Meda Release by Tony Kevin, 18 September 2006: Comments on the Commonwealth Government’s citizenship discussion paper

 (as read today on www.citizenship.gov.au/news )

 I have now read the government’s discussion paper exploring the merits of a formal citizenship test.  This paper is offensive and dishonest.

 This response is public, and will also be media-released and posted to my website www.tonykevin.com .

I will not observe the request to comment according to the paper’s numbered questions.  I do not wish to assist a government spin exercise aimed at demonstrating (as it obviously will, because most people who feel as I do will not bother or dare to reply) that statistical majorities of respondents support the government’s preferred range of answers under each question it poses. The Howard government will affect to ignore or despise the torrent of informed media criticism that its paper will undoubtedly attract, e.g. today’s excellent editorial in the Canberra Times, because in its “Animal Farm” mode of public consultation, majority views will prevail over informed views.

I expect that almost every word I write in this submission will be a minority dissident view, in the new Australia that the Howard governance machine is step-by-step fashioning in its own image. At least by ignoring the numbered questions, I can exercise my freedom not to be statistically recorded as a person whose views are in the minority, and whose views therefore may be “democratically” ignored.  

My credentials for commenting:  I am a citizen born here in 1943 (if that is relevant which it should not be), the son of a father who was a decorated ex-RAN officer (ditto), and the son of a refugee Viennese Jewish mother born in Europe who became an Australian citizen when she married my father and settled here in 1939 (ditto). I am a retired Australian Commonwealth senior public servant of 30 years career standing (1968-98), a former Australian ambassador (twice, to four countries), a university graduate (two degrees, in Engineering and Arts) and a proud member of an extended multicultural family some of whose members were born here and some overseas. . My wife and two daughters and my sister-in-law, all born in Cambodia, are now all Australian citizens. My brother-in-law, born in Cambodia and arrived here last year, is an Australian resident and intending Australian citizen, currently undergoing AMEP language training. My wife arrived here in 1999, went through the AMEP language and citizenship courses over several years, and became a citizen in 2005. I am therefore personally familiar with the courses referred to in the paper.

The paper is offensive primarily because it starts with the premise that people arriving here from overseas, having made a choice to settle here, may be less loyal citizens than people born here. There is no reason for believing that to be true. Indeed, people who have made a conscious choice to live in Australia are more likely to be loyally committed to Australia than people who passively inherited Australian citizenship as a result of being born here; for the same reason that religious converts are often more fervent than people born into a religion.

 

Herein arises the second cause of offensiveness: the inequity in asking one group of people living in Australia to pass compulsory tests of competence and belief that other Australians, those born here or born overseas to parents who are Australian citizens, do not have to.  Equity suggests, logically, going further.  Why should not people like Mr Howard and I have to pass such a test at various key points in our lives as Australian citizens? For example, before being enrolled at 18 as voters? Before being allowed to have an Australian passport? Before being eligible to join the public service? Before being allowed to marry or to have children? Maybe these will be further future steps along Mr Howard’s road towards acquiring total power over the Australian people. But fortunately, mortality can be expected to intervene at some point not too many years off now, unless the resourceful Mr Howard finds a way to overcome that barrier as well.

 

The paper at no point mentions terrorism but its genesis is clearly in the unnecessary fear and xenophobia that the Howard government has whipped up against Australian Muslims as part of its “war on terror”. The proper answer to terrorism lies in three things: policy change in respect of criminal government policies like taking part in the invasion of Iraq and giving continued support for the many and serious war crimes in the Middle East committed by Australia’s allies; effective policing,  that respects and is friendly to minority communities living in Australia; and normal law and order processes that treat terrorism as what it is, serious criminality to be dealt with under Australia’s criminal law,  rather than a national security threat.  It is precisely the hysteria that the Howard government has whipped up over what it calls “the war on terror” that has generated the fearful public climate in which this foolish and offensive paper is being put forward for serious public discussion. More and more thoughtful Australians understand that the Howard government is fuelled by the politics of fear.

