Swinburne Research Bank http://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au Author: Mascitelli, Bruno; Battiston, Simone Title: Challenging the Australian government approach towards expatriate voting: the case of Italy Year: 2009 Journal: Australian Journal of Political Science Volume: 44 Issue: 3 Pages: 513-519 URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/69553 Copyright: Copyright © 2009 Australian Political Studies Association. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Australian Journal of Political Science on 04 Aug 2009, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/f ull/10.1080/10361140903067276. This is the author’s version of the work, posted here with the permission of the publisher for your personal use. No further distribution is permitted. You may also be able to access the published version from your library. The definitive version is available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/10361140903067276 Swinburne University of Technology | CRICOS Provider 00111D | swinburne.edu.au Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) Challenging the Australian Government approach towards expatriate voting: The case of Italy Bruno Mascitelli and Simone Battiston Abstract In 1999 the Australian Government dropped its objections to the Italian legislation which contemplated postal voting and parliamentary representation for its Italian citizens resident abroad. This was a significant turning point for the Australian Government approach on the question of voting rights for expatriate communities in Australia voting in their homeland elections. Based on undisclosed Government sources and interviews with former Australian diplomatic and Government officials, this paper will recall and examine the Australian Government’s reaction to the Italian political debates leading up to, and eventual passage of, the Italian expatriate vote legislation. Introduction In the early 2000s, the Italian legislation governing the vote to Italian expatriates was radically transformed. New legislation in Italy saw expatriate Italians granted the right to postal voting and parliamentary representation in Italian elections. The new legislation made the exercise of overseas voting not only accessible to virtually all eligible voters through postal voting, but most importantly it created an overseas constituency and representation for the Italian Parliament.1 The impact of the new legislation on Italian expatriate voting was particularly felt in the 2006 elections when for the first time 18 ‘expatriate’ representatives were elected in Italy’s parliament, including two (one in the Chamber of Deputies and one in the Senate) from the Africa-Asia-Oceania-Antarctica electoral college. The Italian expatriate vote was also one of the decisive features of the election, helping provide the winning centre-left coalition with a slender majority in the Senate (Battiston & Mascitelli 2008a). The Australian government’s response to the implementation of the Italian expatriate vote, from the late 1990s was one of non-interference. This was however a departure from an earlier position of opposition to the Italian legislation. Despite several studies in the area of citizenship and dual citizenship in Australia (Davidson 1997, Chesterman & Galligan 1999, Hudson & Kane 2000, Betts 2002, Brown 2002, Rubenstein 2008) scholars have yet to come to terms with the impact of foreign expatriate voting in Australia. Only recently the literature has begun delving into the Italian case study (Mascitelli & Battiston 2008a, 2008b; Panichi 2008a; 2008b). Yet, in recent years there have been a growing number of countries that pushed to enfranchise their citizens living permanently abroad, including some giving a special representation in their national parliaments, among those France and Portugal (Bauböck 2005). While stressing that world migration was indeed changing the traditional understanding of democratic citizenship from a nation-state perspective, López-Guerra (2005, 234) warned that the possession of citizenship by expatriates should not necessarily entail the exercise of political (i.e. voting) rights, as ‘participation in a democratic process should be restricted to those who will be subject to the rulings of that Government’. So what has been the response of governments of expatriate-receiving countries to this phenomenon? This paper is chiefly based on declassified Government sources obtained under the provisions of the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act (1982). The collection made available to the authors by means of FoI (Ref. 68/F07) comprises correspondence to and from Australian and Italian Government institutions from April 1994 to March 2007. Along with FoI sources, the authors interviewed former and current Australian diplomatic and government officials, such as Lance Joseph, Rory Steele, Murray Cobban, and Amanda Vanstone. An interview by ABC Radio National journalist to former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Alexander Downer was also utilised.2 Diaspora parliaments: the Australian Government’s perspective Prompted by the need to act in response to Italy’s legislative proposal to offer Italians abroad the right to vote and representation in the Italian parliament, the then Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) prepared in March 1996 an internal report entitled Diaspora Parliaments: The Issues and Implications for Australia. Australia conceded that one of the cornerstones of its multicultural policy, namely, the basic tenet that naturalised migrants would solely and primary identify with Australia, their adoptive country, was under challenge.3 According to FoI sources, the attitude of the Commonwealth Government towards expatriate voting rights and representation was of no objection to expatriates of other countries who had (and exercised) the right to vote in domestic constituencies of those countries.4 The proviso was as long as the voting arrangements for foreign nationals did not contravene the Commonwealth and local by-laws of Australia. Countries such as the Portugal had been making periodical voting arrangements for their nationals resident abroad, Australia included. The expatriate voting arrangements discussed by the Italian Parliament in the 1990s, which also envisaged the creation of an overseas constituency was, however, a step up in this understanding. It prompted the creation of an Inter-Departmental Committee (IDC), chaired by the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs and included the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Attorney-General’s Department (A-Gs), the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) and the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC).5 The IDC was convened once in 1993 and again in 1997 and 1998. It was given the task of codifying the policy on the matter. ‘The dreaded voting abroad issue has returned’ It is important to highlight the bipartisan approach of the Australian government to the issue of overseas constituencies and the undermining effect it may have caused to the government’s multicultural policies. In 1993 the Labour Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, Senator Nick Bolkus, stated in discussions with members of the Italian-Australian community that the Australian government would not sanction Australian citizens running for the parliament of another country while still resident in Australia. Nor would it sanction the conduct of elections to foreign parliaments when those processes could be viewed as taking place within Australia.6 Although the Minister may have made these comments, the Ambassador at the time, Lance Joseph was of the view that the Minister’s visit and discourse was not a high priority of concern by either the Minister or the Cabinet.7 The fact that Australian citizens could stand for elections conducted by foreign governments and sit in foreign parliaments was the heart of the matter. So much so that the Australian Government feared – astonishingly predicting in part what happened in the Italian elections of 2006 – that “an Australian resident, possibly with dual citizenship, could come to hold the balance of power in the Italian parliament and be tempted to use that power to induce the Italian Government to intervene in issues of an Australian domestic character”.8 The legislative odyssey of the Italian expatriate voting legislation was a particularly long one. Several similar proposals had been circulating through the Italian houses of parliament as early as 1955. For decades the chances of the proposed legislation on Italian expatriate finding a majority looked slim. In the early 1990s there was a renewed vigour by a growing number of Italian politicians to bring about this new legislation, a move that provoked the concern of the Australian and other governments. In September 1995, the Australian Ambassador in Rome, Lance Joseph, writing to the West Europe Branch of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), alerted his superiors that the voting rights for Italian citizens abroad was back on the agenda.9 In early 1996 a relieved Ambassador Joseph communicated to Canberra that the Italian government was in the throes of another political crisis and that the dissolution of the Italian parliament meant that pending legislation designed to extend the vote to Italians living abroad had lapsed.10 It was almost a joyful Ambassador who realised that the whole process of re-proposing the legislation would need to start afresh after the April 1996 poll. Only months after the 1996 Italian election, right-wing National Alliance MP, Mirko Tremaglia, tabled