Chinese In Australia Will Be Forced Into Citizenship!

     (Kos Samara’s post from the FACEBOOK on 14 May2026.)

(Opposition Leader) Angus Taylor’s Budget in reply. Why has he just turned the blow torch on Chinese Australians? “You cannot access certain government services (such as Age Pension, Dole, and Carer Allowances, etc.) if you are not an Australian citizen, even if you are granted permanent residency.”

The core issue is simple: China does not recognise dual nationality. Under Article 3 of China’s Nationality Law, China does not recognise dual nationality for any Chinese national. Article 9 goes further, any Chinese national who has settled abroad and voluntarily acquires foreign nationality automatically loses their Chinese nationality.

No other major country Australia takes migrants from has this strict a rule. So for a China-born Chinese Australian, taking Australian citizenship is not an administrative step. It is, in legal terms, a severing.

It can mean losing or seriously complicating access to:

– Property, inheritance, bank accounts, pensions, and business interests in China,

– Family obligations under the hukou household registration system, which governs identity, services and local entitlements

For many it is also emotional. Citizenship is tied to parents, birthplace, ancestry and family duty. Becoming an Australian on paper can feel like, or be seen by relatives as, a formal cutting of the cord. It was for many post WW2 migrants too.

Australian permanent residency already gives the right to live, work, study, own property, use Medicare and build a life here. The marginal benefit of citizenship is small. The cost of losing Chinese nationality is not.

That is why a large number of Chinese-Australian households deliberately keep at least one family member as a Chinese citizen. It is risk management, keeping the family’s legal foothold in China intact. It is not disloyalty.

Compare this to every other migrant community in Australia. Lebanese, Iraqi, Turkish, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, European, African, Latin American, Pacific, overwhelmingly, the countries they came from permit dual citizenship. Muslim Australians from those source countries can naturalise without losing anything. So can virtually every other group.

China is the outlier. So Chinese Australians are the ones who pay the cost and who he seems to be targeting. The political consequence is significant. A suburb can have a large, settled, economically integrated Chinese-Australian population, and a voting-age citizen footprint that is materially smaller than the raw demographic count suggests. Permanent residents cannot enrol to vote. They are deeply embedded in Australia, but absent from the electoral roll.

Now overlay Angus Taylor’s values-based migration agenda, citizenship as the test of belonging, the Australian Values Statement as a binding visa condition, naturalisation as the proof of loyalty. That framework falls hardest on the one major migrant community where taking Australian citizenship means losing legal ties to your parents’ country. Every other community can naturalise freely. Chinese Australians cannot, not without real legal and family cost.

When Taylor escalates the citizenship-as-loyalty framework, the group it disproportionately punishes is obvious. This is what an anti-China policy looks like in practice, even when it is not named as one. Clearly, he has decided that they no longer have a future in Sydney or Melbourne.

Cry me a river: Take it up with Xi Jinping.

Angus Taylor is bang on correct. Non-citizens should not have the right to the Australian welfare system. If you’re moving to Australia from another country to permanently live here then you need to put Australia first if you want all of the benefits that go with being Australian.

If your country of origin does not allow you to be a dual citizen, then take that up with the other country. But do your want to remain where you were? Or do you want to become Australian?

And for the record, Australia for a long time wouldn’t allow emigrants from Australia to other countries to adopt their new nation’s citizenship without losing their Australian citizenship in the process. I’m not sure when that was changed, but I think it was sometime after 2000. I know this because I was born in New Zealand to an Australian mother. That is how I am born an immigrant and a 4th or 5th generation Australian.

All I can say is that if you truly want to be Australian then you have got to be prepared to leave the country you came from behind. And with that I’ll add: GO WALLABIES! I will be cheering for the Wallabies to defeat the All Blacks in the next Bledisloe Cup.

Advance Australia Fair!