I'm John Bachelors with my good friend and colleague Gregory Coppley editor and publisher of Defense and Foreign Affairs.

We're headed to Australia with the King himself, King Charles III and Queen Camilla.

I mentioned that the Royal Family these days is injury report like a football team that's been

banged up a little bit by the championship rounds. Princess Anne has left hospital

and regrets not being able to attend some of the ceremonies that are available to her horse

a memorial service. The king is moving around, he's very active, the queen asked him to not do so much,

and he is bound for Australia, but I'm not certain now that I have the whole itinerary. This is important because the king is the king of Australia, is the king of New Zealand.

He's the king of Canada, I believe. What about the Australian trip? There's a second part to it where he's going to

attend a gathering of the heads of the Commonwealth. Where is that? Is that Fiji, Gregory?

No, that's Samoa. So that'll be before he goes to Australia, which is the Commonwealth

Heads of Government Meeting, which moves from one Commonwealth Country to the next, as each of the

meetings move around the world. So he really has to attend that

because he is the head of the Commonwealth and this is his first big chance as the monarch to address the chocum in his own right.

Bearing in mind that Queen Elizabeth negotiated with the Commonwealth heads of government a decade ago to ensure

that Charles would succeed her as head of the Commonwealth.

Now Charles knows that his health makes his outlook questionable, whether he's there for two years, five years, ten years, we don't know, but he has to consolidate his position as head of the Commonwealth to keep that

organization viable and dynamic and in fact to reintroduce some dynamism to it

because when Britain joined the European Union until it left in just a couple of years ago,

it had basically abandoned the Commonwealth.

Now it has to rebuild the Commonwealth as a major global trading and strategic

network of most family ties. So the King goes to Chogam, I'm sure he's going to do that and do it well and it looks like he's positioned himself to do it.

He's restricted himself to a week in Australia and missing New Zealand altogether and in Australia he'll take a couple of days for for private time

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