King Charles ‘could RENOUNCE his claim on Australia’ says ex-prime minister as he ridicules the nation for failing to break away from the British monarchy when the Queen ‘didn’t even want us’
- Paul Keating said he ‘wouldn’t be surprised’ if King Charles renounced Australia
- Mr Keating led the charge for Australia to become a republic when he was PM
- He claimed the Royal Family hoped Australia would vote for republic in 1999
Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating has made the astonishing claim that King Charles – ‘a constitutional aberration’ – could renounce his claim on Australia.
He also lambasted the country for not voting for a republic when the Queen ‘didn’t want’ to hold on to Australia, saying ‘Australians have so little pride in themselves’.
Speaking on Wednesday night, Mr Keating said Queen Elizabeth and her family hoped Australia would vote to become a republic in the 1999 referendum.
‘I think the Royal Family would have been so glad for the referendum to have passed, to be honest,’ he told James Curran, a Sydney University professor, in an online talk.
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if King Charles the Third, the King of Australia, doesn’t volunteer … to renounce his claim on Australia,’ he said.
King Charles (right) is pictured with Queen Consort Camilla at the Palace of Westminster in London, England
Mr Keating, 78, led the charge for Australia to become a republic while he was prime minister from 1991 to 1996.
He privately discussed his hope Australia would endorse the move with Queen Elizabeth during a visit to Britain in 1993.
According to Mr Keating, he told the Queen he would ‘not involve her family’ in his campaign for Australian to have its own head of state.
He became a figure of notoriety in the UK during the Queen’s visit to Australia in February 1992, when he not only made a republican speech in front of her, but for seemingly breaking Royal protocol by placing his arm around the monarch.
His actions earned him front-page treatment in British newspapers, with headlines calling him the ‘Lizard of Oz’.
Mr Keating said on Wednesday that Australia had its chance to become a republic in the defeated 1999 referendum, but failed to follow the lead of other countries.
‘Look at the French. The French had a revolution for their republic. The Americans had a revolution for their republic.
‘We couldn’t even pinch ours off Queen Elizabeth the Second – who didn’t want it. We couldn’t take the title, even if the monarch was happy to give it,’ he said.
Mr Keating said the Australian Republic Movement asked him to get involved with its campaign after the Queen’s death, but he did not want to.
Former prime minister Paul Keating (centre) is pictured arriving at the National Memorial Service for Queen Elizabeth II at Parliament House on September 22, 2022 in Canberra, Australia
‘Why would you? We fluffed it (in 1999),’ he said on Wednesday.
‘If Australians have so little pride in themselves, so little pride that they are happy to be represented by the monarch of Great Britain, why would somebody like me want to shift their miserable view of themselves?’
Mr Keating said a monarch based on the other side of the world could not properly represent Australians.
‘Who in their right mind could believe that the monarch of Great Britain could represent our aspirations here?
Paul Keating sealed his place in Royal infamy when he put his hand on the Queen’s back as he steered the monarch through a crowd in 1992
‘We occupy one of the oldest land masses, the oldest continents on Earth, perhaps the oldest societies on Earth – it’s so pathetic,’ he said.
‘Charles the Third, King of Australia, is a constitutional aberration. That’s what it is.’
Mr Keating also took the opportunity to lash out at previous prime ministers of both Australia and the UK, referencing Scott Morrison’s controversial trip to Britain in 2021 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
‘There was Morrison running off to Cornwall with that other fruitcake, what’s his name … Boris Johnson,’ said Mr Keating.
FORMER PM PAUL KEATING’S STATEMENT ON THE QUEEN
The Death of Queen Elizabeth II
Statement by PJ Keating
In the 20th century, the self became privatised, while the public realm, the realm of the public good, was broadly neglected.
Queen Elizabeth understood this and instinctively attached herself to the public good against what she recognised as a tidal wave of private interest and private reward. And she did this for a lifetime. Never deviating.
She was an exemplar of public leadership, married for a lifetime to political restraint, remaining always, the constitutional monarch.
To the extent that an hereditary monarch can ever reflect the will or conscience of a people, in the case of Britain, Queen Elizabeth assimilated a national consciousness reflecting every good instinct and custom the British people possessed and held to their heart.
In a seventy-year reign, she was required to meet literally hundreds of thousands of officials – presidents, prime ministers, ministers, premiers, mayors and municipal personalities.
It was more than one person should ever have been asked to do.
But Elizabeth the Second’s stoicism and moralism welded her to the task and with it, the idea of monarchy.
Her exceptionally long, dedicated reign is unlikely to be repeated; not only in Britain, but in the world generally.
With her passing her example of public service remains with us as a lesson in dedication to a lifelong mission in what she saw as the value of what is both enduringly good and right.
Potts Point
9 September 2022
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