The Australian government has just introduced a new law to
strip Australian citizenship from dual nationals who fight with Australia's
enemies - particularly terrorist organisations.
This is not really blog worthy except that the law operates
automatically. If you fight with one of Australia’s enemies, you are, by that
act, renouncing your Australian citizenship. No involvement by the courts. No
process of investigation or finding of guilt. It’s just happens by magic.
No-one even has to tell you that it’s happened.
Which leads to some very strange possibilities.
How do you know that it has happened? Sure, if you know
you’ve joined IS and you’re bombing police stations in Turkish cities then it’s
fairly obvious. What if you’re in a bar fight in a Turkish city and the bloke
who has taken up your cause is an IS militant on his night off? Do you remain
an Australian if you and he glass a couple of the nastier thugs who are
currently trying to knock you into the middle of next week? What about aiding
and abetting? Does one lose a taste for Vegemite simply because the old lady
you helped across the street in Baghdad turned out to be on her way to meet
Allah and claim her virgins by way of a support stocking made of Semtex?
What if you don’t realise that you’ve given up on the
green-and-gold and returned home to the country. Say you’re admitted to
hospital. As a citizen, you’re entitled to be treated free on presentation of
your Medicare card. But you’re not. Because you weren’t even a citizen at the
time you were brought in, you didn’t have a Medicare card and, ipso facto, you
weren’t admitted. Therefore, you don’t exist on the hospital records and you
are not currently occupying a valuable hospital bed that is reserved for fair
dinkum Aussies. Any conversations you had with the nurses didn’t happen, any
medicines you received weren’t dispensed and the surgeon is obliged to
re-insert any wobbly bits of you that may have been surgically excised. The net
effect of all of this on the paperwork – and the subsequent internal
investigation to find all the missing supplies – will drive the hospital
administrator into the psych ward but that’s just the kind of price you have to
pay for defending the homeland.
There is also the vexed issue of trees and forests. If one’s
citizenship fails in the Middle East and no one but you is there to see it, has
one in fact lost one’s citizenship? As far as you’re concerned, you know you’re
not a citizen because of your dastardly deeds. From other people’s point of
view, you’re still a citizen because you haven’t told them otherwise. There is
also the possibility that someone, a Minister for example, has heard a rumour
that you might have given up the citizenship ghost but can’t confirm it. All
this leads to a very Schrodinger kind of situation where you could be both a
citizen and a non-citizen at the same time. The Australian government should be
admired, I think, for taking bold strides into this area of quantum
legislation.
Then there are elections. Some of you might remember how
close the Al Gore / George W presidential election was. It came down to how
punched a punched card had to be if a punch card could be punched. That’s
nothing compared to the unresolved quantum uncertainties that could follow a
very tight election result. If allegations were made that a given number of
voters in key seats were, in fact, non-citizens at the time they voted and not,
as they claimed, real, breathing, pie-eating Aussies, then what does that do to
the election result? If the people that voted for a Prime Minister may or may
not be real then the government is probably going to be just as surreal;
flickering in and out of existence as the nature of the citizenship of the key
voters is wrangled by one side and the other.
Law enforcement is also affected. A house owned by an
Australian is Australian soil and the writ of law runs there. What if the owner
was an Australian but ceased to be one and was now only a foreign national?
Does the house they owned become an extension of their country’s embassy? Can
they deny entrance to the police who are coming to arrest them for the
terrorist offences they allegedly committed because the police have no
jurisdiction in a foreign country? I imagine that after the kind of in-camera
session required to sort that one out, the barristers might retire from the bar
and adjourn to an adjoining bar to get seriously rat-faced and discuss
theoretical physics or string theory – anything that makes more sense than this
bizarre piece of legislation.
No comments:
Post a Comment