In all honesty, I think you’re missing a fundamental point:
Your average Caucasian Australian (and they are the majority of this country’s population) doesn’t want Ethnic Foreigners moving here. In fact, quite a few of them would prefer it if the Aboriginal population suddenly vanished tomorrow too. :eek:
Well, but that’s my whole point. The questions aren’t really relevant. So what? To what?
The questions aren’t meant to test whether the person has sufficient life skills to survive in Australia. For that, the test would have to be much longer, much harder and much less multiple choice.
It’s meant to be a simple, easily administered, cheap to mark way of determining whether people have vaguely passable English skills and enough intelligence and interest in the citizenship process to read a short book a couple of times. It’s not exactly a demanding standard.
Given the purpose of the test, the actual information in the questions isn’t important. They could be damned near anything, so the government chose a few random bits of history and cultural background to test. Would you really prefer that they had to pass a much harder but more relevant test? It might be a better gauge of whether they were prepared to be Australian citizens, but it would probably mean locking out even more of the people you want to see allowed to stay.
I strangely took the same time but got 12 correct despite my limited knowledge of Australia. Though the Olympic Torch question was much easier after reading this thread, Phar Lap was one of the options.
1)2-3 million people is not “all who come to it regardless of need or want”, which is what you claimed. There are 20 million refugees alone. And that means just the official refugees listed by the UN. That isn’t all the actual refugees, nor doe sit include those ho would become refugees if doing so didn’t simply make their position worse.
There would be at least 100 million people want to come to Australia. A figure of 1 billlion isn’t out of the question. The idea that Australia is wealthy enough to accomodate 100 miilion plus people is bullshit. The idea has sufficient resources to support that sort of growth is doubly bullshit.
Your idea that a nation can simply let in anyone who can get there, regardless of need and regardless of background or ability is Sesame Street type fantasy land stuff. It can’t work in the real world where people actually live.
I’m not going to get into whether we should have more immigrants or not, or where they should come from (which is a whole other argument). I actually DO think it would be great if they were questions, and therefore study, that would help people settle into living here. If it’s just a disguised language test, there are FAR better ways of doing this than forcing people to learn random factoids that most Australians either don’t know or wouldn’t care about.
As it happens, I had two friends recently become citizens after living here for a number of years (they’re from the UK and NZ, btw). They told me that the test was difficult, as it should be, and I agreed with them, thinking that the study for the test had given them a great understanding of Australia. Looking at these questions, I don’t see that being the case. In fact, you could use exactly the same questions, for the purposes that you’re suggesting, for citizenship for NZ, the USA, or any other English speaking country. A bit pointless, perhaps?
If the question is "what’s 1,000 times 1,000,000, then you’re absolutely right. If the question is “How many immigrants might Australia expect under an open border (okay, coast) policy?” then you’re insane.
Interesting update - they’re redesigning the Australian Citizenship Test because of many of the same reasons listed here.