Decades old flaw in Australian citizenship laws cost man his job

After living his entire life in Australia, a Victorian man was told two weeks ago a casualty of a decades old flaw in our citizenship laws.

Transcript

00:00 A classic Australian childhood with Australian parents in a classic suburban Australian home.

00:07 This is where I grew up and this used to be my home.

00:11 Glen Keogh has lived here in Victoria his whole life, but was last week told he's not

00:15 an Australian citizen.

00:17 Yeah, I was devastated, you know.

00:20 Glen approached Home Affairs last year after seeing news reports about a little-known law

00:24 which meant anyone who applied to be the citizen of another country automatically gave up their

00:29 Australian citizenship.

00:31 Section 17 was repealed in 2002, but it wasn't repealed retrospectively, leaving Glen worried

00:38 because he'd applied for Irish citizenship in the early 90s.

00:42 I got a response that I wasn't expecting and that was that potentially my citizenship would

00:48 be cancelled and that it would be backdated to 1991.

00:54 He immediately applied for his citizenship to be resumed and went six months with no

00:58 answer and was even stood down by his workplace over concerns about his right to work as a

01:03 non-citizen.

01:04 Today, two hours after sharing his story on ABC radio, he received a phone call from Home

01:10 Affairs.

01:11 I've got a confirmation from Home Affairs that my citizenship application to resume

01:17 has been approved.

01:19 Stoked.

01:20 Absolutely.

01:21 Yeah.

01:22 Grateful and stoked.

01:23 Yeah.

01:24 The government left him in limbo for so long and is worried others are at risk.

01:28 I'm not okay with losing 33 years of my life or my citizenship just because of this.

01:37 I think this needs to be addressed.

01:40 Legal experts called for this flaw to be fixed more than a year ago.

01:44 Until there is either a formal court decision about some of these cases or a decision by

01:50 the government of the day to really resolve these anomalies in practice, we're going to

01:57 see this happen again and again and again.

01:59 [BLANK_AUDIO]