The act was, and remains, a significant piece of legislation in Australia’s history—one that continues to provide the key guidelines for how Australian citizenship is legally recognised and defined. Since its introduction, the 1948 act has been amended some 36 times. Many of these amendments were introduced to make the 1948 act more reflective of our growing migrant population and Australia’s changing relationship to Britain and to erase instances of discrimination contained in earlier versions of the act.
The 2005 bill before the House today and the additional amendments that the government introduced to the bill in October this year will replace the old Australian Citizenship Act 1948. Some of the amendments contained in this bill are an improvement on the 1948 act and, as such, I and many of my other colleagues readily welcome them. Many of these improvements encompass recommendations made by the Australian Citizenship Council in a report it released on 18 February 2000.
This bill also introduces a number of new provisions that the government has sought to justify as necessary measures aimed at better securing Australia against the threat of terrorism. These provisions were first hinted at by the Prime Minister himself in a press release dated 8 September last year, which was titled ‘Counter-terrorism laws strengthened’. Among other things, these new security measures include a greatly expanded role for ASIO in the area of citizenship, especially in relation to the granting of citizenship, new restrictions on the eligibility criteria for Australian citizenship that I would say go backwards rather than forwards and the introduction of new discretionary powers that will enable the minister to directly intervene in decisions regarding the granting of Australian citizenship, including the ability to deny citizenship to individuals regardless of whether they satisfy the citizenship eligibility criteria or not.
Whatever position one takes on these new measures, the very nature of these changes to our citizenship laws demand that they be given serious and detailed consideration. One of the welcome changes brought about by this bill relates to section 17 of the 1948 act. For Australian citizens who had renounced their Australian citizenship under section 17 of the 1948 act, the new bill makes provisions allowing them to resume their Australian citizenship if they are found to be of good character. Under proposed section 21 of the new bill, children of former Australian citizens who lost their citizenship under section 17 will also be able to acquire Australian citizenship by conferral.
These are improvements to Australian citizenship laws, and the opposition supports them. However, under section 21 of the 2005 bill, children of Australian citizens who renounced their citizenship under section 18 of the 1948 act will still not be able to acquire Australian citizenship. In effect, this is the first of a series of discriminatory clauses introduced in this bill. Both provisions have significant implications for Australia’s Maltese community, and because I have a very large Maltese community in my electorate it is my responsibility to put their concerns on record here in this place. Children of Australian citizens who renounced their citizenship under section 18 of the 1948 act should be given the same rights and access to Australian citizenship as those children of Australian citizens who renounced their citizenship under section 17 of the old act. They should be given equal opportunity in their bid for citizenship, as was recommended by the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee in its inquiry into the position of expatriates. I, along with many of my colleagues, again call on the government to amend this obvious discrepancy in Australia’s citizenship laws. It is one which is unnecessary, discriminatory and unfair.
I want to turn to the new security measures that this bill introduces to Australia’s citizenship laws. According to proposed sections 17(4), 24(4) and 34 of the new bill, the minister is prohibited from approving a citizenship application while an adverse or qualified ASIO security assessment is in force, and this new statutory requirement—
Debate interrupted.
As I was saying before the interruption of the debate, according to sections 17(4), 24(4) and 30(4) of the new bill, the minister is prohibited from approving a citizenship application while an adverse or qualified ASIO security assessment is in force. This new statutory requirement will apply to all applicants for Australian citizenship, whether by descent, by conferral or by resumption. In effect, this gives ASIO the power of veto over the granting of Australian citizenship.
One concern that has been voiced by a number of civil liberty groups is that this new arrangement has the potential to undermine an individual’s ability to properly appeal an adverse decision regarding his or her application for citizenship because the Attorney-General can certify that a person is either not to be notified of an adverse security assessment or that evidence deemed to jeopardise Australia’s national security should be heard in secret and kept from the applicant and his or her legal team during the appeals process.
The bill also introduces new provisions for the collection and storage of as well as access to personal identifiers used to verify a person’s identity during the application for citizenship. These include fingerprints and handprints, height and weight, a head and shoulders photograph, an iris scan, a signature and other possible identifiers which the minister is given the power to add to the bill at a later date. As it stands, the 2005 bill contains no safeguards that would prevent it from being amended in the future to make it permissible for personal information, ostensibly collected for the purposes of a citizenship application, to become accessible to other parties. The bill also remains silent on how personal identifiers collected will be stored. As it currently stands, the bill already allows for the disclosure of these personal identifiers to the Australian states and territories. These weaknesses allow for too many loopholes in the bill, and I would like to see additional measures put in place that expressly prevent the exploitation of such loopholes in the future.
