Is it going to last the week? Via the AFR:
The Turnbull government faces an anxious wait with one of its Lower House MPs checking his citizenship, just hours after the Prime Minister announced a new disclosure regime to draw a line under the saga.
The Liberal member for the semi-marginal Sydney seat of Bennelong, John Alexander, is trying to confirm whether his British-born father, now deceased, renounced his UK citizenship. If not, Mr Alexander, a former tennis player, would be in a similar situation to now former senators Fiona Nash and Stephen Parry, both of whom have fallen foul of section 44(i) of the Constitution for having British fathers and automatically being UK citizens by descent.
But because Mr Alexander is from the Lower House and not in a safe seat, if he was dismissed, it would force yet another by-election on the government and leave it fighting for its one-seat majority. It is currently fighting a byelection in former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce’s seat of New England but Mr Joyce is expected to win comfortably. Nonetheless, Mr Turnbull will campaign in New England on Tuesday.
The revelation about Mr Alexander by Fairfax Media came just after Malcolm Turnbull accepted more MPs may fall as he proposed a new disclosure regime in which all 226 federal politicians declare to Parliament they are not dual citizens and provide the evidence to back it up. The move quelled dissent in the party by some, such as Eric Abetz, who had been calling for an audit.
And:
Cabinet minister Josh Frydenberg has hit out at a fresh report claiming his mother, who fled regime-sponsored killing of the Jews after World War II, was not stateless when she arrived in Australia.
Mr Frydenberg last week scotched suggestions that he could be a Hungarian citizen through descent, thereby putting him in breach of the constitution. He has been forced to issue a new declaration highlighting his mother’s statelessness following an article in the Australian claiming his mother Erica Strauss was not stateless when she fled Europe with her parents and siblings.
The newspaper said Mr Frydenberg’s mother “arrived in Australia using a valid passport” and “the immigration report was unclear about whether the family was travelling on Hungarian passports or some other form of valid travel documents for those displaced during World War II”.
It would be a more than appropriate end to the most inept government in living memory. Then again, the one thing it does do well is kick the can, via The Guardian:
Assuming you as the government still have any control over how this citizenship crisis plays out (and that is arguable) let’s consider chamber by chamber.
The Senate, which sits next week, could approve this framework next week if Labor ultimately agrees with the terms, starting the clock from then, which means the Senate disclosures could pop up while the parliament was still in session for the year.
This will obviously be inconvenient and embarrassing politically in the event any problems are uncovered. But Senate eligibility problems are easier to fix – there’s a resignation, or a court process resulting in a recounts to fill vacancies. No byelections.
If you strike problems in the House, you have to face byelections.
Byelections are, of course, deeply problematic if you happen to hold government by a wafer-thin majority, and we know the government is already having to fight one political contest, in New England – an inconvenience that has cost the government its working majority on the floor of the chamber.
The House sits for only another fortnight, in late November and early December.
On the 21-day timeframe proposed in this system, the public eligibility declarations from lower house MPs won’t actually show up in the final parliamentary sitting weeks before the end of the year.
The relevant material will not be in the public domain while the three-ring circus is in Canberra.
While you can’t forestall the inevitable, this effect of kicking the can down the road could be useful if you were a government wanting to avoid any dangerous conflagrations – like someone trying on a vote of no-confidence on the floor of the House, or some other mischief with the potential to blow the place sky high.
Death by a thousand cuts it is then.
