Subjects and Citizens:
History of Australian Citizenship

In the previous Study Week you examined the historical evolution of two different models of citizenship and democracy, civic republicanism and liberalism. In the civic republican tradition, citizenship is understood as active participation in public affairs. Within the liberal tradition, citizenship is understood more as a legal and administrative status in which political participation is minimal. The traditions of liberalism and civic republicanism will help organise your knowledge of citizenship categories. The purpose of this week is to examine citizenship as a form of political struggle in Australia. Accordingly, this Study Week presents an account of the historical and contemporary struggles for citizenship rights in Australia. This week first explores the evolving rights and responsibilities of British colonial subjects. It then considers a few of the political conflicts that have occurred over different ideas of Australian citizenship after federation. You will note that many of the important political struggles have aimed to obtain the basic legal status of an Australian citizenship. But there have also been significant struggles to achieve socio-economic rights and resources that would enable the citizen to participate more effectively in the Australian society and polity.

1.Historical Background

Citizenship status in the late 18th century was somewhat paradoxical, in that to be a British subject was also to have the rights of a citizen. In the Australian courts and political debate, British colonists frequently referred to the 'Rights of freeborn Englishmen' or to 'the ancient rights of Britons'. By these they meant primarily the constitutional rights guaranteed in Magna Carta (1215), the laws governing Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights (1689), and the Act of Settlement (1701). (These topics will be considered in the next Study Week 4.) Australian colonists understood these rights as deriving from the historical experiences of Great Britain and not from the abstract, universal rights promulgated during the French and American Revolution (Neal 1991: 23).

Initially, the colonists simply wanted the same kinds of legal and civil rights that were thought to be available in Great Britain. For example, as British subjects, Australian colonists called upon the right to protection from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. If accused of a serious crime, a British subject (citizen) had the right to be tried by jury and an independent judge. According to the British legal heritage, houses and homes could not be entered by police authorities without a warrant from a court. As Hirst (1994: 119) points out, these rights were legal and civil rights of the individual, not political rights.

The sole political right held by ordinary subjects, as opposed to the elites of the aristocracy and clergy, was the right to petition the monarch and parliament. The major political rights were constitutional and institutional rights, such as those of parliament that limited the rights and prerogatives of the monarch. In the 18th century and for much of the 19th, there were virtually no social rights to welfare or state support or government protection if one was in ill health or dire poverty. For the ordinary subject (citizen), such social support was often provided by family, friends and neighbours. In some cases an individual could call for assistance from the churches and seek support from the local 'poor house'.

From 1788, New South Wales was a penal colony within the British tradition, but whose institutions did not entirely reflect the highest British political principles. New South Wales was governed largely as a military autocracy with few formal constraints upon the political power of the Governor. There was no provision for trial by a jury of one's peers, but only trial by military courts. The early courts comprised a judge-advocate appointed by the British government and a panel of (six or more) military officers. Later on, the trials were conducted by judges and military officers, and eventually civilian appointees were involved.

Nonetheless, in the colony of New South Wales different social conditions existed and had to be taken into account. In the early years, the colony comprised convicts, soldiers and their officers, a few clergy and a limited number of free settlers. Over time, however, there were increasing numbers of convicts who had served their sentences or who had been pardoned, more free settlers and also ex-officers. The unique composition of the population became the source of various departures from British precedent. Here, we shall discuss briefly the debates over and evolution of the respective rights of convicts, emancipists, free settlers.

Most of the convicts had committed crimes such as burglary which were 'capital offences' and therefore punishable by death. Nonetheless, those convicted could be reprieved if there were some mitigating circumstances, and the monarch agreed to it. Those who had their sentences of death commuted were sentenced to transportation to penal colonies such as New South Wales. Under English law, however, convicted felons (and former felons) were regarded as already executed and therefore 'civilly dead' (Neal 1991: 6). Such people were unable to sue in courts of law, unable to be a witness, unable to hold property, and unable to make contracts. Essentially, such convicts had no legal rights. But in 1788, two convicts Henry and Susannah Kable sued the captain of the ship that brought them to Sydney for the loss of a parcel of their belongings worth 15 pounds. Surprisingly, the convicts won and this established an important precedent that convicts had at least some minimal civil and legal rights.

