With one Australian poll putting support for a republic as high as 69%, the supporters of the status quo are pulling out all sorts of argument to strengthen their case. Malcolm Mackerras, a patron of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, writes in The Canberra Times that a second republic referendum will be defeated, with one of his reasons being that a direct election model will be proposed:

"...if they [the republicans] go for popular election of the president all the objections to that model will come to the fore."

Those objections will defeat a republic, he argues. This argument is fascinating because of the direct election is popular amongst the Australian public. In 1999, the Australian Constitutional Referendum Study of over 3,000 voters in all states found that 50.1% of Australians wanted a directly elected president, 18.6% wanted a indirectly elected president, and 21.8% wanted to keep the monarchy.

Crucially, the second preferences show that 31% of direct election supporters prefer no change as a second preference to direct election - in other words, they would rather vote against a republic than for a indirect elected head of state. On the other hand, 5% of the supporters of indirect election would rather vote against a republic than for one with a directly elected head of state, so more supporters of indirect election would support direct election than the other way around.

The overall results are most interesting - 71% of both direct and indirect supporters would support direct election if it was an option, while 44.8% of direct and indirect supporters would support indirect election - almost the same as the 1999 referendum result of 45% of voters in favour of the indirect election proposal.

In short, popular election is, well, popular. As Greg Barnes noted recently in The Age:

What became clear in the post-1999 referendum period is that the Australian people want to own their republic. They want to choose the type of republic Australia would be and a majority believe the best form of republic is one where they have the right to elect the individual who would be their president.

Which leaves only the "objections" to direct election models - I'll deal with these in a future post.