Can Australia be trusted to have a rational republic debate?

Australia's public conversation is alive with the sound of stimulating suggestions.

They include the idea we might do without having such a thing as a head of state of any kind and then as well Waleed Aly's idea in the Sydney Morning Herald that instead of a foreign King Charles Australia might have an Elder, a distinguished First Nations person.

"We could even call our elder Uncle or Aunty and when our Aunty dies, deep rituals of mourning would already exist, ready for us to embrace as a nation," Aly has mused, noting the rituals of mourning that have followed the departure of Elizabeth II to Heaven and to her Great Reward.

With this festival of harmless ideas under way (harmless ideas about monarchs and heads of state) my fancy has turned again to the thought of Australia having its very own monarchy employing its very own Australian born-and-bred royal family.

It is an occasional theme of this column, since Her Majesty's promotion to Paradise and the ensuing energising of calls for an Australian republic, that it is the sheer absurdity of monarchy that is its best (perhaps its only) virtue.

I worry an Australian republic will be a coldly efficient AI-like system run by and serving the interests and temperaments of cold, efficient, apparatchik sorts of Australians. In my mind's eye these sorts of Australians are somehow very like the emotions-bereft but ultra-efficient-in-their-way Daleks of the Dr Who TV dramas - robot-beings with no music and poetry in their lives.

The alarming personalities of the sorts of Australians who are the most zealous champions of an Australian republic should have us all twitching anxiously about the quality of the cause that so floats their boats.

Meanwhile, on the matter of the absurdity of monarchy great minds think alike and I have done a great deal of nodding with agreement with writer-philosopher Julian Baggini's new piece for Prospect magazine: "Philosopher-at-large: Can there ever be a rational basis for the hereditary principle? Just because the monarchy is absurd doesn't mean we should abolish it."

It is a shame it takes contrary UK philosophers and eccentric Australian newspaper columnists to see the beauty, the wonder, the splendour, the emotional usefulness of absurdity. But alas, that is the way of the world.

"There is not a single moral or political principle that deserves to be taken seriously as a possible justification for establishing a monarchy," Baggini insists.

He goes on to dash this columnist's shy hopes of a post-Elizabeth II creation of an all-Australian true blue Oz monarchy with the observation: "It is striking that no new monarchy has been established anywhere in the world for well over a century, with the youngest kingdoms all heirs to states that had monarchs before."

But then and although a mild-mannered abolitionist himself he goes on to take seriously, with respect, the points-of view of "soft monarchists" who often agree with republican objections but who see other reasons in favour of retention that they weigh more heavily.

"There are plenty of examples of things that we would never think of fashioning today which we nonetheless deeply want to preserve," he muses, philosophically.

"Many of the world's great monuments, cathedrals and ceremonial objects, for example. No one could justify using state money to [today] make the garishly bejewelled crown that will sit on King Charles's head when many of his subjects can't pay their bills and the health service is at breaking point. But almost everyone wants to see the crown jewels preserved. They are irreplaceable precisely because they would never be made today."

Then, putting himself in the clogs of soft monarchists he embarks (thinking readers really should read his whole piece for themselves) on a catalogue of all the good-government, good-emotions, "social, psychological, historical" good reasons for keeping, in its existing contexts, the absurdity of monarchy alive and kicking and absurding.

"No one would create a monarchy from scratch to fulfil these functions," Baggini concludes. "More importantly, no one could. It only works because it has been around for so long."

It is an engaging thing, whatever subject is being debated, to have someone (like Baggini the abolitionist promoting monarchy's retention) singing the praises of points of view he disagrees with.

By contrast how uncivilised, angry and pugilistic most of our big debates are.

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How brutish, brutalising and intelligence-insulting the looming fight over the forthcoming Voice to Parliament referendum shapes up to be. What a crude, nasty, trading-of-insults pageant awaits us when, soonish, we have a referendum on whether or not we are to become a republic.

Where will a sensitive Australian go to hide from these twin horrors of public life that loom on our national horizon?

Is it absurd (as absurd in its way as monarchy and its hereditary principle) to dare to dream that these looming contests will be philosophical, respectful, civil in tone?