King and Queen to visit Australia later this year
THE King will visit Australia later this year, Anthony Albanese, the country’s prime minister, has confirmed.
The visit is part of a long-haul trip in late October, when the King and Queen attend the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Samoa.
An Australian government spokesman told The Australian newspaper that “the prime minister enjoys a warm relationship with the King, and looks forward to welcoming His Majesty to Australia later this year”.
Buckingham Palace declined to comment. It is understood that travel plans are at a very early stage.
The visit will be the King’s first to Australia since his accession and the first by a ruling monarch since Elizabeth II in October 2011. It will come at a sensitive moment for the Royal family, amid increasing speculation that Australia will become a republic.
The most recent poll, held just after Queen Elizabeth’s death, suggested that 46 per cent of Australians favoured a republic, while 54 per cent preferred the current system. Mr Albanese voted in a referendum in 1999 for an Australian citizen to replace the British monarch as the country’s head of state. The results were similar to the recent opinion poll, with nearly 55 per cent voting to maintain the current system.
Ahead of the King’s Coronation in May, Mr Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “I haven’t changed my position on that and I’ve made that very clear. I want to see an Australian as Australia’s head of state.”
He added: “That doesn’t mean that you cannot have respect for the institution. And I believe, as the Australian prime minister, I have a particular responsibility to represent the nation in a way that respects the constitutional arrangements, which are there.”
The Australian Monarchist League (AML) has called on Mr Albanese to abolish the position of assistant minister for the republic, a role he created in 2022 and which is held by Matt Thistlethwaite, a Labor Party MP.
Eric Abetz, the chairman of the AML, said: “The assistant minister, who personally gets over AU$260,000 (£139,000) per annum plus travel, plus staff, plus accommodation, is an abuse of taxpayers’ money.
“There is no doubt the propaganda machine for the republicans is fed well.”
The King and Queen last visited Australia in 2018, as the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, when they opened the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast in Queensland.