Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a nation we have not fully capitalised on the benefits that can come to us from our diaspora. There are, on any given day, a million Australians living overseas. I have referred in the House previously to the Lowy Institute report entitled Diaspora by Dr Michael Fullilove and Dr Chloe Flutter. On the opening page of their report, Drs Fullilove and Flutter note the following:

… the ‘Australian diaspora’, is large and, in the main, prosperous, well educated, well connected, and well disposed to this country. It is also very mobile: rather than turning their backs on Australia once and for all, expatriates these days are more likely to move back and forward between Australia and other countries as opportunities present ... The Australian diaspora should be seen as our ‘world wide web’ of ideas and influence.

Drs Fullilove and Flutter go on to make a range of practical suggestions about how Australia can better utilise the services of our diaspora. More importantly, the report makes the very strong case that a desire to live overseas for a time does not eliminate or reduce the loyalty of that individual to Australia.

I acknowledge the work of the Southern Cross Group, which supports expatriates and promotes their cause in spreading this message. They have been very vocal about the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005. Some of the things they have called for in the bill have been incorporated; others have not. For others it falls to the Labor Party to argue for and to continue to argue for, in particular on the matters I referred to previously in relation to the revocation of citizenship under section 18 of the act and the government’s failure to remedy that for those individuals and the children of those individuals.

I would also like to pay my acknowledgement to the work of Mr Lawrence DiMech, who lives in my electorate. He is the President of Maltese Welfare New South Wales Inc., a very vocal and well-known advocate for the cause of Maltese in Australia and one who has been very vocal on this bill and on the matter of citizenship generally. I regard him as somewhat of an expert on citizenship given the amount of time he has spent working in the department of immigration on citizenship matters.

I urge the government to accept Labor’s amendments and Labor’s propositions, which have been put in good faith to allow the 2,000 to 3,000 people of Australian descent who live in Malta, and the children of those people, to reclaim their Australian citizenship, revoked under section 18 of the act. I submit to the House that this would not only be fairer but it would also be an outcome in keeping with our national interests. Generally I support the bill, with the reservations that I expressed earlier about residency requirements and the government’s failure to fully deal with the matter of Maltese expatriates. They have dealt with it partially but not fully. I also express my reservations, as other honourable members have done, about the failure to give the minister discretion to deal with people who have been imprisoned for more than five years in an overseas country and the automatic refusal of citizenship to those people.

In the vast majority of cases that would be appropriate, but, as the honourable member for Gorton pointed out in his earlier contribution, under that rule, should Nelson Mandela, for example, choose to seek to be an Australian citizen he would be rejected and nobody would have the right to overturn it. That does appear to be an anomaly which the government should rectify. The government should also rectify the other shortcomings in relation to section 18 revocations. The government should revert to its original position of only increasing the residency requirement to three years out of five, not the four years out of five as they have amended their own bill.

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