The media coverage of the mourning process for Elizabeth II seems to be as endless as the lines of people waiting patiently to pay their respects. (The British are very good at standing in queues.) New Zealand’s official ten day mourning period ends on Monday, after the state funeral in Westminster Abbey. Yet then – a week later - the special one-off holiday on September 26 will invite us all back into the grief cycle once more.

The staunch royalists in our midst will regard this mourning marathon as fit and proper. At some point though, New Zealanders have to consider whether it is wise to persist with letting our head of state be chosen by a genetic lottery carried out among a family of foreigners living on the other side of the planet. From the outside, this looks like a very odd process.

Sure, it has been that way for a very long time. Yet the fact an institution has lasted for a long time is not a reliable guide to its merit. The British monarch has functioned as New Zealand’s head of state ever since our founding document – the Treaty of Waitangi - was signed. Similarly, the vast majority of New Zealanders have never experienced anyone other than Queen Elizabeth II as our head of state. Again, that’s not a compelling reason to continue to sleepwalk into the future.

Quite the reverse. Now that Elizabeth II has departed the scene, it seems the ideal time to consider whether we should be entrusting the same powers to her successor. By September 26 at the latest, we should be well placed to separate any grief and gratitude owed to Elizabeth Windsor personally, from the constitutional role she played for so long.

Is there a better way?

Basically… Should we love the monarchy, or should we leave it? That’s a big decision. Some attempts will be made to renovate the monarchy, but we all know what Charles thinks about modern architecture. The essence will remain, unless the countries that retain the monarchy say otherwise.

Current events to the contrary, royalty isn’t just a game of dressing up, pomp and arcane rituals. While the role of the sovereign as head of state is almost entirely ceremonial, the role does carry some significant reserve powers - as Australians discovered to their surprise in the mid-1970s, when the Queen’s representative sacked their elected government. More recently, Australia’s current governor-general appears to have discreetly signed off on Scott Morrison’s plan to secretly appoint himself as the head of several key ministries. To say the least, ScoMo was making a headlong break with convention. His good mate, the governor-general, quietly went along with it. No one told the public.

So far, New Zealand has been spared the same sort of nasty surprises and close encounters of the vice-regal kind. Generally speaking, the British monarch has been treated here as a neutral, hereditary figure who spares us the potentially polarising problem of voting a New Zealander into the top job. Much the same arguments of course, used to surround the decision to scrap the Privy Council, which was formerly our last court of legal resort. New Zealand managed to sever its ties to the Privy Council. There has been no noticeable decline in the quality of justice.

Ireland, a country with much the same population and talent base, has found in Michael D. Higgins a capable head of state who manages to command wide public support. Surely, it is not impossible for New Zealand to do likewise.

Charles Regnant, or Rampant?

Another factor worth considering is that once the dust of succession has settled, there are signs that King Charles III will be a less passive monarch. You don’t need to invoke the Guardian’s ‘black spider’ memos to feel a little concerned about the potential harm that a more activist monarch might do. Charles says we won’t meddle. But he would say that, wouldn’t he? And how will we ever know? (See ScoMo, above.)

As one foreign commentator has noted, one of Elizabeth’s assets as Queen was that she rarely betrayed strong emotions. “She seemed to accept her role was to be shown things, so very many things: factories and ships and tanks and local customs and types of cheese and the right way to tie the traditional garment, to receive bouquets of flowers from small curtsying girls, and in return never to appear bored or irritated by what was surely often a boring public role.” (This guy

likes to be shown things, too.)

Temperamentally, Elizabeth’s eldest son has been more inclined to show his displeasure when he gets bored or irritated. Already, Queen Camilla has been instrumental in putting him back on an even keel. (It seems to be how their relationship works.) Hopefully though, any decision made by New Zealand to scrap or retain the monarchy won’t come down to a popularity contest.

