Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

The Democrats have long spoken about the importance of multiculturalism to the future of Australia and about the necessity for all of us in positions of leadership to promote the benefits of multiculturalism and to increase understanding and awareness in the Australian community of just how essential it is to our nation fully redeveloping its potential. The unfortunate aspect of this bill before us, the Australian Citizenship Amendment (Citizenship Testing) Bill 2007, is that it is poorly thought through. Like quite a number of other election year measures, it is based not on any evidence but simply on assertion and the creation of a perception. At best, it will be an expensive, bureaucratic waste of time. At worst, it will be divisive, destructive and discriminatory.

One of the issues identified in the report of the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs on the legislation is that questions that will make up the much discussed citizenship test will not be made public. We will have a large body of secret questions that will be used to test whether or not people have a supposed understanding of Australia’s values, culture, history and the like. The rationale is to prevent people from rote learning the questions, but to me that is simple sophistry on the part of the government and the minister. People will be given a resource booklet from which the questions will be drawn. It is ludicrous to suggest that having a resource booklet that people can look at, understand and identify is okay but that giving them the actual questions—200 of them, mind you, from which a selection will be randomly drawn—is not okay. It is simply an example, once again, of the excessive control and secrecy which this government likes to put over so many things.

This is disappointing because, as should be acknowledged, it was actually the Liberal Party, back in the days when it was somewhat more accurate to call it a liberal party, that played a key role in developing multiculturalism and cementing it into Australian society, making multiculturalism a reality. Indeed, it is an irreversible reality—Australia is a multicultural society. So it is particular disappointing that it is under a Liberal government that such a poorly thought through and jingoistic attack is now being made on multiculturalism and that the false idea is being promoted that a singular framework can be put forward within a citizenship test to measure people’s suitability to be Australian. To put something like that forward is using public policy and law to promote mythology. That, I would suggest, is not helpful for any nation. To me, it demonstrates an insecurity about Australia, about our nation, and a lack of awareness of who we are as a nation.

The strange thing with some of the notions that are put forward in the arguments in favour of a citizenship test is that somehow we have some sort of problem with migrants having not properly integrated into the Australian community that might somehow be fixed by a citizenship test. Firstly, whilst there are lots of insinuations made about there being some sort of problem with unnamed migrants having not integrated properly into the Australian community, it has never actually been named in any meaningful sense, certainly not by government ministers.

There is no credible argument or effort to demonstrate how testing people who are already permanent residents, having resided here for a minimum of four years, is somehow going to address that problem. If people fail this test they will still be permanent residents. Because they cannot take it, they cannot become eligible to apply for citizenship, and they cannot take the test until they are already permanent residents. So if there is any problem with them with regard to integration, they will already have been permanent residents here for four years. It is a ludicrous mechanism to use to deal with any alleged problem with regard to a particular migrant’s suitability to be part of the Australian community. They will already be part and parcel of the Australian community.

It suggests that particularly migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds are somehow or other part of the problem. Facts demonstrate that the groups of people most ready and most eager to become Australian citizens are those who arrive here as refugees. They are the keenest to fully commit to Australia and to fully rebuild their lives as Australians. Actually, people who come from English-speaking countries are the slowest to become citizens. According to data I got from the Parliamentary Library, we have close on one million permanent residents in Australia who are non-citizens—people who would be eligible to be citizens but have not got around to it, cannot be bothered or, for some other reason, have not taken up citizenship. Over half of those come from either the UK or New Zealand. So if we have any problem with integration of migrants into the Australian community and with people fully connecting and fully committing to Australia, then we need to focus on people from the UK and New Zealand, using the criteria that the government puts forward to justify this test.

