On Monday afternoon, amid the bustle of dignitaries and the clinking of wine glasses in the modernist boomerang-shaped Australian Parliament building, King Charles will be the gravitational center of that country’s political power.
But at a reception to honor his arrival as head of state, six regional leaders will be conspicuous by their absence. Because all of Australia’s state governors have declined their invitations, citing “other commitments” ranging from election campaigns to cabinet meetings. They certainly have higher priorities, chief among them not appearing to be realistic sycophants.
Invoking his country’s famously crude wit, Charles’s host, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, should adopt the approach of the BBC quiz show Have I Got News For You, which, when the pudgy Labor politician Roy Hattersley did not appear as guest in a 1993 episode, he replaced it with a jar of lard. Perhaps six bags of kangaroo dung would be appropriate replacements for the despicably rude half-dozen.
Queen Camilla, King Charles, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his partner Jodie Haydon at Admiralty House in Sydney on Friday.
From the first engagement to the last, he and Camilla will face demands for the country to become a republic.
Not only is this Charles’s first visit to Australia since assuming the throne, and the first by a British monarch since 2011, but it has been done at considerable risk to his health.
We don’t know his doctor’s advice, but we can’t imagine he or she would be happier that his patient interrupted his cancer treatment to fly nearly 24 hours around the world, albeit with not one but two doctors in tow and armed. With a supply of the monarch’s blood a transfusion was necessary. I don’t envy Charles.
From the first engagement to the last, he and Camilla will face demands for the country to become a republic. Given that Britain’s own anti-monarchist Graham Smith – head of the Republic campaign group and of ‘Not My King’ fame who staged a miserable display of yellow banners on the procession route at Charles’s coronation – has also flown to Australia, Six governors hosting a state reception is feared to be the least of the King’s worries.
It was in 1999 when Australia last held a referendum to become a republic. Then your good people voted to keep Queen Elizabeth as head of state, but the nearly 40 percent who voted against has grown.
Charles will ultimately never reach the same heights of popularity as his mother.
Polls are generally split down the middle between people who want to see the monarch as head of state or an elected Australian, despite the best efforts of a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper recently, which surveyed 1,000 people and showed that only the 33 percent supported republicanism.
A real reckoning is inevitable. Especially because the Australia of 25 years ago has changed irrevocably. Back then, the country had more in common with the Australia of 1966, so fondly remembered by the King from his student days in Victoria, than it does today.
Sydney Opera House lights up with royal projection to officially welcome the King
In the coming days, Charles will no doubt make many allusions to the Treetops Campus at Geelong Grammar School, which he says was the happiest part of his school days. (Although considering how miserable he was at the barbaric Scottish boarding school Gordonstoun, this isn’t saying much.)
In 1966, the great Sir Robert Menzies had just stepped down as Prime Minister of Australia. He was succeeded by Harold Holt, who had served in the Second World War, and in the rare intervals when he could divert his attention from the Sheilas, Holt had a clear idea of the close connection between Oz and the Old Country.
Those old-fashioned Australians carried with them the memory of what held the Commonwealth, formerly the Empire, together. Thousands of them had died for it on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific during World War II. For them there was an instinctive link with the monarchy. Australia’s former cultural icons – Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germane Greer, Sidney Nolan, the great painter – felt this kinship intrinsically, as they all chose to live in Britain.
But Oz has now become a cultural desert: witness the years when the Sydney Opera House sat empty and closed because no one thought it was worth restoring.
Instead, Australia has become a woke utopia (if that’s your idea of utopia), ashamed of its caricature as the land of beer-drinking men and sassy suburban Sheilas of the small-c conservative type, and doing its best to correct past mistakes. .
Australians have much to regret, given the appalling way they treated the Aboriginal population.
And since taking over as prime minister in 2022, Albanese, the left-wing leader of the Labor Party, has enthusiastically taken the knee to this cause. He staked huge political capital on a controversial referendum last year, in which he asked Australians to vote on the country’s constitution that recognized Aboriginal people and established a body to advise parliament on indigenous issues.
The then Prince Charles visits a school near Melbourne in 1966
Sixty per cent of Australians said “no”, many of them concerned about the precedent of giving a specific group of people a greater say in Parliament than others. After burning his political fingers, Albanese will not risk another referendum, particularly on the monarchy, whatever the result.
So, in my opinion, Charles should force the issue. To take a shot at the Republicans, shouldn’t he offer to resign as head of state in Australia? To put it in that country the size of a continent: support me or fire me. Sir Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy are unlikely to stop it. They couldn’t get rid of the Chagos Islands fast enough, and it’s obvious that neither of them see the point of the Commonwealth, which meant so much to the late Queen and King Charles.
If Charles takes the initiative, he will have left the dignity of the monarchy intact and the idea of the Commonwealth strong.
Of course, this rootless new generation of Oz, who have no idea who they are or where they come from, won’t look a royal gift horse in the mouth and enthusiastically turn the country into a republic.
When Australians elect a new head of state, they will almost certainly choose a person of Aboriginal descent, something the king, with his long history of reconciling the different cultures and ethnicities of his British subjects, would welcome.
Good luck to them.
The behavior of its governors and politicians already seems ingratitude and rudeness. The crowd’s behavior seems to threaten to be worse than rude, and we can only feel concerned for the royal couple.
With a typical sense of duty and loyalty to the Australia he knew in his youth, Charles is undertaking a grueling series of commitments that are surely not wise, given his health problems.
If, during the course of this week, he announces that he no longer wishes to be your king, Charles will have said something valuable and significant.
He would no longer have to go through the humiliation of ruling Oz through tolerance. And he could return to his home country, which loves and appreciates the monarchy, and sees the point in it, which Australians no longer see.
