Politics watchers know this to be true: much about national politics is perplexing. Furrowed brows are a given.
Normally, national security doesn’t fall into the perplexing camp. More often than not, the trajectory of the debate is entirely straightforward, entirely lacking subtlety, nuance, or shades of grey.
But that doesn’t mean mystery is entirely absent. Of all the national security crackdowns pursued in Canberra over the past 12 months – the great citizenship crackdown has, perhaps, been the most mysterious crackdown of all.
Best we begin at the beginning. In January 2014, the then immigration minister Scott Morrison told his favourite Sydney radio host, Ray Hadley, the government was “right now” examining strengthening the powers of the government to remove the Australian citizenship rights of dual nationals fighting in the Middle East.
Morrison signalled the government was looking to emulate Britain’s more wide-ranging powers under the Citizenship Act. In the UK, the home secretary can strip dual nationals of their British citizenship if it has been obtained fraudulently (a power similar to Australia), or if the citizenship is not in the public interest (a more wide-ranging power, which would be a very handy power to have in your back pocket).
A week or so after Morrison’s “right now” heads up for Ray, the attorney general, George Brandis, declined to confirm the existence of any such internal deliberations – discretion evidently being the better part of valour.
Then we need to roll forward a whole 13 months, to February 2015. Tony Abbott makes a special trip to AFP headquarters in order to deliver a national security speech, flagging (excuse the dreadful pun, there were actually six flags at the event) amendments to the Citizenship Act allowing the government to revoke or suspend the Australian citizenship of dual nationals.
The prime minister said he was also considering “suspending some of the privileges of citizenship” such as “restricting the ability to leave or return to Australia, and access to consular services overseas, as well as access to welfare payments” – for individuals involved in terrorism who held only Australian citizenship.
Then radio silence again, more or less, until May 2015.
Now, over the past week or so, we have public sorties from Dan Tehan, the chairman of joint parliamentary committee on intelligence and security, and the current immigration minister, Peter Dutton, who on Thursday told the Australian newspaper that second-generation Australians involved in terrorism also faced the prospect of being denuded of their citizenship, along with dual nationals.
We can conclude from all the current advertising that something significant on citizenship is about to arrive with a sonic boom on the parliamentary agenda – most likely next week, when the circus returns.
But before we all conclude this is an entirely marvellous development because dreadful people have it coming, there are a couple of reasonable and pertinent questions to ask at this juncture.
The first question is what, exactly, is coming? (We get the political brush strokes, they are entirely clear, it’s fine-grained detail that’s lacking, and ultimately it’s the detail that matters.)
And the second question is why on earth, if this proposal is fundamental to the federal government’s entirely legitimate and proper desire to protect Australians from the threat of terrorism or domestic outbreaks of violent extremism, has it taken so damn long?
When it comes to the “what”, we’ll have to wait and see, but the current word is the government will deal with dual nationals first before moving to more complicated considerations, like whether we can or should enact a more wide-ranging revocation power, like the Brits have.
The answer to “why has this taken so long” is multifactorial. It’s partly because the government prioritised its other tranches of national security reform, and to be perfectly frank, the internal decision-making rituals and processes in this government are sometimes quite hard to fathom.
It’s partly because of old-fashioned kite flying. In politics, it’s common to float various proposals well in advance in order to test how bad any community backlash might be. It’s not a foolproof strategy but it can help you understand where the limits are. I’d put citizenship firmly in the kite flying category.
The government’s main problem, though, the substantive challenge, is the many complications associated with going there. Revoking people’s citizenship is no small thing, and in terms of a principle, it should be no small thing. Weakening citizenship protections is a significant public policy step for any government to take, because it fundamentally rebalances the power relationship between the state and the individual. The thin edge of the wedge here is pretty obvious if you think about it for a minute or so.
It’s also pretty complicated to achieve. It’s complicated because in the mid-1970s, when Australia signed on to the Convention of the Reduction of Statelessness, we agreed not to deprive people of their nationality if such a deprivation would render a person stateless. (Other countries sought some caveats to their obligations under the convention. Australia did not, giving us less room to move now.)
In addition to the statelessness problem, the current law, as Peter Hughes – a former senior official in the immigration department – put it in a blog post published by the Lowy Institute late last year “sets a high bar for revocation”. Putting this more simply, there are only highly limited circumstances in which citizenship can be revoked. You don’t have to move too far before you find yourself in all kinds of legal complexity.
So where does our companionable citizenship ramble end? It will be worth assessing the fine print closely when this idea finally moves to reality. It will also be interesting to see what Labor does: keep the national security bipartisanship tight and tidy, or whether there is any scope for product differentiation.
