Britain’s Prince Charles and wife Camilla received a warm reception from hundreds of Australians who waited in the rain to see them on Wednesday, even as a new poll showed 51 per cent would not want him as king.
Advertisement
As the Daily Beast reported last week, Monarchists face major challenges in the always-challenging fight to keep Australia in the fold after the ruling Conservative party elected a new leader (who is now Prime Minister by default) Malcolm Turnbull, an arch-Republican who replaced arch-monarchist Tony Abbott.
“She said ‘I see you’ve got the VC (Victoria Cross) there”.
Charles cut a birthday cake before the regal pair sampled local food and wine including asparagus, avocado and marron, with the prince quipping to the large press pack that this was the hardest part of his job.
But he added: “We look forward to the day when members of the royal family make the trip as our equals and not Australia’s current and future rulers”. “I asked Camilla if she was enjoying it and she said she was getting very exhausted”, she said.
The Prince was filmed stripping down to shorts during a scorching summer’s day in Perth and taking a swim at the official residence of the Queen’s representative in the state of Western Australia.
Prince Charles is set to celebrate his birthday with a beach-side barbecue in Australia.
Of course, the Duchess was only joking and Prince Charles was just riding along.
Turnbull wrote “it was hard to believe that Prince Charles could ever be accepted as king”.
Charles, meanwhile, will visit the National Museum of Australia, but the pair will be reunited when they plant trees at the National Arboretum, reports Royalcentral.
Janine Kirk, the head of the prince’s Australian charities, was photographed on Thursday with her hand placed well down the visiting royal’s back as she introduced him to victims of the 2013 Blue Mountains bushfires.
Mr Turnbull also wrote about his frustration at Charles giving the longest speech on Australia Day in 1988, the bicentennial year of the nation.
Camilla revealed that Charles has a penchant for a certain dessert when she visited the Sydney headquarters of OzHarvest, an organisation which provides charities who feed those in need with unwanted produce from restaurants and other food outlets.
Advertisement
So it was a blessing the royals were spared an uncomfortable visit to parliament’s question time which – after a bipartisan expression of support for war veterans – returned to a more prosaic theme: whether the GST would rise under a Turnbull government. “While I am a republican there are much more immediate issues”.
