The " Citizenship " Issue !

Section forty-four of the Australian Constitution is quite clear.  To be legally eligible to stand and win a seat in the Federal parliament an Australian must not hold citizenship of any other country. That does not mean that they must never have had such citizenship.  It does mean that when nominations are called for an election, those intending to stand must have taken legal steps to revoke and cancel such citizenship to meet that obligation.

The scramble for political advantage has all the political parties trying to determine if any of their members are in breach of this requirement while at the same time taking different stances on a proposal for an external probe to become mandatory.   There is a fear that we may have more undiscovered illegals sitting in the House of Representatives and in the Senate and if they are discovered and forced to stand down that could totally shift the power balance.

The one thing that is common in those breaching this section of the Constitution is their belief that they were not held to be citizens of another country, and in many cases they were born here in Australia and that citizenship was automatically bestowed on them by the rule of another country as it is applied to the ancestry of their parents or even grandparents.  The rules of how this applies differs from country to country and can change as the governments of each of those countries change their outlook.   We probably have a bigger problem than we at first imagined.

We are a multicultural country which has accepted settlers from just about every country in the know world.  Many came here from the chaos of Europe after the second world war ended and many more have arrived from the civil wars that have wracked many regimes in Asia and Africa.  It was common for new arrivals to be " stateless " and now their children are adults they maybe totally unaware of what citizenship claims that automatically apply to their forbears backgrounds.

There are some regimes that totally refuse to relinquish any claim to new citizenship when even a tenuous and remote link remains with that original country.  We are already seeing many instances where the birth - or even just the residence - of a family member is sufficient for citizenship to become a right to the sons and daughters of that person wherever they live.   Sometimes, that right to claim citizenship even extends to grandchildren, and sometimes the right is even conferred on soldiers of another nation who may have served a long term garrison duty in a foreign land.

There may be many people with a legitimate claim to Australian citizenship who have every right to stand and win a seat in the Australian parliament who may later find that the laws of another country confer an obligation that extinguishes that right.  We can only revoke the citizenship of another country- if we are aware that such an obligation actually exists,

Perhaps the answer is to empower such a citizenship cancellation to be enshrined in Australian law by the gazetting of a public notice in the form of a statutory declaration by any member nominating to contest an Australian election that they reject and cancel any citizenship rights that may apply to them anywhere in the world.  All who intend to contest such elections would be wise to take that action as a matter of course.

Otherwise, this matter of citizenship remains a whim of whatever other country and whatever citizenship laws they happen to put in place.   Such a statutory cancellation should then put that Section forty-four obligation to rest !