LET’S be clear before we start.

I, like most Australians, suspect the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are pretty nice people, and good parents to their super-cute kids. As role models go, William and Kate are right up there.

But what do Australians really think when we coo and bill over a new royal baby? Do we see a sweet and chubby cherub who’s more celebrity than stately? Or do we see a historical anachronism who, as fourth in line as Australia’s head of state, has been born into a constitutional system better suited to the 19th, and not the 21st century?

If opinion polls are accurate, we can be sure it’s the former.

That’s why I ask: where have all the republicans gone? Why do so few Australians want an Australian head of state?

And don’t let anyone tell you that our Governor-General and not the Queen is our actual head of state. The Constitution’s preamble clearly says the Queen appoints the Governor-General, just as s.1 defines Parliament as comprising the Queen, the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Besides, it’s the Queen’s dignified profile on our currency, not the G-G’s. Could you imagine John Kerr’s face on a dollar coin? Even poker machines would spit them out. And ignore those who say a republican Australia couldn’t compete in the Commonwealth Games. India, Pakistan and others obviously do.

Either way, even the most rigorous royalist can surely see the absurdity of a nation maintaining a Queen who has spent a mere 38 weeks of her 63-year reign in Australia.

I pine for the republican heyday of two decades ago. When Labor prime minister Paul Keating fanned Australian identity in the early ’90s, 52 per cent of us wanted to ditch the Queen. That figure hit 54 per cent by the time of the 1999 constitutional referendum. But because the mood was split – some say deliberately by a canny John Howard – between an appointed and a directly elected president, the referendum still went down 45 to 55 per cent.

It was, as the then-Republican Movement leader Malcolm Turnbull said, a moment of broken Australian hearts.

Today, support for the monarchy isn’t far off the record highs of the 1950s and ’60s. And identifying why that support is so strong, despite royal scandals and growing multiculturalism, is easy.

In 2008, only 42 per cent of us supported a royal Australia. Two years later, on the announcement of Kate and William’s engagement, the pro-royal camp shot to 48 per cent. By the time the royal wedding came around the following April, 55 per cent were royalists and only 34 per cent republicans. Similar figures were recorded after Prince George’s birth.

No one could, therefore, blame outsiders for thinking Australians – once a radical people who built a culture of nationalist egalitarianism (think Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson) – had become milksops for the monarchy. Where we once lampooned elitism and peed on pomp and ceremony, today we adore the royals simply because we, and especially the young, worship all things celebrity.

If more Australians saw the monarchy not as pop stars but reactionary political forces holding back Australia’s final maturation, we just might have an Australian head of state yet.

In the interim, I’m bamboozled by sceptical – and especially young – voters who deny the need for a republic. They say an Australian head of state won’t make uni degrees any cheaper, or finding a good job any easier. I agree.

They also say royalty is relatively unimportant, so why change? Exactly. If the monarchy really is unimportant, why maintain such an absurd institution in a nation long making its own mark on the world?

Republicans take heart: royal fervour comes in waves and, faced with the inevitable King Charles and Queen Camilla, it won’t be too many years before republicanism flares again.

That’s why Opposition Leader Bill Shorten was right to resurrect what most thought was a dormant issue. But with Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Australia Day knighting of Prince Philip, the question is alive and well.

Shorten, then, has a potential electoral ace to play in the 2016 election. By pledging a two-stage referendum in 2017 – first asking if voters if they want an Australian head of state; the second offering a choice between appointed or directly elected presidents – Shorten can paint himself as the visionary, while Abbott appears antiquarian.

Maybe by then a majority of us will see that, while royal babies are very cute, birthright is no foundation for a modern democracy.

Dr Paul Williams is a senior lecturer in humanities at Griffith University Twitter: @PDWilliams1