Australian Republicanism is a political egalitarian philosophy. It makes no room for the social or political elevation of an individual or group through claims of divine right, accidents of birth or the physical imposition of coercion and tyranny. This leads to universal principles of political rights.

The Imagining Australia folks have a section in their book titled Poverty and Inequality ;

Implicit in the notion of disadvantage are two important, but crucially different, concepts: poverty and inequality. On the one hand, poverty refers to the inability of a person to meet the basic needs of life, including food, water, housing, health care and education. Inequality on the other hand refers to the income differential between the rich and the poor within a society.

South Sea Republic carries the byline; Freedom, Liberty, Equity and an Australian Republic . Which is a nice, perfunct statement of principle.

This site predominantly focuses on issues of political technology and organisation; infested as it is with software developers, engineers and scientists. Consequently we touch little on issues of poverty and economic inequality. I will not go into them here, they are covered better on other sites such as Andrew Leigh 's and John Quiggin 's.

The equity in the byline of South Sea Republic refers to the absence of political inequality. The forms of political and social organisation are a human choice. They are human technologies and politics itself, especially liberal democratic organisation, is a technology developed to equilibrate power relationships.

As adam commented on a site with a roped off area;

I must say I admire the boldness of asserting the nation exists but the individual does not, when readers have at least one counter-example of an individual to hand, and the nation-state is a piece of technology constructed by the Treaty of Westphalia around 350 years ago.

Too often we assume that our present condition or state is static and impermanent, having always existed the way it currently does. Constitutions, Federalism, Nation-states, etc; these are all human developed and implemented political technologies.

Technologies are difficult to develop, hard to implement and often the best technological form loses out for a myriad of social, economic and irrational reasons. There are numerous wrecks of superior technologies which have suffered darwinism at the hands of the distributor and consumer.

Since politics deals in power of the state and the public purse, those that skew the power relationships to one person or a small group usually try everything they can to maintain that advantage. Consequently, the establishment of new political technologies has often come at the hands of a revolution.

Disruptive technologies in the market often mean an entrenched competitor re-organises and seeks to capture new markets or the capital which sustained that entity is removed and passed onto a new company that is able to compete in the new market.

Sadly, this is rarely the case in politics. Australia likes to pat itself on the back by claiming it came to self-government without a revolution or blood-shed. The reason Australia achieved this was because it entrenched the interests of the existing ruling elite.

William Wentworth was the main agitator here. He wanted NSW to organise along the lines of King, Lords and Commons. This meant establishing a titled class in NSW. This was ridiculed by Dan Deniehy in his Bunyip Aristocracy speech , but the result was that NSW had an appointed upper-house.

This entrenched what Deniehy called the squatocracy into NSW politics as they could not be removed by the ballot. It was not until the 1970s that the appointed members of the Legislative Council were replaced by elected representatives.

A poor choice of technology and organisation in the 1850s took over one hundred and twenty years to remove. Harpur was not impressed either, though he was happy that self-governance had come as it was an improvement over colonial governorship;

Thank God that we at length have the new Constitution! In itself I despise it, as a disgraceful hotch-potch, that shames us by the side of our younger sister, Victoria: and awards us but a second - nay, but a fourth place in a race, in which we should have been first.

Victoria had instituted an elected Legislative Council when it came to self-governance. The other states have all faced issues of mal-apportionment in the upper houses; Western Australia is yet to solve its problems there.

Poor technology choices have long term ramifications. NSW has spent a long time flushing Wentworth from its system, just as the federal system is yet to remove the last vestiges of Deakin from itself.

Political equality is an important principle. It often exists in slogans such as one man, one vote or no taxation without representation and other proclamations of an individual's political rights, dignity and respect.

Equality requires that no there be no political or social elevation for reasons of divine right, accidents of birth, coercion or tyranny. Republicanism represents political egalitarianism from which universal principles stem.