DUAL CITIZENSHIP DILEMMA ROCKS AUSTRALIAN PARLIAMENT
The 116 year old Australian Constitution prohibits it.
The document, enacted on Jan. 1, 1901, includes a section outlining who can and who cannot sit in the Australian Senate. Section 44.1 of the AUSTRALIAN CONSTITUTION states that: “any person who is under acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen…of a foreign power shall be incapable of being chosen or of sitting as a senator or a member of the House of Representatives.”
Australia's High Court on Friday DISQUALIFIED the deputy prime minister and four senators from sitting in Parliament in a unanimous ruling that could cost the government its slender majority in Parliament. Citizens have condemned the ‘outdated’ 116-year-old constitutional ban on "a subject or citizen of a foreign power" standing for Parliament in a country where almost half the people are immigrants or have an overseas-born parent. But the court said the lawmakers' foreign family ties were known.
The seven judges rejected the government's argument that five of the lawmakers should be exempt from the ban because they had not voluntarily acquired or retained citizenship of another country. While the judges said it may be harsh to disqualify Australian-born candidates didn’t know they were not exclusively Australian, "those facts must always have been knowable."
The disqualified senators include Fiona Nash, Joyce's deputy in the Nationals party, who inherited British citizenship from her Scottish father; Matt Canavan, who the court heard might have inherited Italian citizenship from his Australian-born mother through his Italian grandparents; and Nick Xenophon who later found out he was British because his father left Cyprus while it was a British colony.
"The decision of the court today is clearly not the outcome we were hoping for, but the business of government goes on," Prime Minister Turnbull said. The question now is whether the constitution should be changed, "ensuring in our multicultural society that all Australians are able confidently to stand for and serve in our Parliament.”
Three parliamentary investigations recommended in the 1980s and 1990s that the prohibition on dual citizens be removed from the constitution through a national referendum. But successive governments have failed to act, perhaps because of the difficulty in persuading Australians to change their constitution. Of the 44 referendums Australia has held since 1901 only eight have passed, the last in 1977.
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Illustration by Ronan Porter