2016] The Prevention and Reduction of Statelessness in Australia 469 description of ‘‘aliens’’’,72 Foster observes that the Court has ‘consistently resisted arguments that Parliament’s power is so limited’ in notable cases.73 It is possible that the Court would be more willing to intervene in a case of deprivation, as opposed to failure to confer nationality, and support for this proposition can be found in obiter comments. For example, in Re Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs; Ex parte Ame,74 Kirby J stated that: The deprivation of nationality, including nationality by birth and especially in cases affecting minority ethnic communities, has been such a common affront to fundamental rights that I would not, without strong persuasion, hold it to be possible under the Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth.75 Notwithstanding the possibility of future curial intervention,76 at present the Commonwealth Parliament enjoys considerable discretion in designing citizenship law and policy, including that pertaining to or affecting stateless72 Ibid, quoting Pochi v Macphee (1982) 151 CLR 101, 109 (Gibbs CJ). 73 Foster, ‘An ‘‘Alien’’ by the Barest of Threads’, above n 68, 503. We note the fascinating discussion by Gummow J in Al-Kateb v Godwin (2004) 219 CLR 562 about the relationship between constitutional interpretation and the late emergence of an understanding of statelessness. As his Honour acknowledged, ‘[a]t the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the phenomenon of ‘‘double nationality’’ was well understood, but that of the ‘‘stateless person’’ achieved significance only in the course of the twentieth century’: at 596 [80] (citations omitted). His Honour observed at 597 [83] (citations omitted): ‘The appellant’s status as a stateless person takes him outside the meaning given to the term ‘‘alien’’ in the joint judgment of six members of the Court in Nolan v Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs’. In that case, their Honours said at (1988) 165 CLR 178, 183, quoting Milne v Huber, 17 Fed Cas 403, 406 (Ohio Cir, 1843): As a matter of etymology, ‘alien’, from the Latin alienus through old French, means belonging to another person or place. Used as a descriptive word to describe a person’s lack of relationship with a country, the word means, as a matter of ordinary language, ‘nothing more than a citizen or subject of a foreign state’. In Al-Kateb v Godwin (2004) 219 CLR 562, Gummow J went on to consider at 597--8 [85] (citations omitted): Does that condition deny him the character of a constitutional ‘alien’? It is unnecessary to decide that question now, particularly in the absence of full argument. That is because, at all events, and as the respondents submitted, the appellant is within the reach of the immigration power in s 51(xxvii) and laws supported by that power. 74 (2005) 222 CLR 439. 75 Ibid 476--7 [96] (citations omitted). 76 For a very interesting exploration of the question whether the notion of ‘the people’ in the Preamble to the Constitution may operate as a constraint on legislative power in this area, see Elisa Arcioni, ‘The Core of the Australian Constitutional People ---- ‘‘The People’’ as ‘‘the Electors’’’ (2016) 39 University of New South Wales Law Journal 421, 443--6.