emperor.

Our king must be Australian. It is a simple matter to give Prince Harry Australian citizenship. Of course he will have to acquaint himself with Australian culture and history. That should be no problem for an Eton-educated prince, who has also already spent some time living and working on a farm in Australia.

The king must be coronated in Australia. It must be a civil ceremony rather than a Christian one, because our monarchy will not discriminate against any sect or religion.
The king must live in Australia. Yarralumla and Admiralty House are suitable residences for any king of Australia.

The king must marry an Australian citizen. If he gets engaged to someone who is not Australian, we must naturalise that person as well, much as Mary Donaldson became a naturalised Dane before her royal wedding in Denmark. This spouse can be anybody. Religion, wealth, and other factors will not matter. The only thing that will matter is love.

The king’s first born, male or female, will be the heir, and only he or she will be referred to as Prince or Princess. Any other children will rejoin society as adults, to be called upon if the heir dies unexpectedly.

The heir to the throne must also marry and provide an heir. Our monarchy will not discriminate against homosexuals, so naturally, gay marriages will be allowed. If the crown prince or princess is gay, he or she must still provide an heir. Adoption and other non-traditional forms of procreation are therefore totally acceptable. Adopting royal heirs has historical precedent. The Roman emperors did it, for example.

As head of state, the king will have the same powers and responsibilities as our current queen, represented in Australia by the Governor-General.

We don’t even need a referendum to make this change. Our constitution requires that our heads of state be the ‘heirs and successors of Queen Victoria’, and Prince Harry already is.

Republicans argue that the people alone should choose their head of state, that monarchies are unfair. I disagree. Choice is overrated. In America in 2004, for example, the choice was limited to George Bush and John Kerry, and in 2008 it was limited to Barack Obama and John McCain. Monarchies use a far older, wiser, and fairer arbitrator than any election: Fate.

Do any of us get to choose whom we are born as, when or where? Whether we are born a boy or a girl, gay or straight, rich or poor? No. Fate alone decides all of these things. Thinking this way, ‘anyone’ actually can become king or queen. Fate can be cruel, capricious, and incomprehensible, but it is completely fair precisely because it favours nobody.

A king doesn’t just symbolise and represent a country and its people. He personifies them. A king is as much a part of the land as the mountains and the forests, the cities, the rivers and the plains. George W. Bush could never have said that of himself, and Barack Obama wouldn’t either.

Anyway, people like monarchies. We humans are drawn to certain ways of organising our society, and try as we might, we can’t shake our biological heritage. Is there any other reason why the marriage of Mary Donaldson to a Danish prince, and their visit, made the front pages of newspapers and magazines all across the country?

Our monarchy will be based on love, fate and family, rather than logic, bureaucracy and elections.

It will be a warm-blooded counterbalance to our cold, distant government. The art to its commerce, the past to its future, the Yin to its Yang.

Redroom.com – J Marc Schmidt