2022 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 4(2) another country by descent or naturalisation, they were born and remained stateless.20 The denial of automatic Australian citizenship to those born in the Territory of New Guinea was entirely consistent with international law. Upon the creation of ‘C’ mandates, the Indigenous inhabitants lost German nationality without automatically acquiring the nationality of the Mandatory.21 Similarly, it was not intended that their descendants would automatically acquire the Mandatory’s nationality.22 This continued to be the international law position in respect of the Indigenous inhabitants of the Territory of New Guinea after Australia’s League of Nations mandate was replaced by UN trusteeship.23 An amendment to the Nationality Act 1920–1946 (Cth) in 1946 softened this exclusion from nationality and allowed residence in New Guinea to count towards the residence qualification for Australian naturalisation. However, though ‘technically embracing all inhabitants of PNG’, the Australian Government reinforced racial divisions and announced that naturalisation would be granted only to persons ‘substantially (ie more than one half) of European extraction’.24 As Wolfe notes, race was (and remains) a ‘classificatory concept’ defined and deployed according to the form and needs of the colonial administration. Racial categories functioned to organise the subject populations hierarchically in relation to access to resources and how the law applied to them, as well as to distinguish those subject populations as both ‘different’ to those of the metropole and from each other.25 As Kim Rubenstein and Jacqueline Field note, the 1946 amendment and subsequent changes were targeted at people categorised as having ‘mixed racial origins’ and ‘Asians’ living within TPNG.26 These changes, which allowed these groups to apply for naturalised citizenship, were prompted in part by criticisms stemming from a UN visit to the Territory and in part by the Minister for Territories’ anxieties about the future prospects of these populations in an independent PNG. Paul Hasluck, who was Minister for Territories from May 1951 to December 1963, was keen to avoid the problems that he foresaw might arise if TPNG had a significant Asian population at the time it attained self-government and was also aware of the international pressure Australia faced in TPNG.27 In a submission to Cabinet in May 1962, he noted that there 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 A stateless person means ‘a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’: Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, opened for signature 28 September 1954, 360 UNTS 117 (entered into force 6 June 1960) art 1(1). This provision also reflects the customary international law definition: Michelle Foster and Hélène Lambert, ‘Statelessness as a Human Rights Issue: A Concept Whose Time Has Come’ (2016) 28(4) International Journal of Refugee Law 564, 566. H Duncan Hall, Mandates, Dependencies and Trusteeship (The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1948) 77–78; D P O’Connell, ‘Nationality in Class C Mandates’ (1954) 31 British Yearbook of International Law 458, 460–61. Hall (n 21) 77–78; O’Connell (n 21) 460–61. Alex C Castles, ‘International Law and Australia’s Overseas Territories’ in D P O’Connell (ed), International Law in Australia (Law Book Co 1965) 322. C Vening, ‘Citizenship Status of Mixed Race People in PNG’ (Document, archived at National Archives of Australia, A452, 1970/5934, 19 June 1972). Wolfe (n 5) 11. Rubenstein and Field (n 1) 104. Ian Downs, The Australian Trusteeship Papua New Guinea 1945–1975 (AGPS 1980) 197– 98. 218