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[Edmus]

Facebook groups and memepages are held to a really low standards...
With two clicks you can go from popular spicy memes 'memes for the urban gentleman' w/ ~120,000 likes, to neonazi websites. The intermediary is a less popular pseudo-ironic memepage 'Abhorrent Australian Memes'. Lots of xposts between the two.
No one gives a fuck. 

[Descan]

I mean, to be fair, saying "#virtuesignalling" means it's not really all that disingenuous. She's rather signalling rather hard her virtue* about not falling for virtue signalling!

*read: Being a garbage.

[Reudh]

I mean, to be fair, saying "#virtuesignalling" means it's not really all that disingenuous. She's rather signalling rather hard her virtue* about not falling for virtue signalling!

*read: Being a garbage.

She didn't actually hashtag #virtuesignalling, she just put a shitload of popular hashtags to show that she was virtue signalling about it while actually opposing it herself.

[Descan]

well that wasn't very clear :v

[Reelya]

I read an article outlining how crazy the policitian's citizenship scandal is.

When the Australian constitution was written, there was no such thing as Australian citizenship. Everyone was considered citizens of the British Empire. Therefore, when the constitution says federal MP's can't be subjects of a foreign power, they meant powers other than the British. Also, dual citizenship didn't exist back then: you were either British or you weren't, and if you were British, you were eligible to run in Australian elections, because it was part of the Empire. The constitution doesn't cover dual citizens because that wasn't a thing back then.

However, with the fall of the British Empire, people lost British citizenship and the idea of e.g. Australian citizenship within the British Commonwealth was born. Then much later the concept of dual citizenship came in:

https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/0910/AustCitizenship#_Toc224109068

In 2000, the Australian Citizenship Council released its report, Australian Citizenship for a New Century which examined both the concept of citizenship and recommended changes to modernise citizenship law. One of the key recommendations of this report was for Section 17 of the Australian Citizenship Act 1948 to be repealed so that Australians would not lose their citizenship upon the acquisition of another country’s citizenship. This had been a contentious aspect of the law for many years and the subject of much lobbying, particularly from the expatriate community.[58] As part of its response to this report, the Government made major amendments to the Citizenship Act in 2002 including the introduction of dual nationality for Australian citizens and the extension of citizenship by descent provisions for children born overseas to an Australian citizen so that they were able to register as an Australian up until the age of 25.

And now, the supreme court in Australia is re-interpreting the passage written in 1901 to mean that people who are Australian citizens but have been retroactively granted dual citizenship with another British empire state (UK, NZ, Canada etc - these are most of the "outed" politicians) aren't eligible because the constitution doesn't want them to run. The whole situation is in fact laughable because it's mostly excluding the very people the constitution's writers intended the passage to include.

[smjjames]

Also, British empire here includes a scattering of African states, US (though we split early), India, Pakistan (?)(if you want to get technical here, since Pakistan is in the part of India that existed when it was a British colony), and a few others.

So, now it's a real hodgepodge, then the argument becomes, should we bar some or allow all dual citizenships because it doesn't seem fair to selectively choose a bunch and disallow others.

Here in the US, the only time we have a legal barrier as far as citizenship is for the Presidency and possibly the VP. For any other position, it's possible to make a big deal out of it, but there's no legal barrier.

[Edmus]

I think it's better they take the Aus-only route rather than prejudice in favour of Commonwealth nations. I can't see a referendum changing it, the no argument has a very easy (and fairly legitimate) "Do you want a Chinese citizen as your Prime Minister!?" scare campaign.

[Jimmy]

Damnit! Wish you'd posted that link before Friday, Reelya. I could've picked the brains of my friend who's a doctor of constitutional law at the local university and gotten the inside track on the issue. Now he's off on holidays for a month and I've got a burning constitutional law question I can't get answered!

Ah well, he mostly deals in aboriginal constitutional rights anyhow, so it's not like he'd actually have anything important to say.

[smjjames]

Or just restrict to Prime Minister? Heh.

[scriver]

Well that certainly complicates matters. Kind of hilarious when you see it that way.

As for that kind of laws I'm for them in theory. The people in tje government and parliament of a country should be devoted to the country they are serving, after all. The main problem is that citizenships is in themselves no't a very telling sign of whether anyone is, of course. So in practice they might be more or less worthless. But hey, symbology has it's place as well.

[Descan]

Or just restrict to Prime Minister? Heh.

The problem is that any individual member of parliament could, in theory, become Prime Minister in a parliamentary system; It's not a position that people run for or are elected to in a public election, it's merely the leader of the party that forms the government.

Granted, in practice, people "run for" the leader of their party in party elections, and they *could* concievably be barred from running if they didn't have pure Australian citizenship. But while I'm not sure about Australia's party system, in Canada the government doesn't really have much of a hand or an option about regulating parties in that way.

Which, if they can't tell a party "You can't have a leader that isn't Pure Australian Citizenship," (they could tell the party that it will be an issue, but without any way to enforce it, there's that gap still there*) then that means that if that party that has such a leader wins the election and forms the government, then that causes a crisis.

