Senator SCHACHT (11:40 AM) —I appreciate that the officers do not have all the material here. As I said in the second reading debate, that is one of the difficulties of rushing through the legislation, but I trust that, by the time of the Senate estimates committee hearings in 12 days, they will be ready for a long session as we work our way through a lot of this material, because I suspect that, unfortunately, lots of individual cases in that grey area will start to emerge. I think that you are going to have a problem.

If they did not have an Australian passport or Australian citizenship available by the time the Second World War broke out, how can you define who was an Australian citizen domiciled in Australia? I suspect that, if this ends up in the AAT, even the best legal minds in Australia will start running into the problem of defining who was eligible as an Australian internee when there was no citizenship and where they stand in regard to a colony of PNG or of Nauru—there were civilian massacres in Nauru. I in no way oppose civilian internees getting the payment. I make that quite clear: I am not being difficult and saying that they should not get it. What I am afraid of is how you handle the definition of an Australian resident. You cannot say it is an Australian citizen, because they are British citizens. Does that mean that a British citizen who came to Australia before the Second World War and ended up in Hong Kong and was interned, as many of them were, for the rest of the war is able to make a claim? They are British citizens, and we were all British citizens at the time.