It turned out that reviving grievances about royal life, invoking the death of Princess Diana and claiming to be “the most trolled person in the entire world” did not make the people of Australia fall in love again with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

Indeed, 81% of more than 1,700 Australian adults said in a new poll that their opinion of Harry and Meghan did not improve during the couple’s four-day “quasi-royal” visit to their country last week, Tom Sykes of The Royalist Substack reported. Their trip featured a mix of high-profile philanthropic engagements, self-help-style speaking gigs and efforts by Meghan to sell luxury clothing while visiting cancer-stricken children in a hospital as well as the site of a 2025 terrorist mass shooting.

Indeed, the poll, conducted by the respected, independent Melbourne-based polling and market research company Roy Morgan, showed that 75% of respondents did not think Meghan presented a more positive side during the visit, Sykes also reported. Meanwhile, close to 70% disagreed that she and Harry had been treated unfairly by the royal family, and 87% doubted that their Australia trip would help repair his relationship with his father, King Charles III.

The Roy Morgan poll did not address why Australian respondents were less than impressed by this visit by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, even though most aware of news about their visit. Back in 2018, their visit to Australia, when they were still working members of the royal family, was considered to be a phenomenal success. But this time, the tour “clearly and unambiguously” did not work, Sykes said.

That’s “the real” conclusion of this nationally representative poll, Sykes said. “The numbers are the numbers” — contrary to what they Sussex team has said, operating “from inside a bubble of curated events and hand-picked audiences,” he added.

The team insisted to The Telegraph that there was a disconnect between what critics were saying online and how the couple were greeted with “open arms” at events they attended. But to people in Australia, watching from outside the “bubble,” they saw headlines about the couple’s “grievance narrative,” Sykes said.

As part of this narrative, Meghan declared to a classroom of students at Swinburne University of Technology: “For 10 years, every day for 10 years, I have been bullied and attacked. And I was the most trolled person in the entire world.”

Meanwhile, Harry invoked his mother’s 1997 death to tell attendees at a $1,000-per person summit on workplace mental health that he felt “overwhelmed,” “lost,” and “betrayed” at points in his life. He said he wasn’t sure he wanted to be royal because “this role … it killed my mum.”

The “merch” aspect of this trip also garnered headlines, as the Times of London reported. Shortly after Meghan made appearances at different events, her team let it be known what she was wearing, and her outfits and accessories were immediately made available for sale on OneOff, an AI-powered fashion website. The duchess recently become an investor in the website and reportedly expected to get a 15% cut of the sale price.

So, OneOff guided fashion fans to the $1,250 designer dress and Dior pumps she wore when she and Harry visited children with cancer and eating disorders at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. OneOff also pointed consumers to the $440 blue-and-white-striped shirt and $298 trainers Meghan wore when she and Harry met with survivors and first responders connected to the Dec. 14 Bondi Beach shooting. During the antisemitic terrorist attack at a Hanukkah event in Sydney, 15 people were killed.

“Selling the clothes off her own back at the site of a massacre where 15 people died might come easily to Meghan, but, like any right-minded person, I find this sickening,” Sykes said.

Other royal experts said that the Bondi Beach visit “was perhaps starkest example yet of Harry and Meghan’s efforts to commercialize their royal brand,” as Richard Palmer said.

Regarding Meghan’s claims of being “the most trolled person” in the world, Arwa Mahdawi, a columnist for The Guardian, said she sympathized with the duchess having to deal with the “obsessive misogynistic outrage around every little thing” she does.

On the other hand, Mahdawi also said that both Meghan and her husband are hypocrites for seeming to reject royal life while still insisting on using their royal titles. She also said that Meghan should get some perspective on suffering, when she’s been handed multimillion-dollar content opportunities and was paid a reported $175,000 to show up for a couple hours to headline a $3,200 wellness retreat in Sydney. The efforts by Harry and Meghan to style themselves as brave philanthropists can “feel out of touch” when frontline humanitarian workers are being murdered in record numbers, Mahdawi added.

Meanwhile, Australians also were not happy over the perception that their tax dollars might have gone to pay for the couple’s security and other expenses during the trip, according to a survey of readers by the news website, nine.com.au. Nearly 90% of 904 readers who responded to the survey said the trip itself should never have been allowed.

“I find it almost obscene that the Australian taxpayer is funding any part of the visit when so many families are struggling,” one reader told nine.com.au. “They make more than enough money to cover their own expenses,” said another.

Australians might have viewed things differently if Harry and Meghan were still working royals; they stepped away from royal life and moved to California in 2020.

More than half of nine.com.au readers were in favor of using taxpayer money to fund official royal tours — for example, if Prince William and Kate Middleton came to Australia.

“William and Kate are still working royals, so on official business the tax payer should pay,” one person said.

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