February 2000

Recently, Sir Zelman Cowen celebrated his 80th birthday. Keen to record his reflections on this milestone, I requested and received an interview. His unique record of achievement is too long to reproduce in full. Suffice it to say that he has been a Rhodes Scholar, a Vinerian Scholar, a Law Reform Commissioner, Dean of the Melbourne University Law Faculty, Provost of Oriel College, Oxford and Governor-General of Australia. It has been a good and fulfilling life; as he told me on an earlier occasion "I’ve had a fair go - more than a fair go".

Obviously unaffected in his career by prejudice, was he nonetheless touched by it in any way? "Well, there were I suppose a few instances when I was a young school-boy, never really very serious at all, that is to say in terms of overt anti-Semitism, expressions of ‘Jew-boy’ or something of that sort." Sir Zelman casts his mind back. "That happened at school. My life has been singularly free of that. What people have said in the privacy of some place or other I, of course, don’t know."

Asked to adduce any anti-Semitic episode of consequence that might have affected his outlook, he identifies one when he was twenty-seven.

"It’s difficult to answer that question, put like that", he observes after a pause. "I can remember a case in 1947, when I was serving for a period of time with the British Control Commission in Germany and that was a time in which the situation in Palestine, the last stage of the British Mandate, was pretty bad. You may remember that two British sergeants were hanged and booby-trapped and there was a discussion of that in the [officer’s] mess. And I remember a man speaking about Jews in that meeting in a way that was scarifying. It was in Berlin, and here was a British officer of the Control Commission giving vent to a hatred of Jews which might have made Hitler a learner ... I was genuinely unhappy about that, but there are not many cases like that I can remember."

In Western societies in which Jewish integration was arduous and hard-won, often in the face of social prejudice, Jewish nationalism has often proved a personal problem for successful Jews. Zionism’s clash with Britain for a short but crucial period proved such for Cowen’s Jewish predecessor, Sir Isaac Isaacs. In contrast, Sir Zelman never felt other than in favour of it and hopeful for its success and consolidation.

"My father was a Zionist, a working Zionist in Melbourne in my youth, and I was always conscious of Zionism in the sense that his friends and acquaintances were in many cases Jews and Zionists."

However, Zionism’s violent collision with Britain, which drove Isaacs to public anti-Zionism, impelled Cowen into what one assumes was a characteristic effort to master the field. "For myself, toward the end of the war, I guess I became acutely conscious of the fact that I knew very little about Zionism. It was always there, but I knew very little about it. So I began a systematic reading course to familiarise myself ... I learnt something about [Chaim] Weizmann and Weizmann’s attitudes; I learnt a good deal of events by reading the Peel Report - that was the 1937 Royal Commission, which produced a remarkable document. At the same time, I read Arab history, the rise of Arab national feeling; George Antonius’ book [The Arab Awakening (1938)]. So it was a process of teaching myself. [This is] not the first time I’ve done that as a response to feeling but not knowing".

The fruits of that earlier survey emerge in his careful treatment of the subject in the Isaacs biography he produced in 1967, before he ever imagined following him into Yarralumla. The trajectory of Sir Zelman’s career - from Oxford and Gray’s Inn back to Melbourne - meant, however, that a life lived even temporarily in Israel was never a compelling option. For all that, Zionism has retained a place in his thinking.

Eighteen months ago, in The Review, Sir Zelman, writing on Israel’s 50th anniversary, discussed the views of the philosopher, Emil Fackenheim. Problematic as some of Fakenheim’s formulations have proved, Cowen sees value in his conception of Israel as an instinctive and creative response of an entire community to an existential challenge.

"A necessary corrective?" I ask. "Yes, I think so", replies Sir Zelman. "You see, from a Jewish point of view, it was not only that Palestine-Israel provided a haven, provided a safe place. It was that it provided a new status. The state of Israel made Jews taller."

However, the continuing absence of external peace and internal harmony in Israel weighs on Sir Zelman, as indeed he wrote eighteen months ago. "My thoughts are not very different from the ones I expressed then. I’m still unhappy, I suppose I see the situation as more complicated than I did when I knew less of it at first hand. With all that, I felt the urgency of a coming together, of a settlement, more strongly, of stability in the Middle East predicated upon a satisfactory negotiation between Arabs and Jews."

