Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The case put by the Manager of Opposition Business is a desperate attempt to distract from the fact that there are a number of people on the Labor side who were plainly and admittedly UK citizens at the time they nominated. That puts them in breach of section 44. They have an argument they want to run in the High Court, that because they put in a notice of renunciation then that should be enough to keep them qualified. They should have the opportunity to do that.

Senator Gallagher has been referred. She is in exactly the same position as the member for Braddon, the member for Mayo and the member for Longman, subject to a point I'll come to in a moment. That issue will be determined by the High Court. What is the opposition going to do if it's determined adverse to Senator Gallagher? What are they going to do? Are they going to continue trying to maintain people in the House when the High Court has clearly stated that they would be ineligible? As I said during question time, I wish everybody luck in the High Court. I wish you luck. But, ultimately, the court is taking a very strict, literal reading of the section. It's not the approach to the section that we contended for.

Turning to the member for Batman, it appears that he is in fact a dual citizen now. He's looking for some paperwork to see if he can establish that he's not. I assume, consistent with what he has said, that if he can't find that paperwork he will resign from the House in the way that the member for Bennelong, John Alexander, did a little while ago when he was not able to establish that he was not a dual citizen, at least to his satisfaction.

I come back to the member for Longman. It appears on her own statements that she is still a UK citizen. She made some efforts to renounce, but it is clear that there has not been any registration of that under section 12 of the act in the UK, and so she would remain a UK citizen based on the fact that she had a UK father. That's the position on the other side of the House.

Let's look at one of the people Labor wants to refer to the High Court: the member for Mitchell. The member for Mitchell has a document signed by the Ministry of the Interior and Administrative Reconstruction of the Hellenic Republic, and it says, 'As no registration ever took place within the municipal or mail registries of the state, he'—that is, the member for Mitchell—'cannot be considered a Greek citizen or national.' It is signed with the official seal of the ministry of the interior. Is the Manager of Opposition Business seriously contending that the House should make such a fool of itself as to send off to the High Court somebody that the Greek government says is not a Greek citizen? The honourable member chastised me about what the High Court might rule in the Deputy Prime Minister's case, but he is now claiming that he knows Greek law better than the Hellenic Republic itself. This is absolutely ludicrous.

I could go through the list, but basically what we have is a government whose members who were dual citizens left and went to by-elections. One of them—the Deputy Prime Minister—has been re-elected and returned. John Alexander is facing the by-election on the 16th. Not one member of the Labor Party has done the right thing. They went on and on and on about all of their vetting and how they had no problems, and now we discover them. And we saw an extraordinary stunt just before 1.30. Recognising that the poll had been declared in New England and that the DPM would be coming back into the House, they bullied the crossbench and tried to rush through a motion to refer a grab bag of members from our side of the House off to the High Court. And why? On what basis? They did not present one piece of evidence that any of our members are dual citizens or other than what they have stated to be.

Foreign law is a question of fact in an Australian court. You can't get much more authoritative than the foreign government itself. And what we have is members, including the member for Mitchell—I could make the same point about others—where government has stated that the member concerned is not a citizen, and the opposition says they should go to the High Court. What is the High Court meant to do? Where is the alternative case? Have they presented an argument? Have they presented a case that the member for Mitchell is in fact a Greek citizen, contrary to the views of the ministry of the interior of the Hellenic Republic?

They were scornful of brief statements—and the one for the member for Mitchell is anything but brief—from embassies and consulates. Well, the member for Sydney defends her proposition that she is not a Slovenian citizen with a very short letter from the Slovenian embassy which says, 'This is to certify that Tanya Joan Plibersek is not, nor has she ever been, a citizen of the Republic of Slovenia.' We don't challenge that. The member for Forrest, on the other hand, has a letter from the consulate of Italy which says: 'This is to certify that Mrs Nola Marino is not nor has ever been an Italian citizen.' It's in almost exactly the same terms. So why isn't the member for Sydney being sent off to the High Court?

This is nothing more than an attempt to achieve some sort of tit-for-tat. Because Labor does not want its members to be referred to the High Court, it wants to take some government members as well, and they've gone to the crossbench and said, 'It's only fair that some government members be referred.' The reality is that our members that were dual citizens stood up and left. Barnaby Joyce referred himself to the High Court, and, when he lost, he went to a by-election. John Alexander, when he felt he was not able to document that which he had always believed—that he was solely an Australian citizen—resigned, and is now in a by-election. Of course, you have former Senator Nash, who did the same thing—she put her hand up and said, 'I think I'm a dual citizen.' Well, so she was, and she lost her seat. Senator Canavan did exactly the same thing and was found not to be a dual citizen by the High Court, and he has been restored to his position.

This is a serious issue. If Labor wants to deal with it seriously, and if the House wants to deal with it seriously, then we should deal with each case one at a time. Those who believe that members are not eligible should present their evidence. Now, we had always been of the understanding that we were going to deal with the same-sex marriage issue first, giving everybody time to consider the information that members had filed on citizenship, to obtain further advice, to ask questions, to obtain further documents and so forth, to look at it, to at least give ourselves a few days to go through it, and then deal with it at the end of the week. But for no reason other than political advantage, with not a principle in sight and not a skerrick of evidence in sight, the Labor Party wants to send members of the House to the High Court under the section without making any case that they are in fact dual citizens.

I just come back to the case of the member for Mitchell and the sheer absurdity of the opposition saying that the member for Mitchell is a Greek citizen, when the Hellenic Republic itself—Greece itself—says he is not, and does so under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior and Administrative Reconstruction.

This motion debases the House. If Labor wants to debate this, we are happy to do so. We should debate them one at a time. We should debate them one at a time and we should debate them on Thursday, after we've dealt with the marriage bill.

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