Under clauses 24(2) and 30(2) of the 2005 bill, the minister is also able to refuse an application for the conferral or resumption of citizenship, even in cases where an applicant successfully meets all of the necessary criteria for citizenship. The 2005 bill introduces further measures. Under the new bill, the age at which an individual is no longer required to have a basic knowledge of the English language when applying for Australian citizenship is raised from 50 years to 60 years of age. In addition, under section 22 of the 2005 bill, the permanent residency requirement was originally extended from two to three years, but this is been further extended to four years under the new amendments recently introduced by the government. Permanent residents must now live in Australia for four years before they can apply for citizenship, though I note that the government has finally heeded the opposition’s calls to have the retrospective nature of section 22 amended, meaning that those who become permanent residents before the 2005 bill and its new amendments come into effect will continue to be assessed according to the two-year residency requirement.
In the case of its initial decision to increase the number of years permanent residents are required to live in Australia from two to three years, the government argued that such an increase was necessary for security reasons. I was not privy to, and I am sure no-one else in this chamber was privy to, the security briefings that led to the decision to increase Australia’s residency requirements to three years. I am yet to be convinced that increasing the qualifying period for citizenship acts as an effective deterrent against those who may wish to harm us and to harm our society.
The government’s decision to increase the number of years permanent residents are required to live in Australia from two years to four years becomes even more tenuous as the government switches from national security concerns to its new argument that increasing the residency requirements to four years will give new migrants more time to learn about and to adapt to Australian values and, of course, to learn the English language.
It is hard to overlook some of the absurd assumptions that are operating behind this argument—for example, that it is somehow possible to quantitatively measure the amount of time it takes someone to absorb and adopt Australian values, or that Australian values are so far removed from the way of life and beliefs of other people that it takes four years to master them, or that increasing the amount of time people remain outside of the national community as permanent residents rather than Australian citizens will somehow encourage them to identify more fully with Australia. The list goes on.
The government also claims that lowering the age at which proficiency in English becomes compulsory for new citizens from 60 years to 50 years is a measure designed to further encourage integration because, without a working knowledge of English, getting by on an everyday basis becomes harder—if not impossible. Yet, at the same time that the government keeps drawing a link between proficiency in English and successful integration, it continues to slash funding to those very programs designed to help new migrants learn English. Today it has wiped away some $10.8 million in funding to those English language courses and programs traditionally available to new migrants under the Adult Migrant English Program.
To make matters worse, the government has also drastically cut core funding to migrant resource centres across Australia, which have long played a key role in helping migrants integrate into mainstream Australian society. If the government truly believed that the English language was the key to integration and if it were truly serious about promoting English language skills for new migrants, it would not be undermining the very programs, agencies and networks that are there to teach English to new migrants and to better facilitate their integration into society.
Something else is going on when we have a government that argues for the importance of English as a tool for integration yet simultaneously undermines the very premise of its argument by slashing funding to assistance programs and English language courses designed for new migrants. Something else is going on when we have a government that bases its decision to increase the residency qualifying period for citizenship on the claim that new migrants need more time to learn Australian values and the Australian way of life.
Through all of this, I believe that there is another political agenda at work. One of the overarching claims made by this government—and which this bill reinforces by making it harder for people to become Australian citizens—is that Australian citizenship is something that new Australians should value and respect because Australian citizenship is a privilege and not a right. This is the political line that the government has been feeding to the Australian public: we need to make Australian citizenship more valuable, new migrants need to be given more time to learn what the Australian way of life is all about and we need to change Australian citizenship laws accordingly.
The clear inference from all of this is that, as things presently stand, new Australian citizens, or should I say ‘ethnic Australians’, somehow do not value Australian citizenship enough and that they have failed to fully integrate and embrace ‘the Australian way of life’, a term that is now so frequently and loosely thrown around by this government that, in most instances, it is hard to know what is meant. It is not hard to conclude that, much like ‘national security’, invoking ‘the Australian way of life’ has simply become a convenient rhetorical and emotional tool used by the government to justify its extreme policies. This is the problem that the bill we are discussing today supposedly fixes.
