From the first time I travelled overseas, almost 25 years ago now, I believed that my Australian passport meant something. I was ten and bursting with grown-up pride to have the blue document with the crest in my bag. I’ve spent most of my adult life out of the country, studying, travelling, working, living. And up to 18 months ago it never occurred to me that in doing so I was somehow invalidating my birth right. On the contrary, DFAT was always there to tell you what to do if you needed help. When I travelled through Africa a decade ago, I knew where our embassies were, and where they weren’t, I was told the Canadians, or the British, would be there if I needed it. To be an Australian was to be privileged and safe. It was nice to have that warm sense of security.

At uni I learned that Australia was the only western democracy without a human rights declaration. Not to worry, in theory there are implied rights for citizens in the constitution. Plus, international law stipulates that nationals have a right to return. Given Australia’s record with international law in general, that shouldn’t have been any reassurance.

On a forum several weeks ago, I was called entitled for wanting to come home and see my family. You’re damn straight I’m entitled. That’s literally what that passport is supposed to give you, entitlements. Otherwise, what is the bloody point? Citizenship is not only a privilege, it is a legal status, and it comes with rights, the most basic of which is a right to return.

Can you imagine if the rest of the world behaved as Australia has? If countries with populations in the tens or hundreds of millions suddenly decided to refuse their citizens abroad re-entry unless they could pay copious amounts of money to get in? If they were left to indefinitely depend on the charity of strangers in foreign lands for food and a roof over their head? If everyone behaved as selfishly and illegally as the Australian government, there would be chaos.

For me, the saddest part of this is I suspect that if other governments tried, their citizens would be in uproar for their fellow compatriots. Decades of rhetoric around ‘locking out’ threats has made the Australian public insular and cruel. I have always been an advocate for more humane immigration policies, always been ashamed by how Australia treated refugees, but even I never thought we’d abandon our own. How a government treats it’s least advantaged should concern everyone, because it is indicative of what they will do to you if they think they can get away with it.

Other ‘ideas’ I’ve come across are that certain Australians may be more deserving to come home than others. The keyboard warriors love to question whether someone is a ‘real’ citizen. I can’t say for certain what they mean, but I strongly suspect it has to do with the colour of people’s skin or how their voice sounds. It may make people (racists) feel better to tell themselves that they are ‘more Australian’ than others, but that doesn’t make it true. The hatred and vitriol that has been spat towards dual citizens or people of mixed heritage is appalling. Let me say it again, a citizen is a citizen. They have the exact same legal rights and status whether they were born in India, descended from the convicts, are Indigenous Australians, or third generation immigrants. Whether they hold a second or third passport or have never left the country. You can repeat as many times as you want this idea that there are ‘true aussies’, but it doesn’t make it fact. The only people who could arguably claim an increased right to anything are indigenous persons, and funnily enough I haven’t seen any of them advocating for abandoning fellow nationals.

By some stroke of amazing timing I became a naturalised French citizen in 2019, and it is somewhat of a relief to now carry a passport for a country that I know will protect me. But I am first and foremost and always will be, an Australian. It is the land of my birth, where I grew up, where my family is. It defines who I am as much as being a woman, partner, daughter, sister, friend. You don’t get to tell me that because I fell into an expat life years ago, because I now have ties to another country, I am no longer what I have always been.

Australians overseas keep hearing ‘you should have come home’, ‘you shouldn’t have left’, ‘you should have stayed’. First of all, we were never explicitly told to come home or risk being locked out. But you know what? The bigger issue is that someone should have told me my passport meant shit all. Australians should have been informed that unlike other nations, their government would not respect citizens rights.

When this is all over, when international travel resumes to something resembling normal, every Australian leaving the country should do it with the knowledge that if shit hits the fan, you are on your own. Never again can we allow Australians to leave for abroad with the false sense of security that if there is trouble, you will always have a place to call home.

As I woke up two weeks ago, rolled over and checked my phone, my heart sank, and a huge rock appeared in my stomach, as once again Australia indefinitely limited arrival caps for its citizens. 

