Immigrants Alert: Mess With The Don, Or Else
Sun Herald
Sunday September 30, 2007
TOMORROW, by order of Parliament, the Australian Values test comes into force. Any of us can be stopped in the street by federal security officers and asked questions about what this nation stands for. Get two wrong in a row and you'll be issued with an Australian Values Order, which requires you to turn up at your local citizenship office within seven days for a re-education course. Those who breach an AVO face deportation to New Zealand (which is happy to take recalcitrant Australians to make up for all the people it has lost to our side of the Tasman).
Well no, it hasn't quite come to that yet. The test that starts tomorrow applies only to foreigners who are seeking citizenship. If someone stops you in the street and asks "In what year did Federation take place?" or "Who was the first prime minister of Australia?" they are probably part of The Chaser team. But just in case, it wouldn't hurt to look at the booklet called Becoming An Australian Citizen which the Government will hand out to people seeking to become permanent residents, and that's what this column intends to do over the next two weeks. It would be pretty embarrassing if upwardly mobile foreigners ended up knowing more about this land than those who were born here. Before I begin this process, I need to confess a bias. Early this year I published a small book called Who We Are - A Snapshot Of Australia Today. My dream was that the Government would buy thousands of copies (at a patriotic discount, of course) and hand them to desperate immigrants, and I'd retire on the profits.Instead, the Government decided to write its own book. Perhaps I should not have included a section on the Australian sense of humour (What's an Australian man's idea of foreplay? "Are you awake, love?").So as you read my analysis of the Government's book over the next two columns, allow for the possibility that I will be hyper-critical. But I could hardly be as critical as the Australian Democrats leader Lyn Allison, who described the sample citizenship test as "stupid". She said it was "ludicrous" to deny someone citizenship just because they did not know that the golden wattle was the nation's floral emblem, or that Sir Donald Bradman was a great cricketer. "This is a test designed to exclude people on the basis that they can't memorise answers to some pretty obscure questions," she said.She particularly objected to this question: "Which one of these is a responsibility of every Australian citizen? (1) Renounce their citizenship of any other country; (2) Serve in Australian diplomatic missions overseas; or (3) Join with Australians to defend Australia and its way of life, should the need arise." The correct answer is (3)."It sounds to me as if the Government wants to reintroduce military conscription," Senator Allison said. "Or perhaps it's just designed to make us feel as though we're under attack, because we all know that when we're afraid, the Government can get away with just about anything."Next week: What the Government says are "Australian values".
© 2007 Sun Herald