… What a pleasant life could be had in this world by a handsome, sensible old lady of good fortune, blessed with a sound constitution and a firm will

Wrote Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm (published 1932). The heroine of the story is sponging off the welfare of others  and I learn from Wikipedia that …

each of the farm’s inhabitants has some long-festering emotional problem caused by ignorance, hatred, or fear, and the farm is badly run.

Sounds remarkably like the Australian Federal Parliament.

When I last wrote about our little constitutional difficulty the damage was largely confined to the Green Party. I happened to read one of the alt right web pages that I frequent to help reinforce my prejudices, I think it was The Australian. In the comments the overwhelming response was serve the bastards right. Lack of due diligence on the part of Green Senators, was of course no surprise, Watermelons are by definition stupid or they wouldn’t be Watermelons. No one seemed to notice that the Australia Constitution holds the contradictory provision that the Head of State will be a foreigner whilst no Australian parliamentarian can be even remotely tainted by otherness.

Since then the disease has spread a little wider and the only party not yet infected is the Australian Labor Party. Perhaps they have been more diligent in going through the motions of shedding alt citizenships.

Since my very erudite post on the issue there has been very little in the way of enlightening discussion of the underlying problem. However today at one of the ultra left wing sites I visit to counter my right wing bias, I have a chip on each shoulder, I found a good article by Michael Collet. You can read the whole article at Your ABC.

Mr Collett has gone to the trouble of visiting the debate that led to the wording in Section 44. (Or at least he has read an unspecified  “expert paper” which makes an appearance part way through the article). From him we learn that Sir John Hannah Gordon, a South Australian delegate to the Australasian Federal Convention that drafted the constitution, wanted to make a provision for naturalised British subjects but was shouted down. Significant responses being …

You cannot have two allegiances.  Patrick McMahon Glynn.

He may be minister of defence.  Sir George Turner.

It is worth remembering that this debate occurred in the latter half of the 1890’s, about a constitution that would determine the future for British subjects in Australia, between people who were in the main recent migrants to Australia and which led to the election of a parliament that contained a good proportion of people who would today fail the Section 44 provisions. Australian citizenship did not come into existence until 1949.

Notions of citizenship have changed significantly since the debate. In the 1890’s the sun never set on the British Empire, you might be a British Subject born far from Britain itself but you shared in that wonderful fellowship of belonging to the Empire. We might now think of citizenship as a commodity that is useful to us, our ticket to live somewhere, in the 1890’s British Subjects were a commodity useful to the Empire. It owned us.

There was no contradiction in disallowing the naturalised subjects a place in parliament because it didn’t rule out any of us, only the French and other foreigners.

And what of allegiance? If it’s that significant then sending a couple of your friends to the Iranian Embassy with a piece of paper saying “I renounce thee, I renounce thee, I renounce thee.” doesn’t cut it but does satisfy the High Court. Even if a second citizenship is surrendered it might still be the case that we have more of an issue with a foreign power, China for example, buying influence from our politicians.

Is it true that you cannot have two allegiances or even more? A patriotic Australian, a good catholic, a feminist and a Collingwood supporter. What if your committment to a particular religion or political ideology outranks your commitment to your country? What if the sign by the roadside says “You are in Wadawurrung country” when you thought you were in Australia? Ah, the imponderables.

As much as I enjoy anything that causes our execrable politicians discomfort I think our constitution is flawed. It seems that the bunch of migrants that put it together couldn’t envision a future when our migrants might not be British Subjects like themselves. It is an insult to those citizens by choice, like me.

I am proud of my British Heritage and I think that Australia has benefited enormously by adopting much of that heritage. We can’t blame Britain for the constitution though … they don’t have one. Well not a written one. Smart that.