Political and legal problems inevitably arose over how to deal with convicts who had served their time and had become emancipated, and wanted to stay in the colony. Debate occurred over the kinds of rights they ought have. Should freed convicts remain tainted by their past and be deprived of basic legal rights, or should they be given the same ones as free settlers? Should they be allowed to own land, for example, make contracts and be able to enforce them through the courts? Following Governor King (1803), Governor Lachlan Macquarie favoured giving the same rights to emancipists as to others in the colony. Central among these was the right and obligation to serve on juries. Macquarie (1980 [1813]) argued that everyone who had been a convict was 'in every way entitled to the Rights and Priveleges of a Citizen who has never come under the sentence of Transportation'.

The arrival of free settlers in large numbers after 1820 made this problem more acute because they remained under similar restrictions as others in the penal colony. These colonists tended to become the 'exclusives' who did not want emancipists to have the same rights as themselves. The issue was not just one of status, but one of who would exercise political power in the colony. Macquarie's view eventually prevailed and the 'exclusives' lost their struggle to limit the civil and legal rights of emancipists. The dimensions of the problem can be seen with reference to the composition of the population. In New South Wales, convicts had comprised 70% of colonial population in the first decade, but their proportion of the population declined to 40% by the ending of transportation in 1840. Where the proportion of convicts, emancipists and their children comprised 87% of population in 1820, it was still high at 63% in 1841.

One of the most important early political struggles in the colony was that over attempts to obtain the right to trial by jury. In 1819, emancipists first petitioned the monarch for this reform and it officially became an option in 1833. At this time also, emancipists were allowed to sit on juries. According to Neal (1991: 23) such rights were vital, if only because politics took a legal form in the colony. Given the lack of representative political institutions, the courts became public forums for expression of grievances and opposition to the policies of the Governors. The early precedents that gave certain legal rights to both convicts and emancipists meant that the exercise of political power was able to be challenged as to its legality in the colonial courts. That is, the courts served as a check upon political power in Australia and governments could be restrained by law, through reference to British common law and statute law. This capacity of the judiciary to limit and overrule governments remains a source of institutional conflict and debate today. It also means that citizens have alternative courses of action open to them if they want to express grievances against, and seek redress from, government.

The penal colonies of Australia were established without representative political institutions or any kind of responsible government. With the granting of responsible government in each of the colonies, new political rights to vote were awarded in Australia well before Great Britain. In the 1850s in that country only one in five people were entitled to vote, but adult male suffrage was brought about in South Australia in 1856 and established in all the other Australian colonies by 1900. (Note that South Australia was founded as a free colony and never relied upon convicts.)

Nevertheless, there were different qualifications for voting in the Lower and Upper Houses of Parliament. For the House of Assembly, any male over 21 years who had been registered in the electoral district for over 6 months could vote. Voting qualifications for the Legislative Councils or Upper Houses were more restrictive. One could only vote if one owned a certain amount of property. Neither the electorates of Lower nor those of the Upper Houses were of equal size. Except in South Australia, plural voting was allowed to those who owned property in more than one electorate until the 1880s. These kinds of qualifications tended to disenfranchise itinerant male workers and there was no female suffrage, or right to vote, until the 1890s.

2.Women's rights

Before 1882, women only existed legally and socially through their attachment to men, either by their status as a daughter or as a wife. Normally a women lacked the power to contract or sue, and the right to all her property, even in the event of separation, was vested in her husband. Until 1873, when all colonies enacted fairer divorce laws, women found it more difficult to dissolve a marriage than men. Equal grounds for divorce was not achieved until 1881 in New South Wales. The passing of the English Married Women's Property Acts of 1882 also led to reforms in colonies. These laws gave a wife the right to own property in the event that she separated from her husband. Female suffrage was first achieved in the colonies of South Australia in 1894 and Western Australia in 1899. After federation, feminists continued their struggle for full citizenship rights and this resulted in the granting of female suffrage in all other states, with Victoria being the last to do so in 1908. In 1902, Australia became the first country in the world to award women the right to vote and to stand for national parliament (Sawer 1996: 1). It was not until 1943, however, that the first two women were elected to the federal parliament.

After federation, Australian feminists broadened their struggles for citizenship beyond the political realm into the quest for more social rights. The early feminists recognised the potential within existing conceptions of citizenship for the freeing of women from what Marilyn Lake calls 'masculine and conjugal tyrannies'. As Lake (1994: 26—7) argues, early feminists saw citizenship as a guarantee of the individual right of self-government and self-possession. Feminists thus argued that extending such rights of citizenship to include women was justified on the grounds of equality and justice for all, regardless of gender.

