Should Poms be denied the vote?
What with 'Utegate' and its ongoing aftermath (does anyone agree, by the way, that journalists should contribute to a kind of suffix swear box every time they attach 'gate' to a scandal?), it's been easy to miss what is incontrovertibly the really big story to emerge from Canberra this week: the attempt to strip my fellow compatriots of the vote in Australian federal elections.
It's a little-known electoral fact (and this isn't a fake blog, I promise you) but British subjects resident in Australian prior to 1984 can still vote in federal elections - along, by the way, with the citizens of 48 Commonwealth and former Commonwealth countries whose names were on the electoral roll before the laws were changed. No other non-citizens of Australia enjoy this privilege.
It's a not insignificant number of voters: 162,928 to be precise. And their geographic distribution makes them even more influential.
There are eight parliamentary constituencies that harbour more than 2,500 non-Australian noters. A further 62 have more than a 1,000. Put another way, voters with a 'British subject' notation on the electoral roll are a significant presence in almost half of Australia's 150 parliamentary constituencies.
In a close election, resident Poms who have never taken up Australian citizenship could feasibly exert a disproportionate influence on the outcome.
Now the Labor MP Daryl Melham wants to end this fancy franchise. He's the chairman of a parliamentary committee looking into electoral reform, and thinks it is high time to revisit this anomaly.
What's he's proposing is an end to 'British subject' voting by 2014, which will give permanent residents enough time, he reckons, to become fully-fledged citizens and thus retain their right to vote.
'Fair suck of the sav,' he told me from Canberra earlier on (using a colloquial forerunner of Kevin Rudd's famed 'fair shake of the sauce bottle').
'We still love you guys, but not enough for you to keep the right to vote.'
There's been a lot of this kind of constitutional and legal housekeeping since the war.
Up until January 26 1949, Australians were British subjects. The word 'British' survived on the front cover of an Australian passport until the late 1960s. It was not until the mid-1980s that Australians lost their right of legal appeal to the Privy Council in the UK. It was not until 1984 that Advance Australia Fair became the national anthem, and replaced 'God Save the Queen.' A Briton with dual citizenship could be a member of the Australian parliament until 1999, when the High Court disqualified citizens of a 'foreign power'.
So is it time to sever yet another of those links with Britain?
PS: There's a very lively thread still underway on 'Utegate' (that's another dollar in suffix box), many of which focus on the unlikeliness of this row. Who would have thought Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, two of the richest men in parliament, would be arguing over a ute?
I'm 
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