What's the score with all those Poms?

A bigger issue for citizenship is, or ought to be, the anomaly that permits as many as 300,000 British subjects to have all the rights of Australian citizenship without having to sign up. Most famous among this group was Nicky Downer, the wife of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer. She acquired citizenship in 1995, only after Labor exposed the fact that although she was married to the then leader of the opposition, and thus could potentially be the wife of the prime minister, she was not Australian. Moreover, such was her attachment to her British citizenship that she went back to England to have one of her children to ensure that the child was British.

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