Other feminists argued that extending full rights of citizenship to all women would 'end the violation of women's bodies, inside and outside marriage' (Lake 1994: 26—7). Feminists here argued that the institution of marriage might be likened to slavery as it robbed individual women of their right of self-possession. Women therefore saw some promise in debates surrounding citizenship for securing greater rights for women. Where many legal rights were extended to all men, they were refused to most women. Feminists claimed that a fair and just society required that all citizens be entitled to the same rights and privileges, irrespective of gender, race, class or ethnicity. In the early decades of this century, however, Australian feminists also developed notions of 'maternal citizenship' as a means of justifying the provision of a range of rights and entitlements for women as women. In the following reading Marilyn Lake examines the citizenship issues that concerned Australian feminists.

Towards the end of her article Lake explores some of the problems associated with women pursuing a politics based on appeals to a shared set of women's interests or women's values. After surveying a range of contemporary feminist writings, Lake argues that linking a women's politics with a limited set of women's interests risks reducing that range of issues that women might be able to pursue through their politics and their activism. (A number of the issues concerning the extension of women's rights will be considered further in Study Week 7.)

Since the 1940s, women in Australia have greatly extended the range of rights and resources available to them. These have included gaining access to rights available to men but previously denied to women such as the right to equal pay for equal work and the right to work in a variety of occupations previously closed to them. Marian Sawer (1996: 3) points out the discriminatory laws on women and jury service.

By the time of the Second World War only two states had granted women the right to serve on juries, and even when this right was conceded it was on different terms from men (women had to 'volunteer' for jury service). the major argument against jury service for women was that women's obligations to their husband and family took priority over their citizen responsibilities. This meant that female defendants routinely had all-male juries.

Since the 1960s, governments have recognised further rights that are accorded to women as women. These rights include those to paid maternity leave, and rights to seek redress if they were discriminated against on the basis of their sex, marital status or being pregnant (see Sawer 1996). Nonetheless, many feminists argue that continuing the struggle both to attain equal citizenship rights and to protect those already awarded remains vital. Sawer (1996: 9) further argues:

If equal opportunity is to be extended to all citizens, then the state has to take over some of the caring work of women. If this is to be done effectively, then women must take over some of the decision-making work of men.

This latter proposal returns us to politics and the need for more women to be represented in parliament and in government.

3.Non-Whites and Australian Citizenship

Since colonial times, one of the constant citizenship struggles has been that over rights for, and recognition of, non-whites in Australia. We consider below the examples of the indigenous people and Asian migrants, primarily from China. In both cases, citizenship rights were determined within a larger set of beliefs about the ideal form of Australian national identity and buttressed by a framework of laws and administrative regulations.

With the British invasion, settlement and annexation (completed in 1829) of Australia, the indigenous people became British subjects entitled to protection under the law. Nonetheless, they were less able to make use of these benefits because of a range of factors, including cultural differences and racial prejudice. Since Aborigines were originally not Christians and did not believe in God, they could not take an oath or give evidence in a court of law. Because the Governors often did not have effective control over the distant parts of the colonies, they could rarely protect Aborigines from the predations of white settlers. Where Aborigines were driven off their land and resisted 'settlement', their status was unclear. Were they still British subjects or were they enemies of the Crown who could legally be hunted down and shot?

Although male Aborigines became entitled to vote after 1856 in the colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia, few did vote, and they were excluded by law from doing so in Queensland and Western Australia. After federation, the Constitution, the Franchise Act 1902 and its discriminatory interpretation and administration combined to ensure that Aborigines were often prevented from registering to vote, or from voting when registered (Stretton and Finnimore 1993).

Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders remained second class 'colonial subjects' in every sense well after formal Australian 'independence' from Great Britain.

Colonial governments established another regime of discrimination with regard to Chinese immigrants to Australia. During the 1840s and 1850s indentured Chinese were imported to work in New South Wales as shepherds. About 3,000 arrived during 1848—54 and in 1854 the opportunities created by the Victorian gold fields attracted many more. By 1855 there were 17,000 adult male Chinese in Victoria and in that year the government imposed a special tax of 10 pound per head on all Chinese arriving in the colony. The government also limited the number of Chinese immigrants to one for every ton of shipping. The Victorian laws were the first immigration restriction acts in Australia. Despite attempts to limit their numbers, more Chinese continued to arrive. On the goldfields, violent conflicts ensued, culminating in a number of riots, and massacres of the Chinese by whites.

