And here is the ABC article referred to.
And as it is from the Lefty ABC it MUST be correct.The shrinking '1766 Club': How low could this constitutional mess see it go?By national affairs correspondent Greg Jennett Posted about 2 hours ago
We are yet to find out how many more parliamentarians will be struck from the ranks.
To be on Australia's 'honour roll' of federal parliamentarians is to be consigned to historical obscurity.Forsaken at Part Six, page 424, of the illuminating but seldom read Parliamentary Handbook, are the names of each and every member and senator who has graced — or even disgraced — the leather benches of the nation's Parliament since 1901.
To date, there have been 1766 of them. Or have there?
Had history played out differently, the current dual citizenship saga might not be happening.
The sudden spate of politicians tripping up on the constitution raises the definite possibility that dozens, probably hundreds of them have slid through their careers — including ministerial ones — in perfect breach of the ground rules for eligibility.
As the Parliamentary Handbook records, the number of politicians scrubbed out in 116 years is very small and most of the cases are quite recent — Heather Hill (1999), Robert Wood (1988), Rod Culleton (2017) and Bob Day (2017) — with Barnaby Joyce, Fiona Nash, Matt Canavan, Nick Xenophon, Malcolm Roberts, Greens' Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters more recent additions to their ranks.
It beggars belief that in more than a century of Federation there might not be many more who sat, wittingly or unwittingly, in political perfidy for years.
The trouble is, short of unleashing some special commission into historical constitutional connivances — and who could ever think that a good use of taxpayers' money when we're $350 billion in debt? — we will never know what ghosts of illegitimate careers have haunted our national Parliament, let alone how they changed the course of history by decisions made in their time there.
Beware the 'birthers'From their obscure political graves, former MPs might pity the current crop of politicians in the 45th Parliament who are not only in collision with the constitution, they are arguably the first batch to be caught in a collision between analogue and digital record-keeping.
Thanks to the internet, clues about an MPs' heritage can easily be searched online, triggering a race between energetic journalists and political staffers eager to unmask Parliament's next suspected unlawful dual citizen.
Who's who in this mess?It can be hard to keep up with what's happening in the dual-citizenship scandal, so here's a quick rundown of who's affected — and how.
Almost a century of electronically scanned passenger departure cards can now be searched through UK archives alone — a technique used to raise early alarms about Senator Roberts' status.
Unfortunately for the nation, online ancestry searches are generating enough "heat" for suspicion, but they do not yield the bright glare of fact needed to convince us or the High Court that an MP or senator is in the clear.
Those facts remain locked behind privacy rules and in old fashioned "analogue" citizenship registers of foreign countries — which is giving rise to a "birther" movement in Australian politics, demanding Obama-like documentary evidence to prove where their allegiance lies.
Only a small number of the 224 parliamentarians remaining (the two Greens have already left) have released documents or receipts confirming a foreign citizenship has been surrendered — the rest rely on self-satisfaction that they cannot possibly be a dual citizen, or simply adopt a "trust me, I'm not" approach to an query.
Trust them? We'll have toIt does not clear the cloud hanging over the Parliament, but the "trust me, I'm not" approach is the one "birthers" and the rest of us will have to accept.
The constitution's comedic timingSomeone has switched Section 44 to "evil". And if this most recent citizenship affair proves anything, it's that paperwork can be a bitch, writes Annabel Crabb.
An individual's citizenship status depends on personal histories only they can know, together with documents more likely to sit in scrap books and shoe boxes than on any computer.
Without documentary evidence, the burden of proof lands impossibly on political opponents or the media to demonstrate otherwise.
All of this means we cannot assume the High Court's ruling on the Ludlam, Waters, Canavan, Roberts, Joyce, Nash and Xenophon cases will necessarily be the last Section 44 and the 45th Parliament.
If it turns out we should not have trusted an MP who later discovered a dual citizenship, for consistency's sake they too should have to be adjudicated on, even if the court adopts a more generous and modern interpretation of the 'foreign allegiance' section later this year.
Fess up beats cover upFar better that every possible case, especially borderline ambiguous ones, be revealed now — and with documents if necessary — to cleanse the Parliament once and for all.
Read the distressing rest as Bull S. ducks and weaves here
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-22/1766-club-how-low-could-the-constitutional-citizenship-mess-go/8828074