It shouldn’t, but it might. Public perceptions of Charles III will inevitably feed directly into any debate held here over the wisdom of retaining the monarchy. So far, the media in general and the royal watchers in particular have been pushing the continuity buttons as hard as they can. To that end, the pageantry parade is supposed to signal that the ceremonial ship of state still has a steady hand at the tiller. It is far more interesting to consider the breaks with convention that Charles might/should bring in his wake.

Charles the change manager

His regular regal hissy fits aside – a trait Charles owes more to his father than to his mother – the changes wrought by the new monarch, either by choice or necessity, could (theoretically at least) be substantial. Despite all the current chanting about regal continuity, Charles has ample reason to make a decisive break with some aspects of royal tradition. Indeed, the declining number of countries that retain the British monarch as head of state should be asking it of him.

For example: If this really is to be a modern monarchy and not just more of the same royal puppet show, the British sovereign needs to acknowledge – and apologise for, even – the ways that successive monarchs put a symbolic gloss on the cruel excesses of the Empire. For centuries, the role of the British monarchy has been to project an air of imperial benevolence to cloak the Empire’s core business of annexation, exploitation, and subjugation.

This has been part of the monarchy’s job description from the outset. Elizabeth I pointed England towards a major involvement in the slave trade, and into active participation in the looting of the New World. By the aftermath of the Victorian Age, an estimated quarter of the globe and one fifth of the world’s population were under British rule.

It fell to Elizabeth II to preside over the twilight years of that Empire. Yet the imperial excesses kept happening on her watch, too. In Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus, Aden, and Northern Ireland atrocities were committed by Her Majesty’s governments, and Elizabeth II lent to those actions a polite air of business as usual. As has often been noted, no one has ever suggested - let alone offered proof – of Elizabeth’s knowing complicity in the massacres, torture, executions, and mass internments pursued by her governments, during her reign.

More than 100,000Kikuyu villagers were herded into fortified compounds in Kenya during the 1950s, to prevent them assisting the Mau Mau insurgency. The same forced internment camp policies became a feature of the Malaya campaign as well. (This history makes Britain’s current criticisms of China’s detentions of the Uighurs ring somewhat hollow. Britain wrote the book.)

Yet there is a paradox here to ponder. As the historian Caroline Elkins has pointed out, Elizabeth’s legions of fans like to stress her devotion to service: all of those hours on duty, assiduously reading the Foreign Office red boxes of briefing documents, querying her ministers, and offering wise counsel to the series of British prime ministers who came and went from her weekly meetings. But at the same time, Elkns says, we’re also expected to believe she knew nothing, nothing at all about what was going on out in the colonies. It beggars belief.

Charles, even at 73, cannot claim to be unaware of the grisly histories of imperial rule. He has been told about them often enough. To repeat: to date, the monarchy has never apologised for its centuries of prettifying Britain’s looting of the resources of the colonies it ruled, or for the destruction of indigenous communities and cultures that this entailed. Canada, Australia and New Zealand still recognise the monarch as head of state.

In unison with their own indigenous First Peoples (and alongside Britain’s former colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean) shouldn’t the Commonwealth’s big hitters be making an apology from the Throne a precondition for them agreeing to perpetuate the regal pantomime in future? An apology, plus some gestures of compensation.

Fat chance of that. The cleaner and quicker way of proceeding would be for us to cut our losses. At some point, New Zealand will have to identify the steps required to disengage, and to cease playing the games of royal charades. Last year, Barbados became a republic, albeit one that’s still within the Commonwealth. Its new flag features a broken trident, which symbolises how Barbados has broken away from three centuries of forelock-tugging to British rule, and to a British sovereign.

When will we respectfully begin to do the same? Literally, there is no better time than the present to begin. No use waiting for the politicians though, who keep on kicking the republican can further down the road. It will happen in their lifetimes, they say, but not in the lifetime of their administrations, thanks very much.

This is a bit depressing. Our leaders say that New Zealand becoming a republic is inevitable, but they also shrink from taking any of the tangible steps required to achieve it. At the very least, shouldn’t the government be appointing a working group to lay some of the necessary groundwork? That, even more than fealty to the monarchy, is the New Zealand way.

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