With federation in 1901, the goal of promoting a 'white' Australia became a national policy accepted by all major political parties. Indeed, one of the first acts of the new Commonwealth was to pass the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 which put certain restriction upon immigration and provided for the removal from Australia of 'prohibited immigrants'. This Act did not explicitly forbid entry by non-whites but allowed for the application of an education test. It defined a 'prohibited immigrant' as:

any person who when asked to do so by an officer fails to write out at dictation and sign in the presence of an officer a passage of fifty words in length in an European language directed by the officer.

Here we may note that a standard of competence, namely, proficiency in a European language, was used as criterion of potential citizenship to exclude non-Europeans, but particularly non-whites from entry into Australia. This strategy, called the 'Natal formula' after its origins in Natal Assembly of 1897 in South Africa, was later used by federal governments to try and exclude people on political as well as racial grounds.

The broader legal foundations of these discriminatory citizenship regimes are examined by Clarke and Galligan (1995: 454—5). According to these writers (Clarke and Galligan 1995: 457), the specific features of a racially based citizenship regime were formally established by the start of the First World War. Clarke and Galligan designate six legislative enactments introduced following the passage of the Immigrations Restrictions Act 1901 that were important in delimiting and defining the rights and responsibilities of the Australian citizenry and in shaping popular understandings of the Australian citizen between the first and second world wars.

The first of these was the right to participate in the formal electoral process, enacted via the Commonwealth Franchise Act (1902—1918). This act established who may be included on electoral roles and hence who may vote and/or stand for political office. The Naturalisation Act (1903—1917) determined who might become what was then called a 'naturalised national'. This category of the national was the precursor to more recent conceptions of the citizen and in the interwar period it defined who might be counted as an Australian citizen.

A number of other laws defined the rights of Australian citizens through providing various incentives for individuals to begin developing the more remote regions of the continent. Such incentives laid the groundwork for the more formal development of the welfare state in Australia enacted with the establishment of old age, unemployment, sickness and pension benefits (among others). The provision of maternity allowances and child endowments further established the rights and entitlements of the Australian citizen. The Emigration Act (1910) as well as the Passports Act (1920) in turn established the international identity of the Australian citizen abroad. These pieces of legislation were instrumental in characterising the features of an Australian citizenry at a time when few formal attempts were made to define specifically the 'nature' of the Australian national.

As Clarke and Galligan demonstrate, both the early legislation and much bureaucratic effort were oriented primarily towards defining the 'desirable Australian citizen'. Clarke and Galligan (1995: 459) suggest that this was done by formally describing that which the desirable Australian citizen was not: an aboriginal native. In keeping with attempts to preserve a resolutely British dominion in the South Pacific (as embodied in the Immigration Restrictions Act), Australians of Aboriginal descent were excluded from official conceptions of Australian citizenship. Accordingly, the category of the aboriginal native became a powerful metaphor that described, by negative implication, the 'desirable' Australian. Clarke and Galligan conclude that the category of the aboriginal native thus became the 'key boundary marker' defining through exclusion, the nature of the Australian citizen.

4.National Identity and Civic Identity

Perhaps the earliest official understandings of the legal meaning of Australian citizenship is evident in Quick and Garran's commentary on the terms 'Allegiance' and ' A Subject of the Queen' in the Constitution. They indicate a further paradox of Australian citizenship that, even though the Commonwealth Constitution created a 'federal citizenry', the term citizen is nowhere used in the document.

Quick and Garran also explain why the term citizen does not appear in the Constitution. (In so doing they refer to ideas and historical events raised in the Study Week 2.)

In view of the historical associations and peculiar significance of the terms 'citizens' and 'subjects', one being used to express the membership of a republican community, and the other that of a community acknowledging an allegiance to a personal sovereign, it was obvious that there might have been an impropriety in discarding the time-honoured word 'subject' and in adopting a nomenclature unobjectionable in itself but associated with a different system of government.

The 'impropriety' alluded to was not just the republican connotations of the word 'citizen' but also its historical association with rebellion against the English monarchy. Accordingly, the constitution refers to 'subjects of the Queen' and the 'people' of the Commonwealth or a State. Yet, by using the words 'people' as a synonym for 'citizens' the Constitution creates another small dilemma for Australian nationalism in that it implies a unity and homogeneity that did not exist in the way that the term 'people' appeared to do so in Great Britain or Europe.

