Making Australian citizenship mean more

After over 30 years of increasingly easy access, Australian citizenship is becoming harder to acquire. Permanent residents must now wait for four years before applying (instead of two), and the Government intends to introduce a formal citizenship test. This latter change is the subject of heated debate. The emotion surrounding this debate can be best understood as an instance of the clash of two competing views about what citizenship ought to mean: the procedural and the patriotic. Copyright. Monash University and the author/s