Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased today to speak on the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005. It has been my privilege since I have been in this parliament to be the Chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Migration and also the chair of the government members’ committee on migration, multicultural and Indigenous affairs, so I have a good deal of interest in this area of government policy.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

As I said, I am very pleased to speak on this citizenship bill because it gives me the opportunity to talk about Australian citizenship. Given my strong interest in migration, I certainly want to put a number of things on the record.

As we know, Australia is a country that has been built on migration—orderly migration. I go, as many members and senators do, to lots of citizenship ceremonies in my electorate. We hear many and varied stories of why people migrate to Australia and how they migrate to Australia and about all the nuances that come with migration. We hear many people wax lyrical at the beginning of their speeches about the first migrants to Australia, not forgetting, of course, the initial migration waves of Aboriginals many years ago. However, in the debate that has ensued in this country in recent times about people arriving by boat, it is always quite humorous at citizenship ceremonies to reflect on the fact that people who arrived by boat in the first instance were very unwilling participants as they arrived in convict ships et cetera.

However, since then Australia’s migration has been built largely on orderly migration, but it was quite unregulated in the first instance. As we know, largely the big migration pulls to this country after the initial free settlement were due to gold rushes. We know that this happened in Victoria, in Ballarat and regions like that. Of course, in Kalgoorlie there were enormous ramifications to the population of the Western Australian state due to the migration to the goldfields, and it had a very large influence on the federation. Most Western Australians at the turn of the century did not want to be part of the rest of Australia. However, the goldfields miners—who in some respects outnumbered the rest of the population of Western Australia—were ‘t’othersiders’, as they were called. They had come from the eastern states, even though they were probably new migrants themselves, and saw great benefits in Australia being one nation and one country and they voted eventually, largely from the goldfields, for Australia to join the federation.

I digress to point out that there have been many migration waves to this country, as there have been many migration waves throughout the rest of the world. I was privileged to be in New York some years ago and visited Ellis Island, which is an absolute eye-opener when you realise that five million postwar migrants went through that transitional facility on Ellis Island and have built the America that we know today, largely on what you would generally call unregulated migration. The only real check that I saw as I went through the museum there was that, if you had palsy or very obvious body defects, they put you on a ship and sent you home. Other than that, if your teeth were sound and you looked pretty healthy, you were allowed in. Migrants then dispersed throughout the United States. So the world has been made up of migration flows all over the place.

However, Australia is seen as a prime destination for migration—and why not? Albeit that we have suffered extremes of flood, drought, fire and famine in our history, Australia is still the land of plenty and still the land of opportunity. There is an enormous number of people who wish to come and take the benefits of this country, as they do. They want a place to bring their families up. Australia is still an opportunity. As I said, when you go to the citizenship ceremonies in the local councils, you see people from places like Zimbabwe, where people, both black and white, are oppressed. They want to come to Australia because they see Australia as an opportunity of bringing their children up and giving them a way of life that you can rarely get in any other part of the world. You do not have to be rich; you do not have to be privileged; you just have to be motivated enough to work in this country, and there is a good chance you will make it if you do that.

On the basis of those few observations, I would like to mention that the purpose of this citizenship bill is to replace the Australian Citizenship Act 1948. The related bill puts into place the transitional and consequential amendments necessary for the introduction of this citizenship bill. The legislation does a number of things. In referring to the 1948 act, it needs to be pointed out that in 57 years this 1948 act has been amended 36 times. Some of them have been minor amendments and some have been quite major amendments. For example, there have been amendments about referring to husbands and wives, about requirements for residents who might be deemed aliens and about residency requirements in time parameters of two years for aliens. There have also been amendments about the fact that we deemed that, if you became an Australian citizen, you were not really a British citizen. We know that that is a hangover from our settlement as a British colony; the residency requirements were such that you ceased to be a British subject.

One of the more significant amendments in recent times concerned section 44 of the Constitution. On my first foray through this parliament in 1996, as the member for Swan, I was pleased to sit on the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. I was surprised to be on the committee given that I had no legal background, but the chair at that time, one Kevin Andrews, told me that it was probably a benefit not to have any preconceived legal ability. I found some of the inquiries quite interesting. One of the inquiries we did was into section 44 of the Constitution. We know that people in this country who had not renounced their citizenship were forbidden to do several things. One example concerned the member for Lindsay, Jackie Kelly. She had not renounced her New Zealand citizenship; as a result, she was required to go to another election, which she duly won—and we are very proud of the fact she did.

One of the amendments that came in in 2002 was that you could retain dual citizenship. Dual citizenship has been quite a benefit to many people because it allows you to retain the citizenship of the country of your origin as well as gaining Australian citizenship. This has not been popular with everyone. I have had people in my electorate say to me, ‘Look, you are either one thing or another.’ In recent times it caused a fair bit of public comment when the war in Lebanon revealed that 60,000-odd people who have Australian citizenship live in Lebanon. When the war between Hezbollah and Israel blew up in recent months, many Lebanese with Australian citizenship demanded that the Australian government remove them from Lebanon, which the government did to the best of its ability. I suppose one of the benefits of having dual citizenship is that you can go back and live in a country of your choice while still retaining all the benefits of Australian citizenship. As I said, it is a benefit to some, but it is an area of contention for others.

It does make it easier for many people. When I go to citizenship ceremonies, I find that there are many and varied reasons why people have decided to become Australian citizens. With some people, particularly refugees or asylum seekers who are seeking Australian citizenship, as soon as the two-year permanent residency requirement is up and they can apply for Australian citizenship, they do. With people of Asian or East Asian origin in particular, as soon as they qualify to be able to apply for Australian citizenship, quite often they do; they cherish the fact that they can become a citizen of this country.