Given that Australia was a nation of immigrants from various parts of the British Isles, the wider Empire and Europe, nationalists saw a need to create a common loyalty out of the original multiple loyalties to Great Britain, Australia, and the States. Because of its history as a collection of separate self-governing colonies, and then as a barely independent member of the Empire, many critics thought that Australians had a weak sense of being a 'people'. This assumption gave reason for attempts to strengthen it. Yet, for much of the 20th century, the dominant Australian national identity was based upon the values of racial purity as well as dual loyalty to Australia and the Empire. Whereas purity of race was to be achieved primarily by putting restrictions upon immigration, the dual loyalties were to be achieved by encouraging the virtues of 'Empire Citizenship'.

At different times, key figures expounded on the meaning and requirements of Australian citizenship. One of these was Peter Board, Director of Education in New South Wales. His address to the Royal Australian Historical Society in 1919 was indicative of a certain strand of Australian nationalism at the time.

Instead of focusing on civic rights, Board (1919: 197) stresses the need to see citizenship as entailing individual obligations and group responsibilities that in turn imply the 'curtailment of liberty'. Board understood citizenship as 'the product of the laboratory of history' about which Australians needed to know more. Education therefore had a critical role to play in fostering Australian citizenship. For Board (1919: 200), however, it had to be self-education based upon 'life-made thought' (as opposed to 'book-made thought') and 'directed discussion'. Despite his recognition of the obligation to others, Board advocated an education that 'will counteract the tendency of the individual to let the social group to which he belongs do his thinking for him.' Writing at the end of the First World War and before the Versailles Peace Conference, Board (1919: 200) refers briefly to both Australia's racial identity and its international responsibilities: 'Have we the type of citizenship that can realise not only the responsibility for Australian social and racial integrity, but is ready also for the role of guardian of the less advanced communities.' [sic] After the Second World War these dual concerns gradually took a different form as Australian governments become more international in outlook and the immigration policies became less racially based.

The passing of the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 first established the legal category of an Australian citizen. Before this time Australian 'citizens' were simply British subjects (Davidson 1997: 145). With the new act Australian citizenship was available under the following conditions (Davidson 1997: 45):

• being born to an Australian father,
• five years residence for those from Britain and Ireland, be of good character, have a knowledge of English, have an 'adequate knowledge of the rights and responsibilities and privileges of Australian citizenship' and intend to reside in Australia,
• by naturalisation, if an alien, which required all of the above, or to have resided in Australia for one year or have worked for the government for four years, to have applied and been accepted, and on swearing an oath of allegiance to the monarch of Great Britain.

Note that British origins were still important. An 'alien' was someone who did not have the status of a British subject and was not an Irish citizen or a 'protected person' which was often the official status of Aboriginal people. For Davidson (1997) the 1948 act 'enshrined Australian as Anglo-Celtic' and confirmed Australia's citizenship policy as assimilationist. This meant that all newcomers were expected to conform to the dominant Anglo-Celtic culture. In the 1960s and 1970s other reforms had a significant impact on citizenship status for indigenous people, and migrants, especially Asian migrants

On 27 May 1967, a constitutional referendum, supported by 90.77% of those who voted, altered the Commonwealth Constitution to allow:

(a) Aborigines to be counted in the national census, and

(b) the Commonwealth power to enact 'special laws' for members of the 'Aboriginal race' if it wanted to.

By repealing the original section of the constitution, the referendum allow the Commonwealth government to have pre-eminent responsibility in the field and inaugurated a significant shift of power and policy in Aboriginal affairs away from the States.

Until after the 1967 constitutional referendum, the indigenous people of Australia did not have uniform access to the same range of citizenship rights and obligations as white citizens. In 1962, for example, when the Commonwealth awarded all Aborigines the vote in federal elections, it did not make it compulsory for them to register. Although the right to vote was finally awarded to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, in Western Australia (1962) and Queensland (1965) before the referendum, many of these people were often forced to live under oppressive condition on missions and reserves, and denied access to the full range of legal rights and social welfare benefits.

