Australian citizenship: removing the welcome mat?

Few things can be as important to an individual as their citizenship. Along with a person’s name, sex and age one’s citizenship (or nationality) is a key defining individual characteristic. The Australian Citizenship Act 1948 describes Australian citizenship as representing “formal membership of the community of the Commonwealth of Australia; and Australian citizenship is a common bond, involving reciprocal rights and obligations, uniting all Australians, while respecting their diversity …”

Australian citizenship rights include: the right to vote; the right to seek election to public office; the right to an Australian passport; access to employment in the Australian Public Service and Australian Defence Forces; the right to consular assistance overseas; the right to protection against deportation on character grounds; and the right to register any children as citizens by descent.

Australian citizenship responsibilities include: the responsibility to enrol and vote in elections; the responsibility to defend Australia should the need arise; and the responsibility to serve on a jury if required.

To properly consider the issue of citizenship in Australia today we need to look at where we have come from. After Federation in 1901, Australia entered the first half of the 20th century as a predominantly white Anglo-Celtic society, along with small numbers of other ancestries and a small Indigenous population.

The Immigration Restriction Act 1901, one of the first acts of the Australian Federal Parliament placed exclusionary barriers around Australian immigration and ensured a predominantly British migration pattern for the first half of the 20th century, with about 97 per cent of Australians being of Anglo-Celtic origin. The “White Australia” policy was well and truly entrenched.

World War II forced a rethink of Australia’s immigration and citizenship policies. The collapse of the British Empire and a growing realisation that a population of seven million people was insufficient to defend Australia’s vast land mass saw the emergence of new policies aimed at expanding Australia’s population.

The initial focus of the Australian post-war migration program was on British immigration. However, Northern and Western European migrants soon became part of the immigration stream. Over time so to did Southern European migrants, particularly from Italy and Greece, then came Asian and middle-Eastern migrants and now African migrants have become commonplace.

Since 1945 about 6.5 million migrants have come to Australia, which equates to around one million migrants per decade. Also since that time over 3.5 million Australians have become citizens. These post war migrants have helped build Australia’s social, cultural and economic miracle.

Our post-war migration program has seen the face of Australia completely transformed. Australia had gone from being a mostly homogenous Anglo-Celtic society with a small Indigenous population to a truly multicultural society, where more than one quarter of the population, or over five million people, have a non Anglo-Celtic background which is predominantly continental European or Asian.

In September 2006, the Federal Government released the discussion paper, Australian Citizenship: Much more than a ceremony. The paper considers the merits of introducing a more formal Australian citizenship test, with stricter English language and “Aussie values” requirements.

In November 2006 the Howard Government also introduced reworked legislation to extend the waiting period for eligibility to Australian citizenship from two to four years, plans which are currently in the Federal Parliament. The Federal Opposition had previously supported an extension to three years but is now opposing the four-year extension.

The proposed changes to Australia’s citizenship laws and the floating of the idea of a stricter citizenship test are consistent with the Howard Government’s gradual withdrawal of support for multiculturalism. The Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration, Andrew Robb, states that Australian citizenship is not a right, it is a privilege. This represents a shift in emphasis away from a welcoming or inclusive citizenship process towards a more selective or exclusive process.

Mr Robb also states that citizenship “is more than a ceremony”. This follows on from Mr Robb’s oft-repeated claim that citizenship is being thrown around “like confetti”. The implications here are that people are not taking their new Australian citizenship seriously. Yet there is no evidence provided to back up this claim.

Mr Robb’s paper fails to provide any evidence that people are refusing to learn English and does not comment on some of the barriers to learning English faced by new migrants. Rather than imposing a discriminatory citizenship test the Government could consider providing more flexibility in the provision of English language training through more flexible and better funded English language training. The journey to English language proficiency is hugely important but people need help.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, has recently lavished praise on the Australian Greek community as an example of a community that has successfully integrated into the Australian community while retaining a love of their country of origin.

