Commonwealth Citizenship
Under United Kingdom law, Australians are Commonwealth citizens and hence are entitled to certain rights in the UK:
- access to the UK Working Holiday visa program
- for those with a UK-born grandparent, access to the UK Ancestry Entry Clearance
- for those born before 1983 who have a UK-born mother or are women who were married before 1 January 1983 to a man with the right of abode in the UK, the right of abode (those born before 1983, whether Commonwealth citizens or not, with a UK-born father are generally British citizens by descent)
- for those living the UK, the right to vote and stand for public office there.
Australian citizens also have the freedom to live and work in New Zealand under the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement.
Read more about this topic: Australian Nationality Law
Famous quotes containing the words commonwealth and/or citizenship:
“By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.”
—O. Henry [William Sydney Porter] (1862–1910)