In this issue.(Australian citizenship)

• Position: 155873237
• Pages: 8(4)

The lead article in this issue is John Stone's highly important and devastating critique of the "discussion paper" entitled Australian Citizenship: Much More than a Ceremony, the work of Andrew Robb, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Senator Amanda Vanstone. Robb's paper considers the merits and nature of a future citizenship test, and seeks public input on a number of issues it raises for discussion. It will be impossible for the input provided by John Stone's article to be ignored, but time will tell whether Amanda Vanstone and the bureaucrats surrounding her have the courage to give effect to that input in any future legislation on the question of citizenship and what should be required to gain it.

A citizenship test, while highly desirable, needs to have real substance, and Robb's discussion paper misses many of the crucial issues. John Stone's article analyses this failing in merciless detail. For a start, the discussion paper fails to even note why a tougher road to citizenship has become necessary--that is, the presence within Australia of considerable numbers of radical Muslims whose idea of a good society is, to put it mildly, different from ours. The discussion paper's silence on this issue is a mark of its sheer gutlessness--it does not even address the activating circumstances that have made it necessary!

After offering a thoroughgoing critique of the paper (and conceding at the same time its useful aspects), John Stone proceeds to outline his own suggestions for giving some real teeth to any citizenship test. The public input Robb's...