Should New Zealand ditch the royal family and become a republic?

February 7, 2020

New Zealand Republic Campaign chairman Lewis Holden talked to TVNZ1’s Breakfast about having a Kiwi as head of state.

Following on from several turbulent months in the royal family, the New Zealand Republic Campaign is pushing to ditch them to make way for a New Zealander to become head of state.

But it wouldn't mean we have to ditch the Commonwealth, head of the campaign Lewis Holden told TVNZ1's Breakfast this morning.

"We want a New Zealander as head of state but that actually doesn't mean leaving the Commonwealth. Most the members of the Commonwealth these days are actually republics and have their own heads of state," he said.

"We'd still be able to go to the Commonwealth Games, we'd still have all those fun things going on, but we would have our own head of state, and that person would probably be someone like our Governor General at the moment."

Mr Holden said being a republic would be a fairer system and give equal opportunity.

"We will never have a Māori head of state of New Zealand until we become a republic - that's one of our biggest arguments."

He added the Treaty of Waitangi was a key constitutional issue that will need to be worked through.

"Becoming a republic doesn't actually mean that we would lose the treaty but it does change the nature of the Crown," he said. 

Watching the royal family the past year, though, Mr Holden said it had been incredible the "almost self destruction occurring and people wanting to move away from the royal family".

He described Prince Andrew's interview with the BBC about his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and responding to claims he had sex with a 17-year-old as "a car crash".

"I think what we're seeing, though, is an institution that really has done a good job over the last 30 years of representing itself as quite stable when in actual fact, when the veneer's pulled back, it's not stable at all."

Breakfast host John Campbell gave his own evolving views on the proposal and the royal family after the interview.

"I don't think they should be our heads of state," he said. "They're just not a great family, in my opinion.

"Andy's [Prince Andrew] behaviour, and I know he's not really anywhere near in line to the throne now, is so morally repugnant, so entitled, so lacking in any ethical moral compass or understanding of what it is to be human that I think he's just revealed them."

SHARE ME

More Stories