The irony of the Prime Minister’s comments is that the Greek community has relatively low rates of English language proficiency in comparison with other communities, with 67.9 per cent of Greek Australians reported as having good English from the 2001 census. Many older members of the Greek Australian community would not pass an Australian citizenship test with a stricter English component.

The Government’s citizenship paper lists Australian values as including respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual, support for democracy, commitment to the rule of law, the equality of men and women, the spirit of a fair go and mutual respect and compassion for those in need.

Looking at those six value sets, democracy and the rule of law are already covered by our current citizenship pledge and are of course central Australian values, as well as being values practiced by a large number of nations of the world, if not all. “Respect for the individual” while not inherently contentious draws heavily on the Western liberal tradition.

Supporting the equality of men and women seems reasonable but it must be stressed that this is only a recent Australian value. About 20 years ago women couldn’t get into the Melbourne Cricket Club and Australia’s largest religion, Catholicism, still disallows female priests. The final two values, of a fair go and mutual respect, are hardly Australian values but are actually universal values found in a vast array of nations and different religious and secular beliefs.

The problem with trying to define “Australian values” beyond democracy and the rule of law is that they are not necessarily agreed values. Pluralism, or the right to hold different values beyond the acceptance of democracy and the rule of law, is arguably one of the most important values in a multicultural society and effectively rejects a detailed list of agreed values.

Multiculturalism could also be considered a quintessential Australian value as recently argued by our former Governor General, Sir William Deane.

The proposals within the Government’s Citizenship paper may cause significant discrimination against new migrants, and in particular against refugees from non-English speaking backgrounds.

Under Australia’s current off-shore humanitarian migration program about 70 per cent of migrants are currently sourced from Africa including a significant number from non-English speaking countries such as Sudan. Placing a further requirement for higher-level English on such people to become Australian citizens, having already accepted them as residents, would effectively create a situation of “double jeopardy” for these people.

Many African humanitarian migrants are illiterate in their own language and have not even had basic educational experiences after long periods in refugee camps or living in severe hardship. Some refuges may never have sat in a classroom or attended school. Simply holding a pen and writing may be a foreign experience to some refugees. To expect such people to achieve a level of English higher than basic in a short period of time sometimes with no more than 510 hours of government subsidised English language training is often unrealistic.

Germany is a country that has citizenship laws that prevent a significant proportion of their residents from becoming citizens. Turkish “guest workers” began arriving in Germany in the 1950s to help meet labour shortages associated with Germany’s post-war economic boom. There are now about two million German Turks but at the 1998 federal election only 160,000 were eligible to vote due to citizenship restrictions against German Turks.

Creating a strict English language test may create a similarly disaffected and discriminated against group of residents in Australia. This proposal would take Australia a long way back from where we have come over the last 40 years in terms of building a non-discriminatory immigration and citizenship policy.

Australia is a highly successful multicultural society built on immigration with over six million migrants since World War II. Australia has demonstrated world’s best practice in successfully integrating generations of migrants into our wider community. The current citizenship requirements of two years’ permanent residence, basic English and a public pledge to Australia and its laws and democracy have served our nation well.

The Government’s Citizenship Discussion Paper has failed to demonstrate the case for the need to overhaul Australia’s citizenship requirements. A more formalised, higher level citizenship test would discriminate against new migrants, and particularly against refugees from non-English speaking backgrounds. It would create a two-tiered society in Australia which would damage our successful immigration program and multicultural society.

Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that everyone has a right to a nationality. Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provides for the rights of minority groups to practice their language free from discrimination.

These two clauses read together would seem to indicate that a stricter English language citizenship test, that denied Australian residents who do not have high-level English skills citizenship, would be fundamentally in breach of Australia’s international human rights obligations.

Learning English should be seen as a life long journey for all Australians, not as a discriminatory barrier to citizenship. While English language acquisition and an understanding of citizenship and Australian society should be encouraged we should not introduce a discriminatory citizenship test in Australia - our nation would be the poorer for it. The welcome mat should not be removed.