On the other hand, everyone knows the position under the Constitution of the Prime Minister. Our Constitution works because of many conventions. If we start to make provision for the constitutional position of the Prime Minister then we have got to start working out all the other conventions and consider which of them should go into the Constitution. It's not too much skin off the nose of a Prime Minister that he or she is not in there, when everyone knows that this power is great and the influence even greater. I don't think that's a particularly serious default.
Most people have no idea about the Australian Constitution.
If they read it they would probably forget what they read anyway. But that doesn't make the Prime Minister one jot more, or one jot less important than ordinary citizens know that he or she is. If there were to be a change in the position of the constitutional head of state, I find the option that has been put forward by the Republic Advisory Committee the most attractive one. But I do so because essentially it is continuing a constitutional monarchy, without a monarch. Of course there are some people who declare themselves to be true republicans who say, 'you have kept the vestiges of constitutional monarchy, but you have not kept the checks and the traditions that go with constitutional monarchy and therefore the system will not be so easily transferred to the arrangement that the proposal puts forward'.