Many read­ers of this site are expa­tri­ates of some kind. For var­i­ous rea­sons they have cho­sen to live beyond their native bor­ders. Some are absent from home for a fairly short time before head­ing back with a quota of after-din­ner tales. For oth­ers, home is where their bed is, and the point of child­hood depar­ture is a dis­tant mem­ory.

I hap­pen to have started life as an Aus­tralian. The iden­tity tag, ‘Aus­tralian’, still has some res­o­nance for me, although not quite in the way your aver­age Bruce in a Syd­ney leagues club would under­stand it. Now it has dawned on the Aus­tralian Par­lia­ment that out of twenty mil­lion cit­i­zens, around 800,000 of us are folk like me — liv­ing away from ‘home’. This has led the Hon­ourable Mem­bers to won­der a lit­tle how (or whether) they should account for the inter­ests of these scat­tered brethren. To that end, the Legal and Con­sti­tu­tional Com­mit­tee of the Aus­tralian Sen­ate has been accept­ing sub­mis­sions on “The Sta­tus of Aus­tralian Expa­tri­ates”. My sub­mis­sion below may inter­est some folk. Since it has now been tabled in the Aus­tralian Par­lia­ment, it can be viewed on the web­site of that par­lia­ment at http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/legcon_ctte/expats03/submissions/sub437.pdf , while links to a full list of sub­mis­sions to the inquiry can be seen at http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/legcon_ctte/expats03/submissions/sublist.htm . Note that all of these sub­mis­sions are cov­ered by par­lia­men­tary priv­i­lege (i.e. their author’s have full legal pro­tec­tion for what­ever they may have sub­mit­ted).