Australian citizenship: removing the welcome mat?

Germany is a country that has citizenship laws that prevent a significant proportion of their residents from becoming citizens. Turkish “guest workers” began arriving in Germany in the 1950s to help meet labour shortages associated with Germany’s post-war economic boom. There are now about two million German Turks but at the 1998 federal election only 160,000 were eligible to vote due to citizenship restrictions against German Turks.

Creating a strict English language test may create a similarly disaffected and discriminated against group of residents in Australia. This proposal would take Australia a long way back from where we have come over the last 40 years in terms of building a non-discriminatory immigration and citizenship policy.

Australia is a highly successful multicultural society built on immigration with over six million migrants since World War II. Australia has demonstrated world’s best practice in successfully integrating generations of migrants into our wider community. The current citizenship requirements of two years’ permanent residence, basic English and a public pledge to Australia and its laws and democracy have served our nation well.

The Government’s Citizenship Discussion Paper has failed to demonstrate the case for the need to overhaul Australia’s citizenship requirements. A more formalised, higher level citizenship test would discriminate against new migrants, and particularly against refugees from non-English speaking backgrounds. It would create a two-tiered society in Australia which would damage our successful immigration program and multicultural society.

Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that everyone has a right to a nationality. Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provides for the rights of minority groups to practice their language free from discrimination.

These two clauses read together would seem to indicate that a stricter English language citizenship test, that denied Australian residents who do not have high-level English skills citizenship, would be fundamentally in breach of Australia’s international human rights obligations.

Learning English should be seen as a life long journey for all Australians, not as a discriminatory barrier to citizenship. While English language acquisition and an understanding of citizenship and Australian society should be encouraged we should not introduce a discriminatory citizenship test in Australia - our nation would be the poorer for it. The welcome mat should not be removed.