On Monday afternoon, amid the hubbub of dignitaries and chinks of wine glasses in Australia’s modernist, boomerang-shaped Parliament building, King Charles will be the gravitational centre of that country’s political power.
But at a reception to honour his arrival as their head of state, six regional leaders will be conspicuous by their absence. For Australia’s state governors have all declined their invitations, citing ‘other commitments’ ranging from election campaigns to cabinet meetings. No doubt they have greater priorities, chief among them is not appearing to be royalist toadies.
Invoking his country’s renowned coarse wit, Charles’s host, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, should take the approach of the BBC quiz show Have I Got News For You, which, when the roly-poly Labour politician Roy Hattersley failed to appear as a guest for an episode in 1993, replaced him with a tub of lard. Perhaps six bags of kangaroo dung would be appropriate replacements for the despicably rude half-dozen.
Not only is this Charles’s first visit to Australia since taking the throne, and the first by a British monarch since 2011, but one that he has made at considerable risk to his health.
We do not know the advice of his physician but one cannot imagine he or she is best pleased their patient has paused his cancer treatment to fly almost 24 hours around the globe – albeit with not one but two doctors in tow and armed with a supply of the monarch’s blood were a transfusion needed. I don’t envy Charles.
From the first engagement to the last, he and Camilla will be met with demands for the country to become a republic. Given that Britain’s very own anti-monarchist Graham Smith – head of the campaign group Republic and he of the ‘Not My King’ fame who staged a miserable demonstration of yellow placards on the procession route at Charles’s Coronation – has flown to Australia, too, it’s feared that six governors bunking a state reception will be the least of the King’s worries.
It was in 1999 that Australia last held a referendum on becoming a republic. Then, its good people voted to keep Queen Elizabeth as head of state, but the near 40 per cent who voted against has grown.
Charles, ultimately, will 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, showing only 33 per cent supporting republicanism.
A royal reckoning is inevitable. Not least because the Australia of 25 years ago has changed irrevocably. Then, the country had more in common with the Australia of 1966, so fondly remembered by the King from his time as a student in Victoria, than today.
Over the coming days, Charles will no doubt make many allusions to Treetops Campus in Geelong Grammar School, which he has said was the happiest part of his schooldays. (Though considering how wretched he was at the barbaric Scottish boarding school Gordonstoun, this isn’t saying much).
Back in 1966, the great Sir Robert Menzies had just left office as Australia’s premier. He was succeeded by Harold Holt, who had served in the Second World War and, in the rare intervals when he could turn his attention away from the Sheilas, Holt had a clear sense of the close bond between Oz and the Old Country.
Those old-fashioned Aussies carried round the memory of what held together the Commonwealth, formerly the Empire. They had died for it in their thousands on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific during the Second World War. For them, there was an instinctive link with the monarchy. Australia’s cultural icons of old – 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 in which the Sydney Opera House remained empty and closed because no one thought it 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-swilling men and brassy, suburban Sheilas of the small-c conservative kind, and bending over backwards to right past wrongs.
The Aussies have plenty to be penitent about, given the ghastly way they treated the indigenous Aboriginal population.
And since becoming PM in 2022, Mr Albanese, the lefty Labor Party leader, has genuflected to this cause with gusto. He staked great political capital on a controversial referendum last year, in which he asked Australians to vote on the country’s constitution recognising Aboriginal people and establishing a body to advise parliament on indigenous issues.
Sixty per cent of Aussies said ‘no’, many concerned by the precedent of granting one specific group of people a greater voice in Parliament than others. Having had his political fingers burnt, Mr Albanese won’t risk another referendum, particularly on the monarchy – whatever the outcome.
So Charles should, I believe, force the issue. To spike the republicans’ guns, should he not offer to step down as the head of state in Australia? To put it to that continent-sized country: back me or sack me. Sir Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy would be hardly likely to stop him. They could not get rid of the Chagos Islands fast enough, and it is obvious neither of them sees the point of the Commonwealth, which meant so much to the late Queen, as it does to King Charles.
If Charles seizes the initiative, he will have left the dignity of the monarchy intact, and the idea of the Commonwealth strong.
Of course, this new, rootless Oz generation, who have no idea who they are or where they come from, won’t look a royal gift horse in the mouth and will eagerly turn the country into a republic.
When they come to elect a new head of state, the Aussies will almost indubitably elect a person of Aboriginal descent – something that the King, with his long history of reconciling the different cultures and ethnicity of his British subjects, would welcome.
Good luck to them.
The behaviour of their governors and politicians already looks like ingratitude and bad manners. The behaviour of the crowds looks in danger of being worse than ill-mannered, and we can only feel anxious on the royal couple’s behalf.
With a typical sense of duty and loyalty to the Australia he knew in his youth, Charles is undertaking a gruelling round of engagements which is surely unwise, given his health problems.
If, during the course of this week, he announces that he no longer wishes to be their King, Charles will have said something valuable and meaningful.
He would no longer have to go through the humiliation of ruling Oz on sufferance. And he could return to the home country, which loves and cherishes the monarchy – and sees the point of it, which the Aussies no longer do.
