AN WILSON: Why Charles should call the bluff of these drongo and ungracious Aussies and announce he’ll quit as their head of state, by the late Queen’s biographer

On Monday afternoon, amid the hubbub of dignitaries and the crackling of wine glasses in Australia’s modernist, boomerang-shaped parliament building, King Charles will be the center of gravity of that country’s political power.

But at a reception celebrating his arrival as head of state, six regional leaders will be conspicuous by their absence. For Australia’s governors have all declined their invitations, citing “other commitments” ranging from election campaigns to cabinet meetings. No doubt they have bigger priorities; chief among them do not appear to be royalist mushrooms.

Charles’ presenter, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, invokes his country’s renowned crude humor and should follow the approach of the BBC quiz Have I Got News For You, which, when roly-poly Labor politician Roy Hattersley was not there managed to appear as a guest for an episode in 1993, replacing him with a tub of lard. Perhaps six bags of kangaroo dung would be a suitable substitute for the despicably rude half dozen.

Not only is this Charles’ first visit to Australia since he came to the throne, and the first by a British monarch since 2011, but it is also a visit he has made at significant risk to his health.

We don’t know his doctor’s opinion, but you can’t imagine he or she is most happy that their patient paused his cancer treatment to fly around the world for almost 24 hours – albeit with not one but two doctors in tow and armed with a supply of medicine. the monarch’s blood required a transfusion. I’m not jealous of Charles.

From the first to the last engagement, he and Camilla will face demands for the country to become a republic. Given that Britain’s anti-monarchist Graham Smith – head of the campaign group Republic and he of ‘Not My King’ fame who organized a miserable yellow sign demonstration on the procession route at Charles’s Coronation – is also heading to Australia has flown, It is feared that six governors undermining 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 the good people voted to keep Queen Elizabeth as head of state, but the almost 40 percent who voted against has grown.

Ultimately, Charles will never achieve the same popularity as his mother.

Opinion polls are generally split between people who want to see the monarch as head of state or an elected Australian – despite the efforts of a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper recently, which polled 1,000 people and found only 33 percent supported republicanism.

A royal reckoning is inevitable. Not least because the Australia of 25 years ago has changed irrevocably. Back then, the country had more in common with the Australia of 1966, which the King remembers so fondly from his time as a student in Victoria, than it does now.

In the coming days, Charles will no doubt make many allusions to Geelong Grammar School’s Treetops Campus, 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 doesn’t mean much).

In 1966, the great Sir Robert Menzies had just left office as Prime Minister of Australia. He was succeeded by Harold Holt, who had served in World War II, and in the rare intervals when he was able to divert his attention from the Sheilas, Holt had a clear view of the close bond between Oz and the Old Country.

Those old-fashioned Aussies carried around the memory of what held the Commonwealth, formerly the Empire, together. They died in their thousands on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific during the Second World War. For them there was an instinctive bond with the monarchy. Australia’s cultural icons of the past – Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germane Greer, Sidney Nolan the great painter – felt this kinship intrinsically, because they all chose to live in Britain.

But Oz has now become a cultural desert – as evidenced by the years when the Sydney Opera House remained 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 brassy, ​​suburban Sheilas of the small-town conservative ilk, bending over backwards to right past wrongs to put .

The Aussies have plenty to be remorseful about, given the horrific way they treated the indigenous Aboriginal population.

And since becoming prime minister in 2022, the left-wing leader of the Albanese Labor Party has enthusiastically knelt to the cause. Last year he invested a lot of political capital in a controversial referendum in which he asked Australians to vote on the country’s constitution, which would recognize Aboriginal people and establish a body to advise parliament on indigenous issues.

Sixty percent of Aussies said ‘no’, many concerned about the precedent of one specific group of people being given a bigger voice in parliament than others. With his political fingers burned, Mr Albanese will not risk another referendum, especially on the monarchy – whatever the outcome.

So Charles, I think, should force the issue. To strengthen the arms of the republicans, should he not offer to resign as head of state in Australia? To put it with that country the size of a continent: support me or fire me. Sir Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy are unlikely to stop him. They couldn’t get rid of the Chagos Islands fast enough, and it’s clear that neither of them sees the point of the Commonwealth, which meant as much to the late Queen, as it did to 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 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 eagerly turn the country into a republic.

When it comes to choosing a new head of state, Aussies will almost undoubtedly 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 their governors and politicians already resembles ingratitude and bad manners. The behavior of the crowd appears to be worse rather than ill-mannered, and on behalf of the royal couple we can only be concerned.

With a typical sense of duty and loyalty to the Australia he knew in his youth, Charles undertakes a grueling series of assignments, which is certainly unwise given his health problems.

If he announces during this week that he no longer wants to be their king, Charles will have said something valuable and meaningful.

He would no longer have to suffer the humiliation of ruling Oz on the basis of suffering. And he could return to the homeland, which loves and cherishes the monarchy – and sees the point in it, which the Aussies no longer do.