The 79-year-old, whose acting roles include Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films, received her certificate from the fair hand of then prime minister Julia Gillard herself, declaring at the time that she was looking forward to voting left here.
Ten years ago, following an anti-Israel outburst by Ms Margolyes on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, British blogger Ray Cook took her measure, here. What he wrote of her still fits.
The inveterate Israel-basher is known to make and sign statements that denigrate the Jewish State and give aid and comfort to Israel's enemies. This, for instance, sponsored by APAN, the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network.
This, too, for example:
'Along with more than 600 other fellow artists, we are announcing today that we will not engage in business-as-usual cultural relations with Israel. We will accept neither professional invitations to Israel, nor funding, from any institutions linked to its government.... Now we are saying, in Tel Aviv, Netanya, Ashkelon or Ariel, we won’t play music, accept awards, attend exhibitions, festivals or conferences, run masterclasses or workshops, until Israel respects international law and ends its colonial oppression of the Palestinians....'And this, from 2015, which gave joy to the many Israel-haters who infest the corridors of the ABC, the BBC's terrible twin Down Under (taxpayer-funded, accordingly obliged to be objective in its treatment of news and current affairs, but not), and pack the studio audience and dominate the panel of QandA, its equivalent of the BBC's Question Time.
She was an obligingly leftwing panellist, as her ABC hosts knew she would be, not only demonising Israel, but to rip roaring approval from the usual suspects insulting Aussie prime minister Tony Abbott ("He's a Tit!"), who as a conservative and a practising Catholic to boot is everything the arch-secularist (though pro-Islam) ABC abhors.
Back in 2013 when she received her Aussie citizenship Ms Margolyes enthused about Australia, telling the Sydney Morning Herald, inter alia:
"The main thing is a lack of class," she said. "I don't like class distinction and there's too much of that in England. There's an energy here - an optimism, a vitality. I think England doesn't have that anymore."In a new three-part ABC documentary she has deplored, among other supposed failings, the fact that Australia has become the "colony of America" and that "Now, there is a sourness, a narrowness and a racism, which I will fight wherever I see it for the rest of my life". And she's used the F word to defy her critics.
This is vintage ABC, and vintage Margolyes. She's entitled to her views, of course, but the sheer bloody-mindedness and hypocrisy of the national broadcaster in all this is not lost on Sky News commentator and Australian newspaper journalist Chris Kenny:
'Sky News host Chris Kenny says a documentary series on the ABC which "bags Australia" by UK actress Miriam Margolyes is the same "clichéd, left-wing, morally superior, identity politics on steroids drivel" constantly seen on the public broadcaster.
Ms Margolyes ... made headlines earlier in May after professing to having preferred UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to have died when he was ill with COVID-19.
"Our national broadcaster only praises Margolyes, in fact it has given her a job making a documentary series about Australia," Mr Kenny said.
In an interview with the ABC's Fran Kelly, Ms Margolyes was not even asked about her "controversial, widely publicised comments about preferring a conservative leader to die".
"Instead the ABC just asked her to bag Australia," Mr Kenny said.
"A billion dollars a year to deliver anti-intellectual attacks on Australia, a public broadcaster dedicated to dumbing down the nation".' [Emphasis added]