I am not making that particular allegation; it is up to people whether they wish to reside in a country permanently without becoming citizens. That is their choice. Those people still contribute in many ways to the Australian community and, if they want to pay all their taxes and do all the other things without having the right to vote, then that is their business. But if we are using the taking up of citizenship and eligibility for citizenship as some sort of test of suitability for ‘Australianness’ and the full integration of people, then there is a proof, there is the so-called problem. Half of the pool of nearly a million permanent residents who have not taken up citizenship are people from the UK and New Zealand. It just shows the shoddy thinking and the poorly thought through rationale behind the citizenship test.

These sorts of things are particularly problematic because they show a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of citizenship. They show a misunderstanding about the nature of migration, of migrants and the reality of the modern world. It has to be said in any debate on citizenship that it was only as recently as 1948 that any such thing as an Australian citizen came into being. Even though we had been a nation since 1901, there were actually no Australian citizens until 1948. Even until the 1970s we were still seen as British subjects and Australian citizens at the same time. We still have the bizarre anomaly whereby a whole range of people who are British subjects—or were British subjects in January 1984, I think it was—were eligible to be on the electoral roll at that time and are still eligible to vote. So we have a whole bunch of people in the country who are not Australian citizens but have a right to vote yet, at the same time, we have another group of people who are Australian citizens and live in the country but are refused the right to vote because of changes made to the Electoral Act last year—people in prison. We have another group of people who are Australian citizens who are overseas and, in many cases, are denied the right to vote. We have yet another group of people who are Australian citizens who, because of changes made to the Electoral Act, are much more easily knocked off the roll without their knowledge and will find it harder to get back on. They also have impediments in the way of their right to vote.

The inconsistencies in the way this debate is presented are quite considerable. Even that very basic phrase that was used in the government’s very poorly written and quite intellectually shoddy discussion paper at the end of last year—the line that is repeated all the time, the one that sounds great on the surface: ‘citizenship is a privilege not a right’—was just a ruse. They had obviously already decided what they were going to do. It was another of those sham consultation processes that gives the work ‘consultation’ a bad name. It is a privilege—there is no doubt about that, and certainly I feel very privileged to be an Australian citizen—but it is also a right for many people. It was a right that I received by virtue of being born here to Australian citizen parents, but it is also a right solely on the basis of legislation created in 1948 and updated by the new Citizenship Act passed earlier this year. But those rights that attach to citizenship are only legislated; they are not constitutionally entrenched. They can be modified, and indeed are modified as in the examples I gave with respect to the Electoral Act.

What we really need in Australia with citizenship is not some sort of jingoistic test, some sort of Trivial Pursuit quiz, to enable some of us to single out who is an Aussie and who is not. What we need is a proper, grown-up, commonsense debate about what citizenship entails and what we need to do to get full value and an increased understanding of it, which we clearly do not have from some in government who want to put forward this kind of legislation.

As I said before, there is a fair probability that this will simply turn out to be a fairly benign, bureaucratic and expensive waste of time that will not achieve any significant positive benefit nor cause great problems. There is also no doubt that this legislation is causing a lot of anxiety amongst some sections of the migrant community. People know their history—migrants often know Australian history a lot better than natural-born Australians—and a lot of people are aware of the White Australia policy and its deliberate use of administrative procedures in a premeditated, discriminatory way. We all know—or we should all know—that arbitrary language tests were used in the past as a deliberate screening mechanism to keep out people from particular regions or individuals we decided we did not want. People know about that history, and that is why they are concerned that these sorts of tests could be used in that sort of way in the future. I am not saying that that is the intent of the government here but, as always, when we pass legislation we have to look at not just how it might be used tomorrow but how it might be used in five or 10 years time. Putting forward a bunch of secret questions as a way of determining who can be a citizen and who cannot is a practice that frankly does not make me feel particularly comfortable. That reality should be linked to the other existing reality of the extreme powers given to the minister under our Migration Act.

