Petition combined and presented to parliament

Hi Folks, If you go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/1640101622668767/ you'll be able to view a copy of a position paper to be delivered to parliament. It was written by a few people that have created other petitions with the intention of finding a single unified position that all the various petitions on this issue can agree upon. Together this adds up to around 50,000 unique signatories. Well done everyone! Fortunately, the position in the attached paper almost exactly matches the position of the petition you've all signed through this group, with a little more elaboration of certain points. In our honest opinion, it's a well written paper that anyone who has signed our petition would struggle to find anything to disagree with, although of course we wouldn't expect 100% of signatories to have phrased the argument in the exact way it is phrased in the paper! Given what you've signed, we're confident that nearly everyone would agree with the two central points of the paper; namely: 1. That any proposed changes to the laws shouldn't take effect until Royal Assent is given to the Act (assuming it passes parliament) 2. That anyone making an application for citizenship in the three years beginning on the commencement day of the Act not be subject to the amendments - this is same as giving an exemption to all existing temporary and permanent migrants. (Any new migrants would require a minimum of 4 years in the country either way, so couldn't benefit from the exemption) The only 'amendments' that the paper takes issue with are focused on the government's proposal to 'increase the general residence requirement' to four years as a Permanent Resident. This is in line with the petition you've all signed. The only point that is potentially debatable that we can see is where the paper presents that any time spent as a temporary resident is indistinguishable to time spent as a permanent resident with respect to an individual's success in integrating in to Australian society. Whilst we agree with the paper on this, we understand that a few may see a bit more nuance in that position, so we wanted to call it out here in the interests of full transparency. Given the alignment in our petition's position with the position presented in the paper, we've agreed to add the weight of every signatory on our petition to the position presented in the paper. This allows the paper's authors to say that around 50,000 people support the position presented in the paper - it carries 5 times the weight of our petition. Please read through the paper and if you DON'T agree with it to the point that you wouldn't sign your name to it, send a message back and we'll remove your name from our combined list. We've had to make a judgement call on this one (as we can't contact every individual!) - if you trust our judgement as a result of following our petition/ facebook group, then we're confident in saying you'd be perfectly comfortable with having your name added to the larger position paper. Many thanks.