Dear Banjo,

I don't disagree with you on so many issues. I simply try to see things not simply just as black or white - but at the shades in between as well. And in this case - I simply can't get my mind around the fact that this man came here as a child, and has not known any other country but Australia. His family is here. Whatever possessed him to do what he chose to do who knows - the fact remains he is an
Australian in every thing but form as the author states. Why should another country take responsibility for him? To me that simply doesn't add up. It's not logical. And we're not accepting responsibility but trying to make it somebody else's problem. He wasn't a criminal when he immigrated. He became one in this country.
And that's our responsibility. As I see it at least.

Banjo:”Don’t you think we should expel any non-citizen crims? I do, they have thumbed their nose at our generosity.”

Yeah like if they came here and were all bad but from 6 years old?

Banjo:”A person has to be born here or applies for citizenship after being a permanant resident for minimum 4 years. Being resident here for 100 years does not make him a citizen. If he is a UK citizen, the Poms cannot refuse to take him.”

That is all official stuff… he’s more Aussie than anyone under 35 years old who was born here I reckon. 4 bloody years – after applying? WHY? Can you get turned down heaps and still stay or is not applying the safer option?

Banjo:”You said, on another thread, that the only advantage you could see in becoming a citizen was that you got to vote. Well here is another--- A citizen cannot be deported under any circunstances.”

Yes but I am terribly well behaved. :)

Banjo:”We did not make this bloke a crim, he made that choice”

This is saying Australia has no impact on its people, does not shape them or make who they are as adults.

This person who was brought here as an infant by his parents, on the invite of the Australian government; and because decades later he does not have a piece of citzenhip paper, he is deported.
He may have been antisocial, that required custodial sentences, but he paid the price for that.
What a sad state of affairs Australia is in, when it to come to human rights!

This person who was brought here as an infant by his parents, on the invite of the Australian government; and because decades later he does not have a piece of citzenhip paper, he is deported.
He may have been antisocial, that required custodial sentences, but he paid the price for that.
What a sad state of affairs Australia is in, when it to comes to human rights!

Have we forgotten that this man has children, who are most definitely Australian?

As long as we continue to pretend that our justice system is about reformation and rehabilitiation then we as a society owe it to his children at least (if not him), to give him the benefit of the doubt.

He might not be a pillar of our society (based solely upon his past deeds), but he is their father and in deporting this man we are denying these children a right to a continuing relationship with their father.

To me, that is just plain sad.

It is an indirect measure of the extent of the recent improvement in the quality of debate on OLO when articles attract first-time commenters, as this one has. Viewers of the 'Newest users' display ( http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/ ) will note that OLO's current newest registered user 'Saoirse' has posted in this thread. Freezing that event in time: http://twitpic.com/4nbebt

Welcome to OLO Saoirse.

In the light of the views expressed by the majority of posters so far, I feel compelled to re-state the last paragraph of my earlier post of Tuesday, 19 April 2011 at 10:13:20 AM, but without the opening word 'Perhaps':

"[T]his is yet another case in Australia,
where public and political responses to
great issues tend too often to flow from
robustly held misconceptions rather than
from reasoned argument, of a permanently
resident British subject being discriminated
against contrary to their possession of an
equality of status implicitly recognised
within the Constitution."

Just to contribute my little bit to sustaining a higher quality of debate on OLO, I feel obliged to confess to the plagiarism I have committed in the first half of that paragraph: the words used were lifted directly without acknowledgement from an earlier OLO article by this author, 'Farewell to an Honourable Jurist', published on 3 February 2009. See: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8497 . The plagiarised words are lifted from the second paragraph of that article.

My unstated hope in committing the plagiarism was that the origin of the words would be recognised by the author and/or other persons interested in the opportunity posed by this case to help dethrone a whole train of 'robustly held misconception' embodied in various pieces of ordinary legislation, such as, for example, the Australia Act 1986 referred to by the author in this article, purporting to constrain 'citizenship' in Australia.

The background of criminality in the case of Clifford Tucker is, I suspect, nothing but a (perhaps intended) distraction for the 'mug public' in order that certain robustly held misconceptions as to permanently resident British citizens rights may be given greater apparent 'force of law'.