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

I move Democrats amendment (3) on sheet 5326, as revised:

(3)    Schedule 1, item 5, page 4, (after line 33), insert:

     (1A)    Prior to ministerial approval, the proposed test questions are to be trialled by the Australian Electoral Commission on a demographically representative sample group of Australian-born citizens to determine the suitability of the test questions.

This amendment is important in order to ensure that we do not get a two-tiered standard attached to Australian citizenship. There is a real potential that migrants who have to undertake this test to become a citizen will in effect have to know more about Australian values, history and geography and the Australian system of government et cetera than Australian-born citizens, who get citizenship as of right under law without having to undergo a test.

That point should be emphasised, because we had the repeated mantra coming from some within the government that citizenship is a privilege, not a right. It certainly is a privilege, but it is also a right. I am an Australian citizen by right. It was my right under law, being born in Australia of Australian citizen parents. There are millions of Australians who are citizens as of right. It is a privilege as well, but it is certainly not something that we should present as not being a right.

There is also a risk here, attached to these tests—particularly given the government’s continuing insistence that the questions not be tabled in the parliament and not be made public—that those who have to do this test to become citizens, to then under law obtain the right to citizenship with all of the privileges and responsibilities that attach to it, may be required to have a greater understanding of Australia than another group of citizens. I think that is an inequality that we should seek to avoid as much as is possible.

The simple aim of this amendment is to ensure that, in effect, we test the test to make sure that the vast majority of Australian-born Australian citizens will be able to pass it. This is of course a matter of continuing commentary, some of it fairly light-hearted, as to how well or otherwise many so-called average Australians would go in passing some of the questions on the test. Frankly, I think that is one of the reasons why the government wants to insist on the questions remaining secret. There is a suggestion that the questions have to remain secret because otherwise people would be able to cram for the test.

If you are going to get a random sampling of 20 questions out of a total pool of 200 questions and you manage to learn them all by rote sufficiently that you can pass the test, then, frankly, isn’t that the point—that we want people to understand all these things? If the way that some people understand it is by rote learning hundreds of questions then good luck to them. As has already been indicated, the questions will be derived from a booklet—similar, I presume, to the draft booklet Becoming an Australian citizen, which has already been released. Frankly, I think the difference between people cramming, if you like, for their test by reading a booklet as opposed to reading hundreds of questions is an artificial distinction. It really does not help to allay some of the apprehensions amongst some of the migrant communities around Australia that there is some other agenda here when there is a continuing insistence on the questions not being made public and not being tabled.

I again make the point that the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs itself did recommend that the proposed citizenship test questions be tabled in parliament. That was recommendation 2 of the entire Senate committee. To ignore that is not a helpful move by the government and suggests to me that, firstly, it is poorly thought-through policy and, secondly, it is basically a political stunt. It might be a harmless political stunt, but I for one and the Democrats believe that Australian citizenship is too important to be reduced to a matter for political stunts.

It is also important to not just test the test on Australians but enable Australians to test the adequacy of the questions. We all know in this place just how contentious the simple question is about who Australia’s head of state is or who the head of the Australian government is. That is a sample question that the government has put forward as a possible question in the draft booklet. That simple question—’Who is the head of the Australian government?’—is open to interpretation. Others, like whether or not Australian citizens are required to enrol on the electoral register, have qualifications and exemptions—such as whether it applies to Australian citizens residing overseas—that are not specifically detailed in the question. Those sorts of things do not indicate a problem with our laws; they simply indicate the fact that the obligations, responsibilities, opportunities and all of the other things that are attached to citizenship are not as simplistic and narrow as they are portrayed by the government in putting forward this debate.

Even some of the ideas and ideals that are put forward in the government’s draft booklet, including those about Australian values, beg the question of how serious we are about putting forward these things and seek to prescribe what Australian values are in an officially government ordained book, which is then used as the basis for government ordained questions at the whim of the minister of the day, including in any future government. Quite frankly, this government and this parliament have, from time to time, passed laws that have seriously breached some of the things that are detailed here as important values in modern Australia.

It is always up to the parliament to pass whatever laws it likes, particularly in a country like ours where we do not have basic rights and freedoms entrenched in the Constitution. So the sorts of things detailed in the booklet are things that, in many cases, can be breached at any stage by virtue of this parliament passing a law to make it happen. To some extent that is a wider debate, but to some extent it is not because we are talking about something as fundamental as Australian citizenship. We are putting forward to prospective new citizens the suggestion that these values, these freedoms and these particular characteristics of Australia are so fundamental and so intrinsic that you need to get the right answer in a test to become a citizen. They send a message that these values are locked in stone—that they are intrinsic values that we do not waver from as a nation and that if you become an Australian citizen you have a right to expect them to be attached to that citizenship.

The simple fact is that in many cases that is not so. In many cases those freedoms, values and rights are able to be removed simply by this parliament passing a law making it happen, and we do that all the time. That is a wider debate and I will not go into a bill of rights except to say that it reinforces just how misleading so many of the messages underlying this debate are. We are passing on those misleading messages to the entire Australian community and to new Australians. To me, it shows how muddle-headed and puerilely politicised this process is.

One way of reducing the potential for puerile politicisation is to ensure that the test is able to be tested, as this amendment seeks to do. I believe it would be very much in this parliament’s interest and would maintain some degree of integrity in the central importance of citizenship to accept this amendment so as to reduce the potential for any future government to more seriously pervert the test down the track and enable it to be used more explicitly as an exclusionary device, because that potential is undoubtedly there. We know, and many migrants know—but many Australian-born Australians do not know—about Australia’s history of using our migration laws in discriminatory ways to specifically exclude people. I am not accusing this government, at this stage, of specifically putting forward this citizenship test to that end, but I am saying that the potential is there for it to be used to that end in the future, particularly given how grievous and unjust the discriminatory abuses have been in the past and, I would argue, how damaging they have been to Australia’s reputation internationally as well as to our own awareness about social cohesion and integration. We need to make absolutely crystal clear that any such tests are not able to be used in that way in the future. This would be one way. It is not a pure, total safeguard but it would be one safeguard that would minimise the chances of that happening.