The 1967 referendum also signalled a significant shift in white attitudes to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. For many white and black Australians it symbolised a vote for 'inclusion' of the indigenous people into the Australian community. For some, the 1967 referendum was a defining historical moment of reconciliation that offered a new future for indigenous people and their relationship with White Australians of British and European origins. Here we may observe the material and symbolic importance of achieving equal citizenship understood primarily as a legal and administrative status. In the years after 1967, however, it became clearer that more social, economic and political reforms were needed to enable indigenous people to participate as full members of the Australian community and polity. After 1967, for example, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders began stronger political and legal moves, not just to obtain equal citizens rights, but also other rights, such as land rights, due to them because of their distinct history and culture. The evolution and political outcome of these movements are considered in Study Week 11 on Land and Law.

After the Second World War there was also increasing international and local pressure to liberalise the White Australia policy. The White Australia plank was removed from the Australian Labor Party platform in June 1965, and in 1966 the Commonwealth Government also acted to end the policy. Under Hubert Opperman, the Liberal Minister for Immigration, new laws allowed highly skilled non-Europeans to settle in Australia, and permitted those already in residence to change their status from temporary to permanent. These reforms were based on the humanitarian objectives of maintaining families and the utilitarian goal of making best use of the skilled workers that the Australian economy needed. Nonetheless, the main policy objective remained that of maintaining a 'generally integrated and predominantly homogeneous population.' These national objectives were changed in the 1970s with the abandonment of policies of integration and assimilation and the implementation of the policy of multiculturalism which we shall consider in Study Week 10. (In brief, the policy of multiculturalism promotes an Australia in which all cultural traditions are of equal worth and where British cultural dominance is substantially reduced.)

Such reforms have all had implications for how we ought to understand and encourage Australian citizenship. It is no longer defensible to celebrate a racially based citizenship, or one tied strongly to Great Britain. The continuing absence of a homogeneous nationality and the existence of cultural diversity has created new dilemmas for those wanting to support a single national loyalty and commitment to the country. One proposed strategy is to recognise Australian cultural diversity and to shift the focus away from racially based 'national identity' to that of a democratically oriented 'civic identity' (see Horne 1994).

In the following reading, Stuart Macintyre discusses the problem of citizenship in Australia and explains why the older civic customs and ceremonies went into decline. He also explores the relevance of diversity and cultural identity to arguments on Australian citizenship to suggest that Australians borrow from earlier times to affirm the importance of the public realm.

A former Governor General takes up this issue from a somewhat different perspective. Also concerned to enrich the meaning of citizenship in Australia he discusses the proposals, now enacted, to change the wording of the oath of allegiance in Australian citizenship ceremonies.

It is evident that many commentators want to give more meaning to the legal and administrative status of Australian citizenship. The critics point to the need to enhance the affective, that is, symbolic and emotional aspects of citizenship, especially in citizenship ceremonies. They argue that Australian citizenship needs to be celebrated in more appropriate ways that denote becoming a member of a certain kind of political community. The new oath of allegiance goes part of the way towards meeting this criticism. Instead of pledging loyalty to 'Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors', new citizens are now required, among other things, to pledge 'loyalty to Australia and its people'.

Nonetheless, as Rubenstein (1995, 1996) shows, ascertaining the range of rights, responsibilities and resources available to Australian citizens in legal and administrative terms is no easy matter. According to Rubenstein, the legal consequences of citizenship must be inferred from a range of disparate legal and legislative sources. In short, although there is an act of parliament that specifies the bare conditions for attaining citizenship, there is no single source of law that defines what rights citizens may claim, nor the obligations which they are legally bound to undertake.

Rubenstein's article provides a comprehensive account of the legal implications of Australian citizenship. He also takes up the broader issue of 'civic virtue' to argue that citizenship should be understood more as membership of a community in which citizens have social and economic rights and responsibilities. Such a reformulation should arguably begin with more open discussion as to what rights and entitlements are required by citizens to ensure an active and informed participation within the operations of the polity. For Rubenstein, such a debate will only enhance notions of Australian citizenship.

Conclusion

This Study Week has sketched out a just a few key historical struggles in the evolution of Australian citizenship. Centrally, such political struggles may be understood as conflicts over who to exclude and who is to be included in the nation. Arguments for inclusion and exclusion are often based upon claims about the ideal civic identity and the civic capacities and competencies appropriate to it. From the earliest days of colonial occupation and settlement heated debates have occurred in Australia over such matters with regard to the rights of convicts and emancipists, women, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, Asian labourers and those from the Pacific islands. One constant theme throughout is that recourse to law has been an important part of efforts to obtain civil and legal rights. Over time, the older discriminatory legal regimes have been replaced by more just ones. Many of these early struggles concerned access to citizenship understood in liberal terms, as primarily a legal and administrative status.