What is missing is any evidence that such a problem actually exists in the first place. Where is the evidence confirming that those who acquire Australian citizenship do not value it enough? Where is the evidence that new migrants need more time to learn the Australian way of life? The answer is that no such evidence exists. This government has introduced a bill largely based on arguments, insinuations, warnings and conclusions that it cannot substantiate. It is making a tremendous amount of noise about fixing a problem that does not actually exist or is certainly not widespread and systemic. If you look at the last 30 years in Australia, they bear witness to a completely different reality—one in which the policy of multiculturalism has proved incredibly successful in providing a solid framework for integration and social harmony in this country. Multiculturalism has been one of Australia’s great post World War II policy success stories and, in an age as turbulent as ours, it is a model that Australia should be actively promoting to other parts of the world. Unfortunately this government is either unable or unwilling to see this.
In its attempt to convince us that migrant communities in Australia are failing to integrate and failing to adopt Australian values, this government is effectively helping to create the very problems and the very divisions that it says it wants to fix. This government plays on people’s fears, taking every opportunity it can to manipulate and exaggerate social division and social discord. That is what the media has aptly labelled ‘wedge politics’.
In the case of the bill before the House, the message that this bill sends is not simply directed at those wanting to become Australian citizens; it is also directed at mainstream Australia. The message it conveys to them is that migrants somehow do not value their Australian citizenship enough, that they take Australian citizenship for granted and that they fail to fully integrate and embrace the Australian way of life. Immigration, integration, refugees, Arabs, Muslims—these are the preferred hunting grounds of the government as it continues to stoke the flames of division, fear and suspicion in this country for its own political agenda.
In ways both subtle and often insidious, the Howard government and its cohorts in the media have sought to denigrate and effectively erase from public memory the enormous contribution that migrants have long made to Australia’s economy and to its social and cultural life under the policy of multiculturalism. The intended target behind this divisive politics is the policy of multiculturalism itself. John Howard has never liked multiculturalism—he never uses the word—and for the last 10 years this government has been slowly chipping away at many of the policies originally introduced under its name.
Making citizenship into a problem is one more example of the groundwork this government is laying for a future assault on multiculturalism. This is, I believe, where the government is heading in the lead-up to next year’s election. In the same way that John Howard used Tampa and the arrival of refugees in Australia to rally the nation against what was always an exaggerated threat, so the Prime Minister is looking to use the issue of integration and the supposed failure of multiculturalism to once again rally the nation against what has become another exaggerated threat.
This government redefines immigration as a national problem and a national crisis. It promotes a politics that continually questions Australians from different religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds over their loyalty to Australia and portrays them as an ever-present threat to some imagined and supposedly more authentic Australian way of life. The government has intentionally used such politics to drive an artificial wedge into the very heart of Australian society, pitting one section of the Australian community against another against a backdrop of fear, suspicion and mutual recrimination. This is the reality of what is being labelled Australia’s ‘cultural wars’, where the progressive gains this country has made under multiculturalism are slowly whittled away and replaced by cultural, social and political conservativism that remains inflexible, unyielding and in complete denial when it comes to Australia’s history of migration and settlement.
If you constantly harass and vilify a community and use punitive measures against them, if you constantly challenge their loyalty and relevance to Australia, then that community will become defensive. Integration occurs when people are made to feel welcome and where their differences are respected, not derided and rejected. This is the lesson that multiculturalism has taught us. We have enjoyed a successful history of integration in this country under the policy of multiculturalism, and there is no evidence that it has been a failure. I am a product and proof of this success.
We cannot risk losing the social cohesion that multiculturalism has made possible because of the acts of a small minority. We need to engage and talk to those groups we are concerned about, not further alienate and marginalise them. We need to make them feel included, not excluded. These bills and measures run the risk of being counterproductive. Malcolm Fraser is right when he argues that the government’s actions seem intended to lay the groundwork for an election fought around the issue of race. And Irene Khan, head of Amnesty International, is right when she says that multiculturalism is not a policy governments choose to support or not support; rather, it is a global reality that governments need to learn to deal with. We have done a tremendous job in dealing with multiculturalism in Australia and we ought not to do anything that jeopardises our cohesive and coherent society.
