Originally Posted by
Arctic Troll
This is an interesting one because the rules aren't actually that much different between the UK and Australia. It is just that in Australia you have to pay £200, prove your entitlement, then get a piece of paper to confirm your citizenship before you can then apply for that passport. In Britain, the citizenship is automatic and you prove your entitlement at the passport application stage, not before.
In both cases you only obtain citizenship by descent if your parent lives or lived in the country of citizenship. Having a British grandparent doesn't make you British if your parent never lived in the UK. It's the same in Australia; I have dual citizenship because I was born there to British parents and I have the citizenship by descent paperwork for my children. But they can't pass their citizenship on to their children unless they're living or have lived in Australia.
Yes but my point was that Australia's rules (for once) are relatively simple - nobody born outside Australia is a citizen until the Aus govt knows about them.
The UK has deemed thousands of people to be its citizens without any way of knowing they exist, and in many cases previously accepted them as foreign visitors. Yet now an obligation is imposed upon them, albeit (as you say in your last sentence) one that is difficult to enforce without voluntary disclosure.
Also, if you're an Australian citizen then you can't apply for an ESTA, even if you don't have an Australian passport. This isn't new, I found this out in 1995 when visiting Australia without my parents wanting to go through the faff of getting an Australian passport. Turns out I couldn't because the second my parents put where I was born on the form, the Australians rejected it.
If you mean an Australian ETA / tourist visa / eVisitor rather than an ESTA, yes obviously the system will reject if it detects you are a citizen, but some Aus citizens have been able to get ETAs/eVisitors on foreign passports.
As everyone born in Australia before 20 Aug 1986 is a citizen by birth, I can believe that they filter travel authorisation applications by DOB and birthplace, but it is not strictly correct to assume that all such people are citizens. Before 4 April 2002, Australian citizens lost their citizenship automatically if they voluntarily acquired another citizenship. (For a long time, the Home Affairs Department and its predecessors forgot to apply that rule when granting citizenship by descent and approving passports - meaning that some unlucky people who thought they were Aus citizens for decades had their citizenship abruptly stripped and passports cancelled. Restoration is possible but may take time and require visas to get back to Aus to locate documents etc.)