More recently, conflicts over citizenship have also arisen over the requirements now thought necessary for participation in the various Australian communities. These kinds of citizenship struggles are not limited to the question of who should be admitted to Australia. They encompass struggles over the kinds of rights, responsibilities and resources that should be given to different categories of citizen. Historically, we can see in Australia a similar evolution of claims to civic rights noted by Marshall. As in Europe and America, Australians have pursued (a) civil and legal rights pertaining, for example, to the rule of law and due process under the law; (b) political rights such as rights to vote; and (c) social rights to welfare and social security programs. (In Australia, most of these social and economic rights are also available to permanent residents, or 'non-citizens'.) Although the first kind of rights enabled protection from government and the exercise of arbitrary authority, the second and third kinds are intended to enable a citizen full participation in the community. For this reason, such conflicts may be understood as primarily within the civic republican tradition.

In the next Study Week we will examine the themes of liberalism and civic republicanism with reference to the historical evolution of democratic political institutions in Australia.

References

Board, P. 1919. Australian citizenship. Royal Australian Historical Society, Journal and Proceedings 5(4): 196—200.

Clarke, T. and Galligan, B. 1995. Protecting the citizen body: The Commonwealth's role in shaping and defending an 'Australian' population. Australian Journal of Political Science 30(3): 452—68.

Davidson, A. 1993. Understanding Citizenship in Australia. In Beyond the Headlines: Australian and the World #1 Public Affairs Research Centre, Department of Government, University of Sydney, pp. 1—16.

Davidson, A. 1997. From Subject to Citizen: Australian Citizenship in the Twentieth Century. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Hirst, J. 1994. Can subjects be citizens? In D. Headon, J. Warden and B. Gammage eds. Crown or Country: The Traditions of Australian Republicanism. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, pp. 118—23.

Horne, D. 1994. A Civic Identity–Not a National Identity. In M.A. Stephenson and C. Turner eds. Australia Republic or Monarchy? St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 34—49.

Lake, M. 1994. Personality, individuality, nationality: Feminist conceptions of citizenship 1902—40. Australian Feminist Studies 19 Autumn: 25—38.

Macintyre, S. 1992. Beyond the politics of difference to a new concept of citizen. Australian 6 November: 13.

Macquarie, L. [1813] 1980. Letter to Lord Bathurst, 28 June. In F.K. Crowley ed. A Documentary History of Australia Volume 1, Colonial Australia 1788—1840. Melbourne: Nelson, pp. 200—202.

Neal, D. 1991. The Rule of Law in Penal Colony. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Quick, J. and R.E. Garran, 1901. The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth. Sydney, on 'Allegiance' pp. 491—2, and 'Subject of the Queen' pp. 954—9.

Rubenstein, K. 1996. What does Australian citizenship mean today? Review Paper. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 9pp.

Further reading

McGrath, A. 1993. 'Beneath the skin': Australian citizenship, rights and Aboriginal women. Journal of Australian Studies 37: 99—114.

Murdoch, W. 1911. The Struggle for Freedom. 6th edn Melbourne, pp. 226—39.

Rubenstein, K. 1995. Citizenship in Australia: Unscrambling its meaning. Melbourne University Law Review 20(2): 503—27.

Sawer, M. 1996. The role of women as Australian citizens: Review Paper. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 12pp.

Stretton, P. and Finnemore, C. 1993. Black fellow citizens: Aborigines and the Commonwealth franchise. Australian Historical Studies 25(101): 521—35.

Internet and On-Line Resources

Below is a list of web-sites relevant to this week's course material.

Centre for Citizenship and Human Rights
The Centre for Citizenship and Human Rights (CCHR) at Deakin University makes a major contribution to socio-political theory, analysis and practice, aimed at supporting and extending civics education, civil society, citizenship, democracy and human rights both domestically and abroad. This site provides numerous on-line resources including links to the Australian Citizenship Database.

Centre for Living Democracy
A United States based non-profit, non-partisan organisation aiming to inspire and prepare citizens for making democracy a rewarding, practical and every-day approach to solving social and political problems.

Open Learning Australia/Radio National
This site is based on the thirteen part ABC/Radio National series covering historical, political and cultural aspects of Australian conceptions of liberal democracy, citizenship and civics education.