2013/20: Should the Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, comment publicly on social and political issues?
Introduction to the media issue
Video clip at right:A Sky News report on the Governor-General's last few lines in her final Boyer lecture. If you cannot see this clip, it will be because video is blocked by your network. To view the clip, access from home or from a public library, or from another network which allows viewing of video clips.
What they said...
... if she wanted to influence public debate on controversial political questions, including constitutional change and same-sex marriage, she should have run for elected office.
Editorial in The Australian newspaper
... even though all of Bryce’s appointments have been by Labor governments, she has not shown any tendency to tribalism or partisanship
Paula Matthewson, writing in The Guardian
In her fourth and final Boyer Lecture, delivered in late November, 2013, Governor-General Quentin Bryce asked her audience ``to imagine a nation'' which embodied all the human qualities, including courage, resilience and compassion.
She then presented her own "imagined" Australia, a country where "an ethic of care guides the way we lead".
Ms Bryce then added that she suggested an Australia ``where people are free to love and marry whom they choose and where, perhaps, my friends, one day, one young girl or boy may even grow up to be our nation's first head of state''
These final lines indicated that the Governor-General supported the idea of legal marriage for same-sex couples, as well as of a future Australian republic.
Politicians, political commentators and others flooded the news media with their interpretations of that last sentence, along with their support or condemnation. Much of the criticism from politicians was on party lines, but not all of it. MPs from both major parties came out for and against both the republic and gay marriage issues.
Although the two issues are controversial, some commentators have voiced their opinion that they are not "political" as such. In other words, the Governor-General was not interfering in politics, but simply voicing her aspirations for her country as a public figure. Other commentators have objected to perceived meddling by a purely ceremonial figure in political issues.
In any event, the question of whether Ms Bryce should have commented on any social or political issues while in office has been hotly debated in the media.