AS THE Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh prepare to open the Commonwealth Games in Australia next week, the country’s oldest parliament has voted to abolish its oath of allegiance to the monarch.

Henceforth members of the New South Wales parliament will pledge loyalty to “Australia and the people of New South Wales”. The decision was made days after the state abolished its 140-year-old representative office in London and announced that it would focus on trade relations within the Asia-Pacific region.

A row has also been raging over whether God Save the Queen should be sung at the opening of the Games in Melbourne next Wednesday. After the intervention of John Howard, the Prime Minister,eight bars of the British National Anthem will ring out around the stadium while Advance Australia Fair, the Australian anthem, will be heard in full.

New South Wales is the first Australian state to expunge any mention of the Queen from the oath that new members swear on taking their seats.

The Bill authorising the change, which passed with support from Labor and Green Party members, will now go to the Queen’s representative in New South Wales, the Governor, Marie Bashir. Ian Cohen, a Green MP, summed up the support for the Bill when he said that the parliament “should be leaders, not followers of a former colonial power”.

The Bill’s passage has outraged monarchist groups. A Christian Democrat MP, Fred Nile, said that it was insulting for the Bill to be debated so close to the Games.

“It is dishonest and disloyal. I believe it is unconstitutional,” he said.

Earlier in the week Morris Iemma, the Premier of New South Wales, announced the closure of the state’s London office, and the withdrawal of its representative, the trade and investment commissioner.

All Australian states maintain similar offices but the appointments are often criticised as political payoffs and sinecures.

The outgoing representative received a salary of A$190,000 (£80,000) a year, with a $70,000 “cost of living” allowance. New South Wales says that it will work through the existing agencies Austrade and Invest Australia and switch its economic focus to the Asia-Pacific region.

It could trigger similar action from other Australian states, all of which are held by the Labor Party, which tends to be more in favour of a republic than the Prime Minister’s Liberal Party and its National Party partners.

Although the Republican Movement was wounded by losing a referendum, which split republican supporters into those who preferred a directly or indirectly elected president, support for a republic remains strong.

The Queen begins a five-day visit to the country on Sunday.

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