Either they go against the rules and have that leader as PM despite going against the constitution, thereby eroding the overall rule of law, a PR nightmare at best and actual erosion of the rule of law at worst. Or they disbar that leader and force the party to pick someone else, which is... Not good; You don't want to force a leadership run for a party just as they're trying to form a cabinet and run the country properly, not when the leader is the person who picks the government leaders. OR you just completely disqualify the party, which is so completely absurd to do to the *winning party* that I can't see that going well at all.

Either way, it's a crisis, and one everyone could see coming, happening right as a party takes power? Not good.

You could argue that the parties would simply voluntarily select only pure Aussie citizens as leaders, but there are such a thing as immigrant-oriented parties, and that's kind of an issue if they (either as a rule or a "rule") need a Natural Aussie as a leader, even if they are minor parties with no hope of ever running the country (I mean, things change over decades after all, so they might. AND, if they don't, it's a shitty thing to enforce that they must do this thing, despite the reason that they must do it never coming up and everyone *knowing* it would never come up). It's especially shitty in a place like Australia which has an... "interesting" relationship with immigrants; I don't need to tell you the problems that THAT brings...

Secondly, Trump's already shown us the problem (and in a 2-3 centuries old democracy) with "unwritten rules" that "everybody follows," since it only takes someone *not* following that unwritten rule to fuck with everything. Same applies to * above.

[smjjames]

Except that in this case, it wasn't an unwritten rule that wasn't being followed, it was a written rule (part of the Australian constitution even) that was apparently ignored for some time.

It sort of looks either like the rule wasn't being followed for some time and when one got found out, it snowballed, or (I think this is more likely what happened) nobody had been doing their homework and/or not paying attention, then when one of the MPs learned about it and resigned, it just snowballed from there.

I don't know if anybody in Australia is asking how they got to this crisis, like was it just people not paying attention? Did any past MPs have dual citizenships (would help indicate how widespread an issue it is)?

Obviously the cause is known (constitution not accounting for dual citizenships, which hadn't existed at the time it was made), but seems like finding out how they got there (since they legally shouldn't have been able to start a campaign while on dual citizenship) would be helpful

[Reelya]

I think it's better they take the Aus-only route rather than prejudice in favour of Commonwealth nations. I can't see a referendum changing it, the no argument has a very easy (and fairly legitimate) "Do you want a Chinese citizen as your Prime Minister!?" scare campaign.

However it's still murky. Australia's head of state is actually Queen Elizabeth the Second of Britain. It's kind of a questionable legal concept that having citizenship of Britain actually means you have Allegiance to a foreign power, since you're still a subject of Her Majesty either way. Also many politicians didn't know they had been granted citizenship of Britain, because that only became allowed after 2002, and it's more like the e.g. British going "oh your dad was a British citizen, that makes you eligible for citizenship too!".

So in other words, lots of the people affect have never been to the nation in question, and only got citizenship recently via a technicality (e.g. they have a right to citizenship via parentage, but it was never sought, confirmed or voided in writing). So the high court interpretation of that as a "allegiance" is a questionable interpretation. This is troublesome because none of it is cut and dried.

Except that in this case, it wasn't an unwritten rule that wasn't being followed, it was a written rule (part of the Australian constitution even) that was apparently ignored for some time.

It was ignored because it was irrelevant. Dual citizens didn't exist before 2002 in Australia, so if you were an Australian citizen (which you had to be to run) then it was fine before. Then recently a number of people who had zero idea that they held anything except Australian citizenship found out that they have technical citizenship rights in another country. Before that you'd have to actively renounce your Australian citizenship to take the theoretical citizenship rights you have somewhere else. That changed in 2002. It's like Schrodinger's citizenship: it only exists if you ask: "oh yeah right, technically, you're a citizen". e.g. you're not actually on any electoral rolls or in the UK's database on citizens at all, but when they check birth records, they find that your parents were British, so they immediately grant you citizenship, and the law change in Australia makes that legit.

Another example was where some guy's mother emigrated, was granted citizenship somewhere else, then by "birthright" the new nation decided the son in Australia is now technically a citizen too.

Basically the system is stupid right now, the constitution needs to be amended and the High Court is just making things worse by being literal about things but with all-new definitions for the words.

e.g. for an example of how stupid the current system is, our government here is completely exposed to other nations silly rules for who is a citizen there. e.g. another nation could declare every single Australian as retroactive citizens and that would technically annul every election ever held. e.g. the basis of the judgement isn't rules in Australia about who is a citizen: it's citizenship rules in other countries that matter. And the High Court has decided that whatever other nations decide for who is a citizen overrides our own elections, even if the person in question didn't know that those citizenship rights even existed. This is ripe for trolling or political manipulation from other nations.

[smjjames]

Oh I see, didn't know when the dual citizenship thing started for Australia. Maybe add some sort of clause to clear people currently alive or something? The US Constitution did something similar (I believe, may be misremembering) for the requirement to be born an US citizen since everybody in the colonies alive before independence would have technically been born a British colonial.

Then again, it's not the same kind of situation as far as being born in Australia (since most, if not all, of the politicians who resigned over this really were born in Australia) vs having dual citizenship.

[Descan]

Except that in this case, it wasn't an unwritten rule that wasn't being followed

You could argue that the parties would simply voluntarily select only pure Aussie citizens as leaders[...]
[...]Secondly, Trump's already shown us the problem (and in a 2-3 centuries old democracy) with "unwritten rules" that "everybody follows,"