The McGarvie Model: I\'d like to compare your system to the McGarvie Model, and hear your thoughts on the topic. How is this better?
The biggest disadvantage is that the Honorary President model provides for an elected head of state. This necessarily involves politics and a change in the power balance, even if the candidates are drawn exclusively from retired vice-regal-officeholders. By contrast, the McGarvie Model\'s Constitutional Council is automatically selected, so politics will be harder to enter into.
The biggest advantage of your system is that it retains a single body as head of state of all the parts of our Federation: the McGarvie Model has a separate council for each state.
Myself, I prefer to avoid the title \'President\', especially for a nonfunctional role. I consider the role of our nominal head of state to be that of the Appointer of our practical head of state, and I think the title Appointer should be used to emphasise this. Also to emphasise the Uniquely Australian aspects of our constitution. (Also, I think the role of representing Australia to the World should remain the Governor-General\'s; if not, the power balance between the GG, the PM and the Appointer is altered perhaps too much.)
Any minimalist model has some interesting problems though. If the model is truely minimalist, there remains some body that is the source of justice, in the way that the Crown is. Presently (unless I\'m wrong), criminal cases are
R.
vs defendant, with
R.
standing for
Regina
(or
Rex
). If the change is minimalist, who is R then? Does it become G. (Governor)? (or G.-G. in Commonwealth cases). Does it remain the Appointer (the Queen/Constitutional Council/Honorary President)? Does it become the People (as it does in most republics), in which case the change is no longer minimalist? How about remaining
R.
, but standing for
Res publica
i.e. the Latin for Commonwealth; but that only works for Commonwealth cases, and state ones will need something different.
In general the concept of the Crown needs to be discussed further in minimalist models. (Crowns as symbolism aren\'t necessarily an unrepublican thing, though, and we could be a republic with a crown if we wanted to.)
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