Protecting Australian Protected Persons On PNG’s side, the decision to impose strict criteria to qualify for automatic citizenship in the new nation-state’s constitution threatened to exclude specific categories of TPNG inhabitants, determined largely by race. As Edward P Wolfers noted in 1977, the colonial world in the separate pre-war territories of Papua and New Guinea, as well as the post-war combined Territory of Papua and New Guinea, was divided by race, loosely defined-into ‘Europeans’ or ‘expatriates’; Asians (more than 90 per cent of whom were Chinese or Malay); mixed race; and ‘natives’, ‘indigenes’, ‘locals’, ultimately ‘Papua New Guineans’.7 In its August 1974 report (compiled after extensive consultations with people throughout TPNG),8 PNG’s Constitutional Planning Committee (‘CPC’) maintained and relied upon these racial categories. The CPC report recommended that a person born in TPNG prior to independence should automatically become a PNG citizen, provided that they had at least two Indigenous grandparents (defined as a grandparent all of whose own grandparents were born in PNG or an adjacent area) and that they did not have the ‘real’ citizenship of a foreign country. The final version of the Constitution of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea (‘PNG Constitution’) softened the qualification for automatic citizenship from having at least two Indigenous grandparents to simply having at least two grandparents who were born in PNG or an adjacent area. While this reduced the number of people born in PNG who would fail to qualify for automatic citizenship, it still left a significant number of people disenfranchised on, effectively, a racial basis. On the Australian side, successive governments had been keen not to draw the ire of the UN and had begun moving away from racialised categories of governance in TPNG since the early 1960s.9 The Whitlam Government’s overt renunciation of the ‘White Australia’ policy in 1973 embraced an expectation that TPNG would be ‘a fully independent member of the UN and of the Commonwealth of Nations’ sooner rather than later.10 Independence for TPNG was also the preference of the UN and, in Gough Whitlam’s view, ensuring that outcome as quickly as possible was necessary to protect Australia’s international reputation.11 Despite this shift, the legacy of racialised governance left an 7 8 9 10 11 Edward P Wolfers, ‘Defining a Nation: The Citizenship Debates in the Papua New Guinea Parliament’ in Frank S Stevens and Edward P Wolfers (eds), Racism: The Australian Experience: A Study of Race Prejudice in Australia (Australia and New Zealand Book Company, 2nd edn, 1977) vol 3, 301. See Jonathan Ritchie, ‘Making Their Own Law: Popular Participation in the Development of Papua New Guinea’s Constitution’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2003) (‘Making Their Own Law’); Jonathan Ritchie, ‘Defining Citizenship for a New Nation: Papua New Guinea, 1972–1974’ (2013) 48(2) The Journal of Pacific History 144 (‘Defining Citizenship for a New Nation’); Jonathan Ritchie, ‘From the Grassroots: Bernard Narokobi and the Making of Papua New Guinea’s Constitution’ (2020) 55(2) The Journal of Pacific History 235 (‘From the Grassroots’). See Paul Hasluck, ‘Citizenship Status of Mixed Blood People in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea’ (Cabinet Submission, archived at National Archives of Australia, A6980/S251217, 23 February 1960): On balance, it is thought that citizenship and the right of entry to Australia should be granted to individuals as the result of a judgment on their individual suitability. That is, we should apply social tests rather than racial tests. Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 10 October 1972, 2300 (Edward Gough Whitlam). ibid, 2298. 215