Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has suggested that migrants could lose their citizenship if they are found to express hatred toward Australia, Australian values, or groups within Australia.

Reading his recent comments, it appears extreme cases of hate speech would be seen as invalidating the oath of allegiance which all migrants take to become citizens.

Mr Dutton suggested this revision of migration laws during the Advertiser’s Future SA conference.

‘If somebody commits a terrorist act against our country they have broken their allegiance with our country, and we have laws which allow the stripping of citizenship from people who commit terrorist attacks, but the High Court has limited the application,’ said Mr Dutton.

The issue of imported ideological hatred, in particular, Antisemitism, has been at the front of the news cycle since two nurses formally of Bankstown Hospital, Sydney, were caught on a viral video allegedly threatening to harm and kill Jewish patients in their care. This incident took place days after the federal government rushed through hate speech legislation that included mandatory sentencing and the loosening of ‘intent’ to ‘recklessness’. Instead of universal condemnation, a handful of political figures and an alarming number of Islamic organisations have failed to properly reject these beliefs to the satisfaction of the wider Australian public.

It has been observed that the bulk of Antisemitic hate is coming from sections of the Islamic community who have had historic religious grudges inflamed in the aftermath of the war between Israel and Palestine.

This culminated in disgraceful scenes on the steps of the Sydney Opera House where violent threats were shouted by a crowd of pro-Palestinians, and later, over the course of months and years, where thousands of individuals have taken to the streets of Australia’s major cities flying flags that belong to terrorist groups, clutching portraits of terrorist leaders, and shouting genocidal slogans.

Australians have been wondering what on Earth they welcomed into their country.

Helping refugees was never meant to include offering their problems a seat on the life raft.

Peter Dutton has suggested changes to the Constitution to ensure that the Migration Act can be properly applied.

‘There is provision under the Migration Act which allows for a revision of a decision being made to grant citizenship in narrow circumstances where people have made a false declaration,’ Mr Dutton continued, before describing his anguish at visiting the Jewish community at Central Synagogue.

‘I don’t care whether it’s the Jewish people, whether it’s Indians, whether it’s people of Greek descent, whether it’s Asian Australians, whether it’s atheists or Catholics or anybody in between, I’m not going to stand by and watch a segment of our population be vilified, and the racism that we’ve seen, the Antisemitism that we’ve seen, needs to be stamped out.

‘The priority is that we live in the best country in the world, we want to preserve it … we have an amazing migration story of which we should be incredibly proud but about which we don’t talk nearly enough. We have to bring the best people into our country, and there are literally millions of people from the four corners of the Earth lined up to come to our country for many reasons, and we should be welcoming the best of them, and we have in the past.

‘We have to have a meaning to the commitment that those people make when they sign up to be an Australian citizen.

‘When you make the declaration, when you turn up to the citizenship ceremony, and you [make the] pledge of allegiance to our country, if it turns out at that point, or at some subsequent point, that you actually hate our country, or that you hate a segment of our country, or that you would seek to do harm to our country, then I think there is a serious question for our country to ask as to whether that is an acceptable position. My proposition is that it’s not. I am prepared to do what it takes to make our country safe and to uphold the values that people adhere to when they sign up for Australian citizenship. I think the Constitution is the barrier … if we need to amend the Constitution, then I think that is a debate that our country is mature enough to have.’

The Blue Ribbon base will be pleased to hear that the Coalition are considering making changes to protect the status of citizenship.

Whether it can be done is another question.

What about the ABC backlash? Any assumption that migrants harbour hate or anti-Australian behaviour will be met with shrieks of racism just as One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson faced.

We also have to have faith the Coalition can withstand accusations of ‘wasting money’ in a financial crisis by staging a referendum, which will surely be Labor’s sidestep if their first response fails.

Then we have wonder about the result of the referendum. In 2023, 30.7 per cent of Australians were born overseas, and that figure has risen sharply with over a million people coming in the last few years. Even as early as 2021, 48.5 per cent were third generation or thereabouts. Will migrants vote to weaken the legal certainty of citizenship?

Mr Dutton’s instinct that something has to be done is correct. The horror of Europe is a glimpse of our future if we continue to ignore deepening and increasingly vocal hatreds on the streets of our country.

For too long, Australia has been living a Utopian lie in regards to its migration plan when instead it should have heeded the warnings of past Prime Ministers who managed migration with the experience of conflict.

Europe deserves some sympathy with its land borders, but Australia is in a predicament created entirely by successive Labor and Liberal governments and they should wear all of the criticism for what happens next. It is not the fault of the Australian people who have never been offered the opportunity to vote on the topic of migration or the loss of their cultural identity.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton may be able to win a referendum on citizenship, if it is held sooner rather than later, but the biggest question is whether or not the Coalition is prepared to defy the international human rights courts and other bureaucracies which will do everything in their power to keep Western nations in a state of civil and social turmoil.

If Mr Dutton could not bring himself to walk away from the Climate Cult, refused to cross the belligerent World Health Organisation, and has shown no stomach to stand up to the United Nations, what hope can we have that Australia will follow through and deport those who come to this country under false pretences?