In the last 18 months my father has been diagnosed with stage 3 cancer, two elderly relatives have been taken seriously ill, my two best childhood friends have had their first babies… the list goes on and on and mine is just one of thousands. 

As an Australian living overseas for the past decade, representing the country in two international organisations, I have held tight to ties to the motherland. 2020 was the first year I did not return home. In 2018 I boarded a flight back to say goodbye to my mother after she lost a decades-long battle with illness. I feel sick with the thought that so many have been unable to make that trip, unable to give a loved one, one last hug, unable to say goodbye. Their position is far more arduous than mine. 

Despite the longing, I chose not to spend the tens of thousands required to come home. It felt wrong to be taking a place from those more desperate than me, felt sick to have to bid my way into a country that is legally obliged to protect me, felt wrong to move even if I could afford it, given the state of the world. Yet I watched aghast as businessmen and tennis players flew in and out, movie stars arrived and strolled our sun-kissed shores, Tony Abbott came and went at his leisure.  

All this while European countries sent repatriation flights around the world to bring their people home, and the country where I was living, France, declared they would never lock out citizens. With time I realised that the caps, the rules, the quarantine, none of them applied if you were rich enough, influential enough, well-connected. Scott Morrison never gave a shit about returning Aussies home in time for Christmas. The system was always designed to benefit those who could pay their way in (and out again). 

At some point we must ask ourselves, if there are Australian children sleeping on airport floors, families living in caravans off charity, people with months left to live, continuously being kicked off flights, while Zac Efron relocates to Byron for the lifestyle- what have we become?

To the Facebook ‘patriots’ raging about how we had the chance to come home, how we were warned, how we have somehow relinquished our right to citizenship because we were abroad. There was NO instruction to expats in March 2020 that they should repatriate. I do not know where this myth came from. Travelers were advised to return as some countries didn’t have the same level of healthcare. But in March 2020 I was settled in a country where I had a permanent job, a home, a partner, and a health care system that leaves Australia’s to shame. The idea that expats should have known that if they did not uproot their lives, leave jobs, say goodbye to partners then and there, or they would not be able to return home for years, was never considered. No one knew how long this would last, how insulated Australia would become, how it would fail to facilitate repatriation or quarantine for its citizens, how abominably behind it would be in its vaccination program. 

You are not more worthy an Australian than I, or thousands of others, because you happened to be there in March 2020. You are not more deserving of the rights that come with citizenship because you did not move overseas, fall in love with a foreigner, take a diplomatic role, have children, work for an NGO, buy a house, build a home… You do not have some invisible, self-congratulatory + next to the Kangaroo and Emu crest because your life circumstances were different. You are not more entitled to the protection of your country than I.

In every Australian Passport there is a message from the Governor General, “… allow the bearer, an Australian Citizen, to pass freely without let or hindrance and afford him or her every assistance and protection”. It doesn’t say ‘to pass freely if you can afford it’, ‘if you never dared to leave at the wrong time’, ‘if you know the right people in the Liberal Party.’.. Citizenship is not only a privilege, but also a right, and it comes with a contract that BOTH SIDES are supposed to fulfil.

Three months ago I booked a December ticket home, knowing I would be fully vaccinated, prepared to do some sort of quarantine, assuming by then the government would have got their shit together and Australians would be vaccinated, or there would be some sort of dedicated facilities that allowed for a humane isolation. Given that by that point the pandemic would almost be at the 2-year mark, it seemed a reasonable assumption. 

Now that looks increasingly unlikely, due to mismanagement, absolute arrogance, confounding incompetence and a complete lack of humanity. It’s possible I may go another 18 months before I set foot on home soil. That’s 3 years without hugging my dad or my brother, the possibility of never again seeing elderly relatives, not meeting my best friends’ children until they are nearly school-aged. If you think I deserve this because a decade ago I took a job overseas, than there is something fundamentally wrong with your heart and your brain.

The extent to which misplaced Australian exceptionalism has thrived during this period is perhaps one of the scariest long-term impacts the nation will be left with. In a society that was already becoming increasingly insular and sneering, this is what frightens me the most for the future of my beloved sunburnt country.