It's a stupid bill.
So garishly stupid that it can blind a boulder. So vapidly moronic that bits of ooze collected by clams are more intelligent. It's so bad that astronauts on the ISS passing over Canberra need to shield their heads with lead so the radioactive idiocy doesn't fry them.
But don't kid yourself: Australian citizenship is profoundly valuable.
I would not pass it up lightly. I was born to it and I am enormously grateful to have it.
Getting where I am now (Australian permanent resident) has been the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.
It included working casual night-shift jobs while studying to get a uni degree during the day (having an Australian degree improves your score towards a skilled visa).
For a long period I have been separated from my wife and daughter due to visa complications, it was heartbreaking.
In addition I had to give up my role as a start-up co-founder (because in order to maximise your skilled visa score, it's better if you are an employee at an Australian-based company - the start-up I was involved with was legally based overseas).
I haven't even visited my home country (Italy) since 2013, I am still in touch with family and some friends but the reality is that the connection to Italy is slowly fading away and I am long past that phase where you start to call your adoptive country "home".
Becoming an Australian citizen has been the main goal of my life in the past 8 years so I'm not going to pass on it lightly. At the moment, however, I'm taking my time to think about it.
Edit: I replied to the wrong comment, meant to reply to the one above this one.
From my perspective, US health care is way above the quality of healthcare in Australia. Price, not so much...
Given that insurance companies will soon be excluding "pre-existing conditions", there's a good chance you can't get insurance under a corporate plan anyway.
Relative to what other citizenship?
Given the topic at hand, this doesn't seem like a distinct strength of Australia, unless you're coming from a despotic regime or recently New Zealand.
I think the last point is the big one. Political lobbying, while still a thing, isn't as rampant as in the US for example. Bad power-grab legislation like the bill being discussed still happen, as do bad laws as a result of general incompetence, but in my experience there are far less laws that happen as a result of corporate lobbying.
A good example is the Australian tax system. There is a government provided website for filing your individual income tax return. For the vast majority of people it is prefilled, takes about 5 mins, and it's also free for everyone. Contrast this with the US where companies like Intuit lobby specifically to keep the tax code complex and to require returns prepared online be submitted through one of them so they can collect their fees.
I think I care a bit less about corporate welfare lobbying than infringements on my civil rights. You can fix corporate lobbying if you have real civil rights, but if you don't have the right to communicate privately, the corporations can literally just stop you from organizing, with the littlest nudges (just make the messages of dissent mysteriously not deliver). It might not even be illegal.
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
For example, their affiliations are: Republican Party, Thatcherism, Reaganomics.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation
Even a broken clock is right twice a day (as the saying goes), but I'm not sure I'd really strongly rely on their policy ideas.
* https://curiosity.com/topics/the-suicide-plant-has-the-most-... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides