Fighting radicalisation with Australian values

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Abbott has shifted his rhetoric to Australian values. As the offered solution to these concerns, Australian values are a more palatable way of trying to sell a government policy that discriminates against naturalised citizens, denies their basic civic rights and can render them stateless. The thing about values is that they are considered to be the 'innate' principles and moral standards held by individuals and the Australian community. Yet a call to respecting Australian values is not the answer.

Nor is re-focussing the debate on the Australian citizenship test for we must remember that this test was specifically designed to assess whether migrants and refugees understood the Judeo-Christian, Enlightened and British-inspired, core civic values known simply as Australian values.

Today, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection administers a revised test after the Australian Citizenship Test Review Committee advised in 2008 that the inclusion of values was 'flawed and discriminatory' and proposed instead a focus on the meaning behind the Australian citizenship pledge as part of the testing process. Closer scrutiny reveals, however, that in the current Australian citizenship test, the pledge is still being defined in terms of Australian values. And it is the same citizenship pledge that the Abbott government is promoting to migrants in order to become ideal Australian citizens.

If we need to re-examine the Australian citizenship test yet again, then it is clear that this costly government policy has failed in its original brief. And if many of the radicalised youth are Australian-born citizens, what use is the Australian citizenship test to them anyway?

Perhaps, instead, the Abbott government should initiate a national conversation about how to ensure that the young and disillusioned achieve a sense of belonging in our democratic nation.