Shame on the rest of the sad sack of carpet-baggers:
The court of disputed returns should not reward “negligence” by letting off parliamentarians who did not take “reasonable steps” to investigate their dual citizenship, the lawyer for Greens Larissa Waters and Scott Ludlam has argued.
In the second day of eligibility hearings on Wednesday, Brian Walters argued the court should reject the commonwealth’s less strict interpretation that parliamentarians without knowledge of their dual citizenship are eligible because they did not “voluntarily obtain or retain” allegiance to a foreign power.
Walters argued that the country of one’s birth and one’s parents’ citizenship constituted “primary facts” that should prompt inquiries about one’s citizenship.
Once aspiring parliamentarians had such facts and wanted to nominate for election they have “a duty not only to be honest but to be careful”, he said.
“Negligence in complying with one’s constitutional obligations should never produce a better result than diligence,” he said, proposing a test of whether parliamentarians had taken “reasonable steps” to ascertain their foreign citizenship.
But the Greens’ proposed test was immediately doubted by the chief justice, Susan Kiefel. Kiefel questioned how the case could “work backwards” from the conclusion in Sykes v Cleary that parliamentarians had to take reasonable steps to renounce foreign citizenship to extend it to a new requirement that they had to take reasonable steps to discover their dual citizenship.
“I don’t know how you get there,” she said.
I do: Ignorantia juris non excusat. It doesn’t matter if they say they knew or not. We can’t know that they didn’t know. If we let them off this basic principle then they can claim ignorance of anything and everything:
- I didn’t know that the money was Chinese;
- I didn’t know that I was doing China’s bidding;
- I didn’t know that I was an agent of the PRC, etc…
And on each of them they’ll get off as we just take their word for it.
Kiefel’s is a leading question.
