Legal bombshell for Britons living in Australia

By GREG ANSLEY

CANBERRA - As many as 500,000 Britons living in Australia for as long as 50 years have been declared aliens and subject to deportation if they cross the Immigration Minister of the day.

Overturning two previous decisions, the High Court - the nation's final court of appeal - has severed one of the few remaining traces of colonialism by lumping British and Irish-born residents who arrived after 1948 in the same migration pile as anyone else born outside the country.

The decision not only brought an end to the special status accorded the many thousands of Britons who moved to Australia and felt no need to become citizens, but also sets January 1, 1949, as the date the nation finally threw off its imperial shackles.

The controversial decision, made by a 4-3 majority of judges, rejected an appeal by Jason Shaw,* 30, against a deportation order made after his permanent entry visa was revoked by former Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock two years ago.

Ruddock revoked the visa under "bad character" provisions of the Immigration Act, because of a string of drug and property offences Shaw had committed since he was 14.

The case was complicated by the fact that Shaw was brought to Australia at the age of 2 when his parents arrived as assisted immigrants, and has never left since.

He has two children, aged 7 and 11 - both Australian citizens - and is being sent back to a country he cannot remember.

Like many Britons, Shaw did not take out Australian citizenship, leaving him open to the action taken by Ruddock.

Shaw's impending deportation has sent a collective shudder down the backs of the hundreds of thousands of other British and Irish immigrants who have similarly not bothered to opt for dual nationality.

Because of the status accorded British subjects for decades after Australia became a federated dominion, many did not see the need to bother with citizenship.

Two previous majority High Court decisions had found that Britons who had migrated to Australia before 1973, and even probably 1984, were not aliens.

The three minority judges in the Shaw case argued that Britons became aliens only after 1984, when the Australia Act was passed, establishing full and final legal and constitutional independence from Britain.

But the majority of judges held that the cut-off date was instead January 1, 1949, following legislation passed the previous year creating the concept of Australian citizenship.