Yes, we’ve gone from doing nothing informally to doing it officially, via Laura Tingle:
Let’s imagine for a minute that an alien spaceship materialises over Parliament House and, using its tractor beam, makes off with Malcolm Turnbull, leaving the prime ministership rather awkwardly vacant, but without all the unpleasantness of a leadership challenge.
Do you think that someone else – anyone else – would be able to solve the current existential crisis facing our federal parliament over the citizenship qualifications of a growing number of its members?
If you think the answer to this question is “yes”, you are thinking about it the completely wrong way, and also failing to understand that the maelstrom that has now engulfed federal politics can’t be “fixed”, on best case scenarios, until at least March next year.
No matter how much the blowback is inevitably directed at the government, and no matter how many political mis-steps the prime minister may or may not have taken, the questions at issue here are only ones the parliament and the High Court can answer.
All executive government can do is try to facilitate and nudge both the parliament and the Court to do their job.
Held hostage to these realities, are the “normal” processes of government and the parliament itself. It’s not just that the government will have a problem getting its message out, or that voters will be getting angry that politicians aren’t talking about issues that “matter to them”.
The government has lots of important things to do over coming months, including a foreign affairs white paper, and preparing the budget for starters.
It’s not just that the citizenship issue will be a distraction. It will create an air of uncertainty about the longevity of the government that will filter into political strategy.
Splendid! The bog deepens today:
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has threatened to break with longstanding precedent and use the government’s slim majority to refer any Labor MPs under a citizenship cloud to the High Court.
The Coalition has until now staunchly insisted that any High Court referrals must be made by an MP’s own party, as part of a bid to prevent an outbreak of partisan referrals.
In a sign of escalating tensions between Mr Turnbull and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten as they try to negotiate a fix to the citizenship crisis, the pair exchanged strongly-worded letters of demand and counter-demand on Thursday.
With three Labor MPs now in the frame – Justine Keay, Susan Lamb and Josh Wilson – Mr Shorten sought an assurance from Mr Turnbull that “all parliamentarians will abide by the established precedent that there should be no partisan referrals”.
“Accordingly no party should abuse its numbers, in either chamber of the Parliament, to unilaterally refer senators or members that have stated the clear grounds on which they are eligible under section 44 and are consistent with the most recent decisions of the High Court,” Mr Shorten said.
But Mr Turnbull fired back soon after.
“I cannot give you that assurance,” Mr Turnbull said in his letter, which he wrote on the plane en route to Vietnam for APEC.
And David Crowe:
The gloves are off in the citizenship row. The key principle applied in the early months will be cast aside as the government confronts internal disruption and a threat to its control of parliament.
Once, the government claimed that it would be dangerous to use one party’s numbers to force an MP from another party to face the High Court over his or her citizenship.
Now the government is more than willing to use its numbers to send some of Bill Shorten’s colleagues to court.
The new approach will be simple: when in doubt, vote for referral. “That’s what we’ve done with our MPs and that’s what we’ll do with theirs if we have to,” says one Liberal.
Malcolm Turnbull was outmanoeuvred on Wednesday when he met Shorten and sought a bipartisan deal on the process to decide who went to court. Shorten emerged with a demand for an earlier deadline for MPs to produce documents.
Shorten doubled down yesterday. His office issued a letter to Turnbull with a series of demands soon after the Prime Minister boarded a plane to two leadership summits in Asia. Labor seemed likely to catch Turnbull off guard again.
Turnbull wrote his three-page rejection letter from the plane with a barb at Shorten’s “absurd” demands and a dig at Shorten’s “anxiety” about Labor MPs who could have been dual citizens when they nominated for the election. The response was swift and effective.
The sense of crisis continues to grow with conservative Liberals like Kevin Andrews talking about a leadership change being a “last resort”.
Do-nothing Malcolm now forced to do ever more nothing as he dies of nothing.
