" 
 :::::I don't think that statement is correct at all, to be honest.  It's incredibly mushy and confuses a number of different ideas.  Australians get to decide who their head of state is by setting laws that say who the head of state is.  They, like most countries, have so far chosen not to do that.  That is the extent to which democratic self-determination comes into play.  Once we have established that neither the Australian people nor their elected representatives have chosen to clarify the issue, Australians' opinions on the subject of ""who is the head of state under the current constitutional framework"" are no more valid than anybody else's.  Every individual is, of course, free to regard whomever they like as head of state without interference from other people.  Nobody can force any other person to believe anything.  But Australians don't have any particular right to decide whom Wikipedia regards as the Australian head of state.  This is a well-established feature of Wikipedia which everyone recognizes when it comes to things like ethnic disputes in Eastern Europe: people from a country don't own articles about that country.   In this particular case, the question revolves around how the term ""head of state"" is to be defined more than anything else, and Australians have no exclusive right to define standard English terms.  The standard definition of a head of state is more or less what the dictionary.com definition says: the person who holds the highest position in a national government.  It says nothing about executive power, or diplomatic representation, or actual power, or anything.  It's just ""the highest position"".  The idea that a country can have a ""sovereign"" who is distinct from the ""head of state"" is alien to the most usual meaning of ""head of state"" in the English language.   "