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[smjjames]

To be fair, I didn't know how long the dual citizenship thing had been happening. So, it's really a recent oversight that boomeranged back at them and not something longer term as I thought it might have been.

Not sure why it took 15 years for it to boomerang back, you'd think problems might start showing up during the next election or the one after, but that's just how things turned out.

[Descan]

Yeah, but I also wasn't talking about the citizenship thing at all. I was talking about a hypothetical "unwritten rule" of not making Non-Pure-Aussies your party leader, which to make sense, you pretty much just have to read my entire post again, because it's all there.

[scriver]

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.

Descan, I'm not sure why you're overdramatisating the situation to such a degree. There is no rule that the party leader has to become prime minister. The prime minister is nominated and elected by parliament. If a party leader would not be eligible, that wouldn't be a crisis at all, it would just mean the majority party would have to recommend another person for the prime minister position.

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.

This is, like, just making ridiculous consequences up. Disqualify the party? What? That's not how anything works!

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...

Are you aware citizenships from the majority of places can be rescinded?

[Descan]

Aren't you in Sweden?

[smjjames]

What does Sweden have to do with anything here?

Anyhow, another one bites the dust http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-42075108

Can't they just put these resignations on hold until they figure out how to deal with the problem? Also, according to the article, an estimated half of all Australians are ineligible due to various dual citizenships, at least unless they renounce the dual citizenship.

I still think every single member of Parliament, including Turnbull, should check their ancestry for dual citizenship because if roughly half of Australia would be ineligible, then it reasons that there is a good chance of a large portion of Parliament being in the same boat. Can you imagine Trumbull finding that he has dual citizenship he didn't know about? That's the depth of your constitutional crisis.

[Reudh]

I'm actually curious if I'd be ineligible, given my grandmother is Dutch by birth.

[Paxiecrunchle]

Welcome to the Australasian politics thread! Be nice! Respect others views! Be mature, level headed adults like I know you all are (most of you).

TOPIC BANLIST: Absolutely DO NOT raise the following topics as they are too contentious.

Gun Control

To go along with the other politics megathreads, why not have Australasian politics?
At the very least, it could be certainly very amusing to yap about Australian and Oceanian politics (lol Abbott lol Gillard)... so go right ahead!

So, old news, but how about that blistering speech Gillard gave Abbott on misogyny a while back?

Shit. Gun ''control'' was the very first thing I thought to bring up when I saw this thread.

[Reudh]

Yeah, a while back two members got in a pretty vicious argument with each other over it that wouldn't die down. It resulted in the banning of one, and the other one largely doesn't appear on Bay12 anymore.

Hence, the gun control topic blacklisting.

If you really must debate it with someone, you can PM me your thoughts on it, but as with anything, keep it civil. I'll lock the thread if it begins to show up here.

[scriver]

Aren't you in Sweden?

Yes. How so?

[Descan]

Aren't you in Sweden?

Yes. How so?

Because all of what I said applies to Canada and Australia has a closer system to Canada than it does to Sweden, which is what I assume you're more familiar with.

[Reelya]

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...

Don't extend the refugee thing to the whole nation. A good 28% of the country are first-generation immigrants (and 49% have at least one foreign-born parent) and there isn't a racewar in Australia over it. The number of refugees isolated is pretty small for a country with almost 200,000 yearly immigrants as normal:

https://www.border.gov.au/about/reports-publications/research-statistics/statistics/live-in-australia/migration-programme

Overall, we're getting almost as many immigrants per year as the UK, a nation with triple the population, and you don't really hear anyone in a major party complaining about it either. The "crisis" with refugees is a political one that affects maybe 3-4% of the total refugee inflow. Total allocated places for refugee intake is 13000+ a year but you only hear about a handful of cases where they are detained, the vast majority are processed like normal.

[smjjames]

Aren't you in Sweden?

Yes. How so?

Because all of what I said applies to Canada and Australia has a closer system to Canada than it does to Sweden, which is what I assume you're more familiar with.

All three are still Parliamentary systems from my point of view. Also, I wasn’t being serious about restricting it to the PM and was a reference to how it’s dealt with here in the US.

[Paxiecrunchle]

So how can we tell what's normal in Australia without living there when all we hear about are the ''newsworthy'' bits?

[Reelya]

The same way you do for any country, you ask, or look up information about it. The problem is that you're basing your entire concept on new stories reprinted in your nation based on their own filtering of our newsworthy stories. It's gone through at least two sets of filters - our nations and your nations - as to what is considered "newsworthy". Good news is not newsworthy, also they basically paraphrase what our debates are actually about, losing all context. e.g. the political dispute about the refugees who are detained (who actually make up e.g. 3-4% of all refugees here) loses all context when it's reported by journalists from another nation who don't know anything about what Australia is like (e.g. that many areas are dominated by non-anglo immigrants, and this is generally accepted by the vast majority of people of all races here).

e.g. if I only went off local Australian news about what America is like then start mouthing off "all Americans are like XYZ" then I expect that to be shot down by people who actually live there pretty quickly. Because we're in a different country, we get all America's "horror headlines" but we don't get the "feel good stories" that their own local news balances things with - we have our local "feel good stories" instead. As far as I know every American is constantly dodging bullet fire or armed robberies and being involved in major traffic accidents, going off local news about America. So, as much as America's own local media is already biased, we're getting literally a "hell on Earth" distilled version of American news here.

Basically, the mistake is in thinking that because you read what your local press is saying about some faraway place that they must know what they are talking about. How often do you read some tech article and think "this journalist doesn't know what the fuck they are talking about". Here's a hint: it's not just a problem with tech articles - you only notice because you are a techie. If they can't get tech articles right, where the knowledge can be gained locally and even through first-hand experience, then how much faith are you going to put on journalists to give you an unbiased idea about life in other countries. Hell, half the journalists can't even report what's happening in their own country without fucking the details up.

[Jimmy]

So gay people are allowed to get married now.