With an electoral system that atomises the political spectrum and produces unwieldy coalitions, Sir Zelman sees Israel in need of electoral reform. "I am not an admirer of the electoral system in Israel. I’m not an admirer of a system - proportional representation - which purports to achieve mathematical perfection. I think that produces too much instability." Rather, he finds more attractive the German model, with eligibility for representation depending on a minimum requirement of 5% of the vote. "I haven’t traced it through. I’m no Malcolm Mackerras. But on the face of it, that looks to me like the sort of thing one should adopt."

Having treated constitutional matters, it is inevitable that we turn to our local context. As Governor-General in succession to Sir John Kerr, Sir Zelman aimed, in his own words at the time, to bring a "touch of healing" at a divisive time in Australian history. The opening of the republic debate found him on the side of constitutional monarchy, but in time he has embraced the view that Australia needs to effect symbolic independence.

"I did move to a position, I guess in about 1995, that Australia should have its own head of state. It was a symbolic thing and nothing but a symbolic thing, but yet an important symbolic thing and I don’t think I’ll waver again in that. I have the deepest respect for the monarch whom I served. I think the system has been a good system but I think the time now has come for Australia to have her own Australian head of state. Now all of that I believe in quite strongly."

Unlike the case for some other monarchists-turned-republicans, the issue for Sir Zelman was not decided by the dissipation in public esteem for the monarchy, or the wilting of robust Anglophilia in Australia. To the question of what changed his mind, Sir Zelman, jurist that he is, responds unhesitatingly. "The debate in the Australian Parliament and Prime Minister Keating’s formulation of the issue in symbolic terms. It was a remarkable speech, and said something to which I responded and have responded ever since."

"I certainly believe that in this next decade it will come again and I would strongly wish that it came again. So far as the direct election issue is concerned, I’m very strongly opposed to it. I think that the people have to see that we are a parliamentary democracy and parliamentary democracy makes its decisions through its representatives in the Parliament. It is a very rare case in which you go to the people with a referendum for them to decide; it’s for parliament to decide, and it’s an elected parliament.

"I think one of the disgraceful things in the referendum debate was the constant reference in so many places to contempt for politicians. That’s not an attitude to have and I don’t really think overall that our politicians deserve that contempt and I would have wished that people answered that question of no politicians more fully, more candidly and more carefully."

"In the case of the head of state ... I thought the idea of a proposal by the prime minister, agreement by the leader of the opposition and then carriage by two-thirds of the parliament, was excellent. Excellent. Why? Because what we want is a person of quality, and the person who has the qualities to keep the nation together by his conduct, speeches and so forth - I said that many, many times - that’s not the sort of person you’re likely to get by a referendum process or a popular vote process."

Be that as it may, constitutional monarchists and minimalist republicans clashed on a significant technical issue: the powers and independence of the proposed president relative to the current powers of the governor-general. Each found the system advocated by the other as productive of less genuine independence and security of tenure. Sir Zelman sees no crisis on this point.

"The situation is that the prime minister can determine the dismissal of the governor-general by advising the Queen to dismiss the governor-general. That of course has never happened. My own view is that there was too much preoccupation with that. I said in a letter that I wrote jointly with two former chief justices of the High Court - Mason and Brennan - that I believe the proposal was safe in the sense that it would not create further risk in the security of tenure of the president than the present system."

"I would say furthermore that I myself disagreed with the proposal for dismissal of the president that was voted on. All I was concerned to say is that I would still prefer to take it as part of the package than to lose the package altogether."

Time has deserted us, but the meeting is not over before Sir Zelman discloses his continuing interest in resolving the republican issue. "I’ve got my own views on how we should proceed ... It’s clear that [the president] must be dismissable for special cause, for example, if he becomes physically or mentally incapable. And I suppose he might be dismissed also for some great turpitude: criminality or something of that sort. That is to say, if it’s charged that there is a gross malefaction or something of that sort, we should have a tribunal capable of ascertaining whether the allegation is justified. Now, I’ve still got to work out just precisely what sort of tribunal; whether the decision of the tribunal would determine the matter, or whether there would have to be a recommendation to Parliament, and I haven’t really done all the polishing of that particular apple. But that’s my proposition."

Copyright © AIJAC 2000
Last Updated 5 November, 2001