However, on the other side of the coin, I personally get annoyed with people who decide that they do not ever want to become an Australian citizen. That is their choice. I do not criticise their choice, but from a personal point of view I would like to think that people who find Australia home and gain an economic benefit for themselves and their families might make a commitment.

As an aside, I was quite cross the other day when I was given a lift in a car to the airport. The lady who was driving me had retained her New Zealand citizenship; she said that she had no intention of ever becoming an Australian citizen because she did not see any benefit in it. I explained to her that I have had people come to my electorate office about this. In one case this involved a lady of New Zealand origin whose spouse had died. I explained that, unless she hurried up and became an Australian citizen, some entitlements—like pensions and the ability for people who might want to look after her to receive carer payments—might not flow to her. She duly went out and sought Australian citizenship.

So it is not just the fact that it is something nice to have; there are some benefits that come with it. People always snigger when they are told they cannot run for the Australian parliament unless they become a citizen of Australia, but that is the ultimate aspiration in many respects. Why not represent the people of the country in which you choose to live? I am very proud to be a member of this House, and I am sure that the people and their children who come here would be of a similar view.

This bill takes into account a number of things, and one of them is that people applying for Australian citizenship—not those who are already in the queue for permanent residency; they are quarantined or ‘grandfathered’, which is probably one of the better terms—will now have to wait for four years. I do not see a problem with that, because it gives a number of opportunities for people waiting in the queue. It gives them an opportunity to get their affairs in order.

In a four- to five-year period people come and go from the country, and they may stay overseas for long periods, up to 12 months, but we are saying now that in the last 12 months before you become an Australian citizen you cannot be out of the country for more than three months. I think this is only fair. To give an example as to why, I have been helping some people from the Ukraine to come to Australia. The wife is here with her two children, and that is fine, but the husband has found that it is easier to make money elsewhere in the world. As a result, he is finding it difficult to spend much time in Australia. You cannot have it both ways—you have to commit yourself to Australia, and that requires you to stay here for some time rather than just warehousing your family here. This is one of the things that this bill addresses. You cannot just warehouse your family in a safe haven like Australia and then decide that you are going to be an international businessman and not invest or spend any time in Australia. I think that requirement is very good.

The other requirement is that you have a proficient level of English. Some people see this as contentious; I do not. I will give you an example I was confronted with as a councillor for the city of Belmont. At a citizenship ceremony, the mayor was to confer citizenship on a lady, and he asked her to repeat the citizenship pledge. Firstly, she did not even know what the mayor was talking about; and, secondly, she could not even repeat it. The mayor was pretty determined not to give her citizenship, but the person from the Australian Electoral Office and other officers came up to him and said: ‘You can’t do that. You have to bestow citizenship on this lady whether she can speak English or not.’

That is confronting for many Australians, because a number of people came to Australia under the family reunion program. In fact, the previous government had a far greater focus on family reunion than does this government. But we know that our priorities are to bring a greater skills demographic to this country to enable a greater contribution. The family reunion system was rorted somewhat in that, if you bought somebody from an ageing demographic into the country, the chances of their speaking English was pretty remote and their chances of getting a job without any English were almost next to nothing.

The report of a recent inquiry into skilled migration by the Joint Standing Committee on Migration clearly pointed out that those who come to Australia without sufficient English proficiency were multiples of disadvantage behind those who speak English. Inasmuch as the Australian government provides somewhere around 500 hours of free tuition to learn English, many people do not take this up.

We can understand the refugee and humanitarian components. We bring something like 12,000 to 14,000 people to Australia under the refugee program. Many of them use the opportunity to learn English because they know how important it is to get a job, but for somebody who wishes to come to Australia, to make a contribution and to use the benefits of being an Australian citizen, having proficiency in English is something that I think is quite understandable. We are not saying that they have to arrive here speaking fluent English, but they must make an effort within that two-year period—now the four-year period—to learn English to demonstrate their bona fides and commitment to this country.

One of the other important aspects of this bill is that it strengthens the ability to secure personal identifiers. Very seldom do we deport anybody—and it is obviously very difficult to deport anybody who has gained Australian citizenship—but one of things that this bill does allow is some discretion with the fact that if people have gained citizenship by fraud—and I do not think anybody could question this—then the chance of you staying here should be reduced. I had a case of this recently through my electorate office where the person concerned, without giving any more details other than saying that they were of Indian origin, had actually borrowed the qualifications of a cousin to come to Australia under a certain subclass of visa. Borrowing the qualifications and then touting them as their own as a skilled migrant in order to stay here is obviously fraudulent and should not be tolerated. You are setting the agenda of the sort of person you are in that you came here by dishonest means and, if that is your modus operandi, who is to say you are not going to continue in that vein of life in trying to attract the rest of your family here on that basis? Personal identifiers are obviously something that we want to use to maintain and protect the integrity of the Australian citizenship process.

This bill explicitly provides that the minister must be satisfied of the applicant’s identity before an application can be approved. Personal identifiers—namely photographs and signatures—are already collected, stored and used. The new personal identifier division provides a legislative framework for the management of those identifiers which can be responded to for future decisions. Obviously technological developments are being used for proof of identity. One of the great things about the Australian migration system is its integrity. Unlike the British, for example, we know who comes into this country and when they leave. The Brits would give their right arm to be able to tell who comes and goes out of their country. They do not have the same strong database and the ability to check that Australia has, which has ramifications in places like Britain, France and many other European countries.

I will finish by saying that this citizenship bill addresses a number of anomalies that have been amended over a number of years. I maintain the fact that Australian citizenship is a privilege bestowed on those who want to make a better life for themselves and their families and should be enshrined and protected as we are doing today in the Main Committee.

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