King Charles just read a digital ID and climate agenda from a throne. Australia pays top four Commonwealth fees and gets forums in return. Our resource sector earns $385 billion a year and we keep signing frameworks designed to kill it. The numbers do not lie.
On May 13, 2026, King Charles sat on a throne in Westminster and read Keir Starmer's legislative agenda to the British parliament.
Digital ID for British citizens. Climate commitments. Cybersecurity frameworks. Thirty-five bills worth of the globalist agenda delivered in a crown and a robe from an unelected institution that has sat at the centre of the British imperial system for a thousand years.
And somewhere in Canberra, Anthony Albanese was taking notes.
This is the thing that needs to be said clearly and without apology. The British imperial system is useless to Australia now. The Commonwealth delivers nothing that justifies the cost. The EU framework that comes bundled with every trade deal we sign actively works against our primary industries. And we have been so thoroughly conditioned to look up to London and Brussels for permission that we have not stopped to run the numbers on what this arrangement is actually costing us.
So let us run them.
Australia's resources and energy sector generated $385 billion in export earnings in 2024-25. LNG alone brought in $108 billion. Metallurgical coal $40 billion. Thermal coal $32 billion. Iron ore, lithium, uranium sitting on top of all of it.
This is the engine of the Australian economy. This is what pays for the schools and the hospitals and the infrastructure. This is what keeps the lights on and the budget from collapsing entirely despite decades of governments that spent the royalties before they arrived.
And 75.7 percent of it goes to Asia. China. Japan. South Korea. The Indo-Pacific. The region that is growing at a pace Europe has not seen in fifty years.
The EU and the UK are not our primary markets. They never were. Asia buys what Australia digs up. Asia powers its economies with what sits in Australian ground. Asia is the relationship that actually pays the Australian worker's wage.
The EU-Australia Free Trade Agreement signed in March 2026 is projected to boost Australian GDP by $7.8 billion by 2030. That is real money and the tariff reductions are genuine.
The UK two-way trade sits at AUD36 billion annually. The AUKUS partnership has real strategic value, though it is fundamentally an American program. The nuclear submarine technology is American. The architecture is Washington. Britain is along for the partnership but the strategic weight lives in the US alliance, not the Commonwealth one.
Now here is the number nobody puts next to the EU trade deal figure.
The EU runs a trade surplus with Australia of 26.7 billion euros. They sell us more than we sell them. Australia is their customer more than they are ours. The relationship benefits Europe commercially to a greater degree than it benefits us.
And the Commonwealth. Australia is one of the top four financial contributors to the Commonwealth budget. What we get in return is described in official documents as: meetings every two years, informal exchanges between leaders, and access to countries we otherwise have limited bilateral contact with. We pay to attend a forum that sets an agenda we did not write.
Here is where the arrangement stops being a bad deal and starts being an actively hostile one.
Every trade relationship with the EU comes with the EU's climate framework attached. Carbon border adjustment mechanisms are being built right now that will impose new tariffs on goods produced using high-emission energy. Australian steel. Australian aluminium. Australian agricultural products. All of them carry carbon costs that the EU framework will penalise at the border.
The FTA removes tariffs with one hand. The climate framework rebuilds them with the other.
And Australia's commitment to net zero, driven by the same ideological pipeline that runs from Chatham House through the Commonwealth into the Albanese government's policy agenda, is projected to cost $300 billion in transition costs.
The EU FTA delivers $7.8 billion in GDP gains by 2030. The climate framework that comes bundled with the relationship costs $300 billion to comply with.
That is not a trade deal. That is a $300 billion bill with a $7.8 billion discount voucher attached.
Getting something from this? The List sends the next essay first, free, Sunday mornings.
The British imperial system and the EU framework give Australia one arm and one leg and call it partnership. We cannot fully develop our energy sector because of climate commitments they wrote for their own economies. We cannot set our own policy because we are constitutionally tethered to an institution in London reading an agenda in a crown.
Before going further, a distinction that matters.
This is not about the ordinary British citizen. Not about the French worker or the German nurse or the Irish family trying to make rent. Those people are as squeezed by their own elite class as Australians are by ours. They did not design the system. They live inside it the same way ordinary Australians do.
The target is the class. Chatham House. The World Economic Forum. The unelected institutions that shape what governments are permitted to think without ever standing for election themselves. The people who trained prime ministers and foreign ministers in what the acceptable range of ideas looks like.
And King Charles. Who has been unusually vocal for a monarch. Climate. Digital governance. The global order. The Queen held the line for seventy years. Stay out of it. Be present. Say nothing that moves policy.
Charles is not running that playbook. And the timing is not accidental. As Trump bypasses the WEF and One Nation rises and the populations of Western democracies push back against the managed consensus, the institutions that used to operate through proxies are having to speak more directly. When the curtain gets thinner, the people behind it start talking louder.
What Australia is watching is not just a king with opinions. It is a class that is losing its grip on the machinery it used to run invisibly, starting to operate in the open.
There is a guilt narrative running through Australian public life that has been aimed at the wrong people for decades.
