Over the New Year's weekend, a Research New Zealand poll disclosed that a growing number of New Zealanders are wanting to do away with the monarchy.

The poll which questioned 500 New Zealanders found that while a near majority of 48% of New Zealanders favoured retention of the monarchy, an equally growing number wanted no further truck with the institution. This is the case as at 42% the number of Kiwis who want to see no more of Liz and Phil and her whanau is a record. Look back even twenty or more years ago and the talk of beheading the monarchy in Aotearoa was nearly unheard of as Liz and Phil were regarded by many Pakeha New Zealanders as being a part of the cultural furniture in much the same way as rugby, racing and beer were. In fact, for much of the World War Two and earlier generation, England was thought of as home and they saw themselves as mere Britons who just happened to live on the other side of the world. Now all this has begun to change.

The rot for the monarchy really began to sink in when Britain joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973. This arrangement ended nearly 140 years of imperial trade preferences for ex-British colonies including New Zealand which, at one time, was referred to (along with Australia and Canada) as being the 'great farm of Britain.' This economic dissociation was also felt at the cultural level as New Zealanders and other 'ex-colonials' lost the right to enter Britain freely, and in terms of defence and security, ourselves and the Australians began to orbit within the American sphere of influence as British power declined markedly with the end of their empire as the new American Empire rose in its place.

Morevoer, for nearly 170 years, New Zealand has also been one of about 26 Commonwealth nations that have retained the services of successive British monarchs as the official head of state. This is a very strange arrangement if you think about it as we, a supposedly sovereign and independent state, share the same Queen Elizabeth II with those Commonwealth states who have also chosen not to dispense of her services and these countries include the likes of Australia, Canada, Tuvalu, the Solomon Islands, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis and Grenada and the list of other states (mainly small Pacific and Caribbean nations) goes on.

We as a country may have a good enough reason for retaining the services of the British monarch though in that, unlike other countries such as Australia and Canada, the sovereign (through her New Zealand Government) is a party to the Treaty of Waitangi. Some Maori look upon not only the institution but the personage of the Crown as providing the protection of Maori people's rights as outlined in Article Three of Te Tiriti O Waitangi where the Tangata Whenua were afforded the same rights and protections as other British subjects.

However, as a university student, I examined in an essay whether Te Tiriti would be enforceable under a republican constitutional structure and found that it could be. Firstly, the Crown in the person of the monarch has not afforded any personal protection to Maori. History illustrates this fact only too well in that Queen Victoria once refused an audience with King Tawhaio (the first head of the Kingitanga Movement) who wanted her to intervene on the issue of land rights in the 1880s but on the advice of the British Colonial Office (who were effectively communicating the stance of the settler New Zealand Government of the time), the audience was canned and the confiscations of Maori land and waterways continued in the name of the British Crown. Secondly, the constitutional authority of the British Crown has been transferred effectively to the New Zealand Government as Queen Elizabeth is the Queen of New Zealand in her own right and this legal distinction operates in her other sovereign jurisdictions too.

If this brief lesson on the constitutional place of the monarchy in New Zealand is making your head spin, then may I just summarise it down further to make a simple point. The Queen is our head of state and, legally speaking, is technically no one else's and while she isn't here in this country (which she isn't very often) the Governor General acts as her representative. Then there is the great contradiction in that she is the sovereign head of state of the 26 other Commonwealth countries as well, some of whom were named above. This bizarre practice is only confined to the British Commonwealth. Even the French, who had a similar-sized empire to the British, did not give their President this same quasi-monarchical status when they bequeathed independence to their former colonies. After all, it was the French who pioneered the literal beheading of monarchs.

Now it is time (in a non-violent way) to do the same to Liz, Phil, Wills, Harry and all the rest of the crew. The Australians will probably do it just before us as Kevin Rudd's Labour Government in Australia has reportedly named the year 2020 as the time by which the last apron strings with the 'Mother Country' will be severed and the next attempt to do so (after their failed 1999 constitutional referendum) could be succesful as a directly elected presidency will likely be instituted there. In fact, the Australians have a long, fine republican tradition with the Eureka stockade of the 1850s showing what early working class colonial Australians really thought of their distant rulers.

Besides, the principles underpinning the monarchy go against many cherished New Zealand egalitarian traditions. The British monarchy is merely an ancient feudal institution which has great accrued great wealth (even though it has lost much of its political power). It is an institution which is beset by sexism in that patrimonial rather than maternal (male over female) succession is favoured in British law as Elizabeth and her few other female predecessors have acceded to the throne only on the basis that the preceding monarch produced no male heirs. Furthermore, the royal family are extremely privileged in that they are virtually born into their jobs for life, something that most of us mere mortals only envy.

Sadly, due to the existence of the treaty and other historical factors including the fact that more English than Irish settlers came to this country (with Irish Catholics carrying anti-British sentiments) and our not starting life as a penal colony full of poor convicts as Australia did, we have not had a strong republican tradition in this country. But towards the close of the last century and into the new, New Zealanders have begun to gain a greater sense of cultural identity which has been increasingly expressed through our art, music and film. This sense of an independent identity has been strengthened through the Maori cultural renaissance and the emergence of a multicultural society through increased immigration.

All of these factors and our increasing economic non-dependence on Britain have made people increasingly ask the question 'how relevant is the monarch to us?' Jim Bolger in the 1990s, in one of his very few good moves as PM, talked of us eventually becoming a republic. Helen Clark, similarly, openly stated her support for a republican future for Aotearoa as well. The severing of our final ties under a fully written constitution (which we don't have) will be easy as we already have done away with the Privy Council as our final Court of Appeal, we are New Zealand citizens in our own right (and have been for 60 years this year), and since our adoption of the Statute of Westminster in 1947, we have been an independent state that has not had to refer our laws or policies to Britain for final approval. In 2001, we did away with the old British style system of royal honours and instituted our own indigenous system.

Therefore, there is nothing standing in our way but an Act of Parliament (approved by popular referendum) which merely replaces the Queen with a President. Through those we means we can finally say 'No Ma'am - we don't want you here anymore'.