 

It is offensive to put further discriminatory tests up against people who, having made the choice to live here, have been through the normal existing pre-immigration and pre-citizenship security checks,  including police record checks. It smacks of the authorities’ demands during the 16^th century Spanish Inquisition that people who had undergone forced conversions from Judaism or Islam to Christianity must then publicly eat large quantities of pork, in order to demonstrate the sincerity of their conversions.

 

I turn now to my second point: that the paper is dishonest, in at least three respects.  First, the values it proudly lists as Australian values are in fact universal values that are common to all the world’s great religions and religion-based or humanist ethical systems, as well as to all modern democratic systems. Australia did not invent and does not “own” these values. As Hugh Mackay recently pointed out in the Sydney Morning Herald – and  see http://www.safecom.org.au/mackay-kevin.htm

 

“The holy trinity of Australian values is precisely the same as that enshrined in the French republic: liberty (expressed by us as the "fair go"); equality (once called "egalitarianism" here, in those heady days when we thought it was a dream that might come true); fraternity (given an idiomatic spin here as "mateship", perhaps the PM's official favourite).”

 

In fact, and as seen in his practice as Prime Minister, Mr Howard would fail these tests, because these are not his operational values at all. Mr Howard’s primary “value”, i.e., his operational rule of conduct,  is “doing whatever it takes”,  to get away with abuses like Tampa, children overboard,  SIEV X, the imprisonment for years of asylum-seekers including women and children, the disdain for a major part of Australian public opinion that opposed Australia’s entry into the internationally illegal invasion of Iraq, the sheltering of his own and his ministers’  corruption and incompetence over the AWB scandal, the WMD lies,  the Foreign Minister’s and DFAT’s failures to pass on to the public credible travel warnings that they had from Australian intelligence agencies prior to the first Bali bombings, the continued unlawful imprisonment without trial of David Hicks in Guantanamo,  and many other examples.  There is no “fair go” and no “mateship” outside its own inner circle of “mates” in the Mafia-style government from which Australia now suffers.

 

It is also dishonest of the paper not to admit clearly that the present AMEP system of language and cultural teaching conveys all the necessary information to migrants on their way to learning English and to citizenship, about Australian society and our common political and social values. I know this because I went through the textbooks in detail with my wife as she did her AMEP courses. AMEP’s citizenship course is a good one. Immigrants welcome the opportunity it gives them to learn more about Australia in a liberal, voluntary, non-provocative way.   I congratulate those agencies responsible for the present syllabus. It offers all that is necessary, and a decent government would see no need to change the present system.  

 

The paper is also dishonest in not admitting that any person of ill will and concealed disloyalty to Australia could easily fake the whole process, just as insincerely converted Jews and Muslims in Inquisition Spain could fake an enjoyment of eating pork (and so convertees had to be tortured in later years, to make sure whether their initial conversions to Christianity had been true or false). Any person planning insincerely to attain Australian citizenship in order to become a disloyal “mole” in the public service or ADF or police forces would not be deterred by such a clumsy instrument of attempted filtering out of disloyal persons. The idea fails the laugh test. 

 

The paper is insincere in stating that migrants and refugees have access to AMEP training courses. In fact, many thousands of mostly Middle Eastern origin boat people asylum-seekers,  grudgingly now allowed to remain here after years of public activism on their behalf by thousands of Australians who care about human rights, still have no access to these courses under the terms of their indefinitely renewed.Temporary Protection Visas.  These unfortunate people are being left to rot in limbo, without English training unable to get proper work or settle properly here, yet another example of the Commonwealth government’s “fair go” and “mateship” values as expressed in its practice.

 

To conclude, this discussion paper is an unnecessary and unwanted provocation. It rides roughshod over real Australian values, and it will drive further wedges between many decent Australians and the present government, and between groups of Australians with different views on these matters. 

 

The appearance of this paper further confirms me in my view that we have at this point in our national history a government that is profoundly ignorant and insensitive , in so many ways that it is impossible for me to list them all, of what it actually means to be an Australian. This disloyal government is progressively dismantling what is best about this country.   

 

 

Tony Kevin,  Canberra,  Australia, 18 September 2006