Preface

Kim Rubenstein

What a delight to be asked to write the preface to this substantial collection, one that captures the energy and richness of a University of Wollongong 2017 workshop¹ that I so well remember. This resulting book is a tribute to its editors and contributors. Their commitment and perseverance over five years has produced an excellent, evergreen analysis and makes important research accessible to citizenship and membership scholars in Australia, New Zealand and beyond – not to mention the greater community.

The collection highlights the prescience of bringing Australian and New Zealand scholars together to focus on citizenship scholarship and its central importance to community and political coherence. As this collection goes to press, the prime minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, has flagged giving New Zealanders a faster pathway to citizenship and even aligning voting entitlements between the two countries. Australians who are permanent residents and who have lived in New Zealand for more than a year can vote in New Zealand elections.² The Australian Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has been asked to consider the rights of New Zealand citizens in Australia – working here, being part of the community, paying taxes and otherwise contributing.

Already, some scholars have voiced publicly their scepticism about the constitutionality of such a move.³ They reference the democracy founding sections (7 and 24) of the Australian Constitution, warning that ‘the people’ referred to may not include New Zealanders. If so, then extending voting rights to them may be unconstitutional.

But, when delivering the opening lecture at the 2017 symposium – and setting the scene for constitutional engagement around nationality, law and belonging – I explained that at the time of Federation, ‘the people’ were not Australian citizens, there was no such concept. Indeed, during the constitutional convention debates, the framers resisted any attempt to define and delineate Australian citizenship as a key membership status. These were debates in which New Zealand representatives participated, although ultimately determining not to become part of the Commonwealth.

New Zealanders, and all other dominion members of the British Empire, held the same membership status in 1901 as Australian residents did at that time – they were all British subjects. So, in 1901, when the Commonwealth of Australia was established, New Zealanders residing in Australia held identical rights of membership as other Commonwealth residents – for British subject status was the fullest form of membership. That said, those New Zealanders and other British subjects at the time held stronger forms of membership than Indigenous Australians, who, while formally British subjects, were not extended full British subject rights. This discussion is just one of many indicating the ongoing value of diving into the historical foundations of nationality, law and belonging in Australia and New Zealand and laying them bare in this monograph.

To their credit, the editors go further – explaining in their first chapter how Subjects and Aliens gathers scholarship investigating legal and social histories of nationality and citizenship in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, at the same time as highlighting the intersections of gender, race and ethnicity with nationality and citizenship.

‘Citizenship’, and its equivalent term ‘nationality’⁴ – so central to political ideals and organisation since the days of the Athenian lawgiver Solon, embossed by the Enlightenment and modern democratic theory,⁵ enlarged by T. H. Marshall’s broader socioeconomic gloss in the 1950s⁶ and further commodified in a globalised world⁷ – has, nonetheless, never been more nebulous, contested, ambulatory, fractured and abused than now. While citizenship ‘has no definition that is fixed for all time … [i]t has always been at stake in struggles and the object of transformations’.⁸

It is, therefore, timely that this collection challenges ideas of who historically ‘belonged’ in Australia and New Zealand and highlights how citizenship rights in the two countries have been inconsistent and contested. By examining histories of law and policy surrounding nationality and citizenship rights in Australasia through the lived experience of individuals, families and communities negotiating their lives as British subjects or ‘aliens’ – those without British subject status – we can see that the ongoing contestation has remarkable foundations.

With the focus of the collection directed to the first half of the twentieth century, up to the introduction of Australian and New Zealand citizenship in 1949 and to the earlier colonial period, we gain valuable insights into the current pressing issues of our time: who belongs, what does belonging mean, and how secure is that membership when the democratic foundations to our system of government are so unclear and fragile?

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