I don’t expect this to be a busy thread, but it seems worthwhile. Things are heating up down here.
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What’s the deal with the not Australians getting kicked out of parliament there? How’d they get in in the first place?
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Carelessness.
Australia is an immigrant country; a huge percentage of people are first or second generation Australians. And we have a reciprocally relaxed immigration arrangement with New Zealand, so there are a lot of NZ citizens here and vice-versa.
The Oz Constitution is almost entirely concerned with tariffs and trade, so nobody pays attention to it. But there are two bits that routinely ensnare careless politicians:
- No candidate for political office can hold a paid government job.
- No candidate for political office can hold citizenship in a country other than Australia. In effect, that means that a candidate must renounce any dual citizenship before standing for election. Barnaby was an Oz/NZ dual citizen, because his dad was a Kiwi.
If either condition is violated, their election is declared invalid and a new one is called. But this isn’t actively investigated; it only comes up if an opponent or the press publicises it.
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Amusingly, this whole thing began because the Oz right picked up a rumour that a couple of the Greens held dual citizenship. They started the ball rolling, and now it has backfired on them rather spectacularly.
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Those poor people. This government is going to burn in any afterlife for what they’ve put the people on Manus through.
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