Royal no-show by Australian premiers is disrespectful and childish

It’s almost 30 years since Diana, the 36-year-old Princess of Wales, was killed in a car crash in Paris. Her death sent the world into a frenzy of grief that’s difficult to imagine for those who were not around to experience how intensely she was worshipped.

There’s never been a celebrity like her. At her wedding, she had all the attributes of a fairytale princess; beautiful, demure – her big eyes were always lowered – and good. When she shook hands with a man suffering from AIDS, she did more than a hundred education campaigns to challenge the stigma of the disease.

Charles and Camilla will make their first visit to Australia as King and Queen this month.Credit: AP

And so it followed, in an age in which public discourse was still underpinned by mid-century, Christian morality, that Camilla – the woman the prince really loved but who was too worldly for his family – must be bad. The princess versus the crone, or so the story went. When Diana died, the hatred directed at Camilla was vicious and long-lasting, fuelled by a self-righteous press.

If the same story were to unfold now, it would be told very differently. The binary moral values that ruled the 1980s have lost their power. That level of celebrity megawattage no longer exists, and we don’t fawn over fame as we once did.

We’re also far more accepting of the messiness of humanity. Divorce is no longer taboo. We acknowledge, now, that marriages are hard, that a union of two well-meaning people may not work out, and that when people are forced to follow too rigid family expectations rather than their hearts when choosing their life partners, things can end badly.

Comments such as this from Diana’s uncle, Lord Fermoy, amid talk of marriage in the early 1980s, would lead now to rapid cancellation. “Lady Diana, I can assure you, has never had a lover,” he told the Washington Post in 1981, two years before they married. “There is no such thing as her ever having had a past.”

The misogynist language used about Camilla back then would be repudiated, too. No responsible journalist would describe her as a frump, an old trout, or “horse face”. Commentary comparing her appearance to Diana’s would rightly be called out.

Camilla might even get some credit for her admirable qualities – her earthiness, her sense of humour and her refusal to follow the vagaries of fashion.

The septuagenarian royals arrive in Sydney on Friday night for a whirlwind trip, Charles’ first to Australia as head of state. Love or loathe the monarchy, Charles remains the king of this country. We don’t have to line the streets, as our grandparents once did for Queen Elizabeth, but as the King of Australia, he should be welcomed with respect, particularly by the country’s leaders.

The absence of the premiers from a formal reception in Canberra is an obvious snub (it’s not hard to move a cabinet meeting, which is the excuse given by three of them). NSW Premier Chris Minns will, however, spend several days with the King and Queen while they are in Sydney.

While there might be millions of Australians who want a republic, the Australian Republic Movement is all but dead as a political force. Perhaps politicians who feel strongly about the anachronism of Australia having a British head of state should elevate their actions beyond a childish no-show, and actually put it on the agenda.

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