Liberty Scott blogs on changing to a Republic.
He touches on something that bothers me a whole lot – who writes the rules for the new government?
A republic in and of itself it not necessarily a good thing. Not PC akins it to accepting a kidney transplant from a bureaucrat, but I think it is more like a trojan horse. It looks like something good, but you don’t know what’s inside, or why you got it. The motivations of some advocating a republic should be cause for worry.
You see a republic can range from being a constitutionally limited one, that is meant to constrain the role of the state, like the United States, or it may be a corrupt dictatorship, like the Republic of Tajikistan. I don’t expect Keith Locke wants a “People’s Republic” although he has been cheerleader for this in the past, but I also don’t expect he wants to emulate the United States.
Many of the provisions in the US constitution (such as freedom of religion) weren’t actually dreamed up in wisdom – they were put in place because there were strong, clashing opinions.
Unfortunately, I suspect that any constitutional arrangements in this country would be dominated by one sort of opinion… guess which one.
I’m a monarchist, not because I think we should be ruled from Britain, but because the system works reasonably well at most levels, and changing it has potential to destroy some of that and create some big problems.
I used to be a lot stronger supporter of the monarchy, but that was before the Pledge Card episode and the EFA demonstrated that the Queen or her representative has basically no say in stopping bad laws being implemented.
And yes, I do see that there some contradiction in that. Give me a proposal for a Republic, and I’ll tell you if I think it improves on what we have. If you have a proposal that simply changes the GG to a president who has the power to turn back the worst legislation, that might just get my vote. Unfortunatly the Greens proposal lacks credibility since they still support the EFA and have thus demonstrated once for all that they should never be let near out constitution again.
Something should go here, maybe later. 
“If you have a proposal that simply changes the GG to a president who has the power to turn back the worst legislation, that might just get my vote.”
That’s essentially what the Bill does – preserves the GG’s existing powers. However, unless the ability to return legislation to parliament is explicitly spelled out, then it doesn’t exist other than in the minds of academics.