Another thing that many migrants know, and they know it much more clearly and starkly than they did a month or so ago, is that anybody residing in this country—it does not matter if they have lived here for decades or for all but a few weeks—who is not a citizen is always at risk of having their residency right cancelled and being deported. It is a right that any country has, of course, to determine whether or not people who are not citizens—aliens, to use to old jargon—can reside. But the problem is that the Migration Act allows that right of the government of the day to be exercised in an extreme, capricious, potentially politically motivated and extraordinarily unjust way. So every one of those more than a million people who are resident in Australia—in fact, it would be close to 1½ million once you count all the temporary residents—is potentially at risk of having their visa cancelled on the most flimsy of pretexts under some of the extreme powers and the wide-ranging discretions that the migration minister has.

When you combine the potential for an unfair blockage through a secret citizenship test with extreme powers under the Migration Act, for visa cancellations without proper rights of review or appeal, then you get an increased concern and apprehension amongst some people in the wider community. Reducing people’s rights, increasing the power of government over the lives of people and reducing the opportunities for scrutiny of the mechanisms that governments use for merits review and independent appeals have a cumulative effect that reduces people’s rights and increases the risks of injustice, whether arbitrary or deliberately malicious, and is the sort of thing we need to guard against. By putting forward these things, I am not alleging a deliberate, malicious hidden agenda—I think the agenda is pretty obvious here: it is just an election year stunt. The test is not particularly aimed at trying to target particular groups in the community, at least in my view. As I said before, we have to look at how something can be used down the track rather than how it might be used tomorrow.

The other reality of this test—particularly if the questions are kept secret, but even if they are not—is a very real probability that there will be a higher benchmark for migrants who wish to become Australian citizens versus those of us who are Australian born and get citizenship as a legal right, at least as the law stands at the moment. There is a very real prospect that people who are required to pass the citizenship test will have a much better understanding and knowledge of Australian society, history, rules et cetera than many Australian-born people. That is one of the reasons why the Democrats recommend that any test that is put forward for migrants to take should first be tested on a representative sample of existing citizens and Australian-born citizens. We need to test the test to make sure that the vast majority of Australians can pass it. If you are requiring migrants to pass a test that many Australian-born people cannot pass, then it is discriminatory and unfair. Apart from anything else, it would highlight the ludicrousness of the whole concept. It is important to ensure that the test is properly tested on people to make sure that it is something that most Australians can pass. If the government is serious about ensuring that people who migrate to this country—who seek to settle here and become citizens—are able to demonstrate some understanding and ability to integrate with Australia via the taking of a test, then I do not see why it would be unreasonable to expect that the test be also tested on Australian-born people.

I note the Senate committee report into the legislation included a unanimous recommendation from the committee that the proposed citizenship test questions be tabled in the parliament, and it is one that I support. As I understand it, it was not supported by the government in the lower house. I urge the government to reconsider this recommendation when we get to the committee stage of this debate in the Senate. I also draw the attention of the Senate and of anyone else who is following this debate in the wider community to the dissenting report that I put forward to the legislation, which contains the formal response that the Democrats put forward to the government’s discussion paper, towards the end of last year, on the merits of introducing a formal citizenship test. It outlines some of the issues that we in the Democrats believe need to be given much better consideration.

If we are going to have a genuine debate about increasing the understanding and value of citizenship and the role that citizenship can play, it is time that we recognised that citizenship is not just about some sort of jingoistic loyalty such as cheering on your football club. There is nothing wrong with cheering on your football club, but citizenship is a much deeper and more complex concept than that. We in Australia live in an era in which many people are dual citizens and in some cases are citizens of more than two countries. In those sorts of circumstances, this narrow nationalistic atmospheric that some in the government like to put forward when promoting and debating these sorts of issues simply does not fit. It does not work in a modern world and it should not work in a modern world. Multiculturalism is something that we should be celebrating and promoting as a positive. The Liberal Party in a previous era played a positive role in doing that. The Democrats continue to do that today. We would urge those within the government who still recognise that history—and I know that Senator Brandis is one of them, because I have heard him speak quite eloquently on that in the past—to continue to make those efforts. (Time expired)