Chris Watson, 3rd Prime Minister of Australia, born in Chile to a Chilean German and a New Zealander, what was his citizenship and what were the requirements to be Prime Minister at the time?
I don’t know that it’s entirely clear even now, although it seems he wasn’t British. At the time he claimed British citizenship, and I assume that was simply accepted as true, presuming it was even questioned. The concept of Australian citizenship did not come into existence until 1949, well after Watson’s premiership.
Then, as now, to be Prime Minister he simply needed to be elected to the House of Representatives and, as leader of his party, be requested by the Governor-General to form a government. Nowadays Australian citizenship would be a requirement for election. In Watson’s time British citizenship would have sufficed. The Constitution disqualifies from election those who are subjects or citizens of a foreign power (section 44(i)). The UK is now considered to be a foreign power for the purposes of section 44(i), following the decision of the High Court in Sue v Hill [1999] HCA 30. That was not the case in Watson’s time.
According to Wikipedia, during his live Watson passed as the son of a British seaman, George Watson. If true, this would have made him a British subject. At the time there was no separate Australian citizenship, so any British subject resident in Australia* could stand for Parliament and, potentially, become Prime Minister.
(* Except aboriginals, but that is a different - and complicated - story.)
On what are probably the true facts, Watson was not a British subject from birth - having a mother who was a British subject was not, in itself, enough, and in any event his mother would have lost her British subject status on marrying her Chilean/German husband. Given his British ancestry (through his mother) and his long residence in New Zealand and Australia, it would have been straightforward for him to have obtained naturalisation as a British subject, though.
I don’t think this thread is old enough to be a zombie.
It’s now known that Watson was born in Chile, so presumably he was a Chilean citizen, and never renounced that citizenship. Since his father was German, he may also have been a German citizen, and not renounced that. Either Chilean citizenship or German citizenship would have been enough to make him ineligible to be a member of the Australian House of Representatives, and hence ineligible to be Prime Minister of Australia.
However, these facts were not known at the time: either Chris Watson or his mother successfully concealed the facts of his birth, and so there was no challenge in the High Court of Australia. So he remains the first Labor prime minister of any country.
Aboriginals couldn’t stand for Parliament? I confess that this doesn’t really surprise me, given my (limited) knowledge of the history of Aboriginals in Australia, but I’d be interested in hearing the details. I assume this is no longer the case?
At least some Aboriginal people could vote and stand for Parliament as from Federation in 1901, according to the Wikipedia article. There’s nothing in the Australian Constitution specifically denying them the vote, but at least some could not vote because of state laws in Queensland and Western Australia until the 1960s. The first Aboriginal federal parliamentarian was Senator Neville Bonner, who was in the Senate from 1970 to 1983 – ironically, representing Queensland, which had given the vote to Aboriginal people only in 1965.