‘The citizenship saga is blatant discrimination’

This farce about Australian politicians needing to be Australian citizens, and not also citizens of any other country really is gaining strength and power now isn’t it. It all started quite quietly, with a couple of Green senators suddenly realising they might not be eligible to be members, but that certainly let the cat out of the bag, with about eight of them now having to get out, sent by no less than our High Court!

The amazing thing is that all of them are either Liberal, National, Green or One Nation, with no names popping out from the Labor side of the house. Now that is the sort of miracle that presses my ‘cynical’ button and makes me perk up no end — Labor completely in the clear, surely not; it will be interesting to see what further information pops out in the next week or so.

In the meantime they, (the Labor Party), are making all the capital they can out of the situation, demanding the resignation of just about everyone on the other side, from the prime minister down, and the repayment of all money the ‘victims’ have earned since they were elected. They also want every law passed, in which these people had a part, to be wiped off the statutes — imagine the problems that could cause.

It seems obvious to me, going along for the moment with the above suggestions/demands, that the whole thing now really needs to be taken a stage further, to avoid blatant discrimination against the eight poor unfortunates now being attacked. Surely it is vital that an in-depth audit now needs to be carried out, examining the national affiliations of every person who has been a Member of Parliament, right back to Federation, to make sure none of them were in the same position as ‘the eight’ regarding their place of birth, or the place of birth of their parents. To avoid discrimination, any one being discovered, should have all their earnings repaid to Australia by them, (or their descendants should they no longer be alive).

Of course, while we’re thinking about it, why not take this to the ultimate conclusion and rule that all laws made during their sojourn in parliament should be expunged from the statutes! To avoid the spectre of discrimination, I don’t see how today’s guilty MPs can be victimised as suggested by Labor, without the exact same terms being applied to all past politicians. Wouldn’t that create an interesting situation?

Ironically, I would guess that more and more parliamentarians would be found to be ineligible if such an audit were to take place, the closer we got to the time of Federation. I have no doubt the number of illegals would increase exponentially as time was retraced, because so many members would almost certainly have come from, or be descended from, English people, or other European countries. (Or were they all careful enough to make sure they were in the clear?)

I can just see it now, if the laws they had made were considered as useless — all tax laws cancelled, no agreements with other countries, all health schemes expunged, the list could be endless.

There are those who would say it’s silly to go back into history like this — something irrelevant they might say, but is it irrelevant? We’ve already gone back into our history to admit that we treated the aboriginal people badly in those days, and have apologised to them and done all we possibly can to put things right, so is the situation we now find ourselves in, (due to the mistakes of our representatives), any less important? I should say any business to do with Government is important and our present representatives obviously feel the same gauging the noise they are all making about it, in their present attacks on the eight.

I don’t suppose any political party wants to be accused of discrimination of any kind, and to attack the present eight members is discrimination, if those that went before them are not also judged in the same way. It will be very interesting to see how all this gets sorted out.

What do you think of this issue in Australian politics? Should politicians be allowed to represent while holding dual citizenship?