White Australians have been told to carry the weight of colonisation. To feel responsible for a project they did not design and did not choose. To perform contrition for decisions made by a British imperial elite that has never once had the finger pointed at it.
Here is what the standard history leaves out.
A significant proportion of the convicts transported to Australia were Irish. Not English petty criminals who stole a loaf of bread. Irish political prisoners. Men and women who were fighting for Irish independence from the same British imperial system that then shipped them to the other side of the world to build a colony for the empire that had just crushed them.
The 1798 rebellion. The Young Ireland movement. The Fenians. Transportation was a political weapon. The Irish were a colonised people themselves, living under British rule, who ended up building someone else's colony under British direction. You want to know why there is an Irish pub on every corner in Australia? Because Australia was substantially built by Irish political prisoners who had no say in being here.
The descendants of those people are being told to feel guilty for the colonisation that the British imperial elite designed, funded, directed, and profited from. The people who actually made those decisions, whose descendants still run the institutions that are still pulling the strings, stay invisible. The guilt lands on the people who were sent. The people who sent them remain above scrutiny.
That is not history. That is the system protecting itself across two centuries.
The next time someone at a protest tells a white Australian that this is not their land, here is what the honest answer looks like.
We did not choose to be here either. The same British imperial system you claim to oppose is the system that sent our ancestors here. Many of them were Irish political prisoners fighting for their own freedom who got shipped to the other side of the world in chains for the crime of resisting the very empire you are now marching in the name of critiquing.
But we were here. And we built something. We built something the whole world used to envy. From nothing. On the other side of the earth. With our hands and our stubbornness and the refusal to be defined by what was done to us.
Your type is trying to see its destruction. That is the fundamental difference. We built. You dismantle. We made something from what we were given. You take something that was made and tell the people who made it they had no right to make it.
If you want to protest colonialism, go to London. Go march outside Buckingham Palace. Go stand outside Chatham House and tell them what the British imperial project cost the people it rolled over. Those are the doors that the finger should have been pointed at all along.
The people whose great-grandparents were transported in chains to build this country are not the ones who owe you an apology.
Go find the ones who put them on the boat.
Strip away the conditioned deference and look at what Australia actually has.
The largest lithium reserves on earth. Iron ore that China cannot replace. Coal and gas that keeps the lights on across Asia. Uranium sitting in the ground as the next energy conversation the world cannot avoid. Agriculture that feeds nations. A stable legal system in the most strategically significant region on earth. A small population sitting on top of a continent's worth of resources.
Australia has more to offer the world than Europe combined if it plays this correctly.
Norway built a two trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund from oil. Singapore built one of the wealthiest nations per capita on earth from nothing. Australia built debt from a continent of resources because we have been governed by people who took their instructions from the wrong room.
The EU needs our resources. They run a trade surplus with us because they sell us manufactured goods while we sell them raw materials at prices they set through the frameworks they control. China needs our iron ore, our lithium, our coal and gas. Japan needs our LNG. South Korea needs our metallurgical coal. The Indo-Pacific needs everything that sits in Australian ground.
None of them are attaching a $300 billion climate bill to the purchase order.
This is not a call against Europe. It is not a call against Britain. The ordinary people of those countries are navigating the same managed systems that ordinary Australians are.
This is a call against the arrangement. Against the institutional framework that was built to serve British imperial interests two hundred years ago and has been quietly updated to serve the Chatham House class and the Brussels bureaucracy ever since.
Australia has outgrown this system. We always had. We just kept performing loyalty to an institution that was never loyal to us in return.
The republican debate in Australia has always been run as a sentimental argument. Should we have an Australian head of state. Should we change the flag. Nostalgia versus modernity.
That is the wrong frame. This is a sovereignty argument. This is a strategic argument. This is an economic argument worth $300 billion and rising.
Every year Australia remains inside this architecture is a year our energy policy is being written by people who need us to stop mining so their own decline looks less stark. A year our cultural narrative is being shaped by institutions that point the guilt at convict descendants while the people who designed the convict system stay invisible. A year our prime minister is taking his cues from Starmer and Macron and Merz while the Indo-Pacific builds the new world without us at the table.
Australia does not need to live this way anymore.
We do not owe this system our guilt. We do not owe it our deference. We do not owe it our energy sector, our foreign policy, our digital infrastructure, or our future.
The people who built this country were sent here by an empire. They survived. They built something extraordinary from the other side of the world with nothing but what they had in their hands. They were not the empire. They were what the empire used.
Their descendants are Australians. Not colonial subjects. Not guilty parties. Not branch office workers waiting for instruction from London.
Australians.
With a continent underneath them, a region in front of them, and a system behind them that has taken more than it ever gave.
It is time to go our own way.
Rico Holt · ricoholt.com
If the throne speech and the resource cheque felt like the same cord, tip the desk that reached for the scissors. Essays stay free.
Leave a tip · A$5Get the next essay and the book launch price first.
Privacy: your email gets used for one thing, sending you Rico Holt essays and book news. It's stored with Netlify, our form host. Never sold, never shared. Want off? Reply to any email and you're gone.