George Williams asks four questions:

• Does Australia have a written constitution?
• What is Australia's top court?
• Does Australia have a bill of rights?
• When did Aboriginal people get the vote?

He answers himself in the newspaper article. In a survey done in 1987, 47% of respondents were unaware that Australia had a written or formal constitution. In 1994 a quarter of respondents to a survey thought the highest court in Australia was the Supreme Court which is America's highest federal court.

This year in a Morgan poll, 61% of respondents thought Australia has a bill of rights (so why don't we again? especially if a majority already thinks we do?) and finally Williams writes that most Australians think the Aboriginal People got the vote in the referendum change of 1967 rather than 1962. Though in that final claim he does not back it up with polling data.

So is it a failure of civic education? Stuart Macintyre argues that the problem is intrinsic to our constitution: it fails to excite enthusiasm, consequently we "resent the exercise of government and despise our civic status".

From Macintyre's essay, The New Republican Temper;

One of the striking defects of the Commonwealth as a mechanism of government and administration is that it manifestly fails to excite enthusiasm. Indeed, it scarcely impinges on the consciousness of its citizens - a survey has indicated that more young Australians know of the constitution of the United States of America than their own country. And the failure of civic awareness, the absence of binding ritual and the inability of Australians to take seriously the form of their polity is driven home by the dissatisfaction of those Western Australian informants.

Here, I believe, the deficiency of the Commonwealth constitution is acute. Australia still operates with a constitutional monarchy, with a federal compact shaped by the pre-existence of the colonies, with constitutional forms that assume the juridical status of subject than citizen and with constitutional documents that originated as British statutes and assume the bulk of British governmental status.

Our notion of popular sovereignty is, in my opinion, seriously flawed in that we have modified a system of monarchical sovereignty into one of popular sovereignty, of a particular kind that invests power in elected representatives and then relies on a set of of imperfect checks and balances to shield the subjects from the worst excesses of power.

The power is removed from the people from whom it supposedly originates, and rests in the parliaments, the courts, the government offices and company boardrooms. We have an aversion to real self-government. Consequently we resent the exercise of government and despise our civic status.

In other words we have tried to make a republican system inside the constraints of constitutional monarchy and the first thing that went is civic enthusiasm. In the early days of federation the civic enthusiasm came through imperialism and commitment to the crown. Menzies best epitomised that form of dominion nationalism within a British and Briton imperialism.

Where the US has strong constitutional language of liberty and small government to bind their collective decision making, Australia in a post-imperial world is left with nothing but the imperfect machinations of a parliamentary government churning its wooden wheels in a pre-industrial representative system.