When John Howard states that his proposed citizenship test will highlight aspects of Australia’s social fabric, such as ‘the concept of looking after the very vulnerable in our community’ (The Age 12 December 2006), it is doubtful that prospective Australian citizens will be quizzed on the degree to which the current and past Australian governments have failed to deliver on this very principle.

There have been many questions already suggested for Howard’s proposed test of citizenship. Some of them, deliberately discriminatory, are little more than thinly disguised throwbacks to the Commonwealth Immigration Department’s dictation test of the past, framed to ensure that particular individuals and nationalities were kept out of Australia. Other proposed questions addressing, for instance, what Howard refers to as ‘the concept of mateship’, would appear unquantifiable beyond a jingoistic flag-waving response (which of course would be the correct answer and should send an applicant for citizenship to the top of the class).

Other terms that have been thrown about include ‘tolerance’ and the ‘equality [of men and women]’. Taking as a given that all citizens are entitled to something more than tolerance, one test of any set of social principles that governments expect newcomers to be conversant in should be acceptance of the right to dissent from such principles. One definition of mateship is that historically it has celebrated an Australian way of life that has a healthy disrespect for authority. While this may reflect reality to a limited degree (such as the oft-referred to disregard for British authority displayed by Australian troops in Europe during World War One), a more common Australian experience is that those who do not defer to authority are likely to be punished rather than celebrated.

In the past Australia’s various legislatively sanctioned categories of citizenship have also relied on categories of non-citizenship in order to strengthen and maintain any semblance of validity. For instance, categories of Aboriginal non-citizenship have been used extensively and imposed with repression. The status of the white citizen was maintained via a maze of tainted and ‘primitive’ categories of caste, ensuring that indigenous people could not reflect or fulfil an image of national purity. Aboriginal people remained outside the place of the citizen while being legislatively held in their place through incarceration or, in some instances, forced dispersal administered through both codified and summary justice.

Despite the ever-present threat of punishments that could include gaol sentences, the loss of already meagre rations, or the removal of children, many Aboriginal people, particularly women, dissented from a colonial authority imposed on them in order to claim their rights as both members of a particular indigenous nation and a nominal citizen of the nation-state. Of course, many of these dissenters were severely punished. And we should remember them, and the laws they defied, in order to defend the higher principle of social justice. If we are to test prospective citizens on the concept of equality it could be through the histories of the struggle for equality. In this way the principle of equality could be valued rather than relegated to little more than a cliché.

Of course for this to be achieved we will need to test the nation beforehand, as we can hardly expect the prospective citizen to address a question that too few of us know the answer to. But in fact no test is necessary.

When people come to Australia wishing to become members of our community we should not be testing their knowledge of us. For sure, we should make our stories and histories available to them in a full and open way. We should also ask them about the places that they have come from and what it is from their histories and traditions that they value and want to share with us. And rather than any of us ticking boxes, we should take their stories home with us.