Thursday, November 02, 2017

Hanson fails School of Hard Knocks over citizenship rules

We all know that right wingers aren't much for tertiary education. They learn all they need to know at the School of Hard Knocks, which teaches such useful skills as dismissing peer reviewed research as left wing mumbo jumbo, reckoning global warming is a hoax cause it was far hotter when they were young, and declaring young people these days are just lazy cause they have eight separate mates who all run their own businesses and can't get any apprentices to show up to work.

There's also honours in how every illegal asylum seeker gets given a house and pension by the government and that Halal food increases Al Qaeda's morale. Unfortunately, the course in learning where apostrophes go and the difference between to, too and two had was cancelled when they had to fire the guy hired to teach it after finding out he was a moderate cultural Muslim.

But with their veneration of life's experiences over book learning, you'd think Pauline Hanson would have been a suppository of wisdom in the current maelstrom of politician after politician being disqualified from the parliament after being revealed as dual citizens, in violation of Section 44 of the constitution.

Hanson lost her fellow One Nation senator, the man she described as her "backbone", Malcolm Roberts. Roberts, despite his declarations that "I can feel it in me waters" that he was solely Australian, turned out to be a dual UK citizen and thus ineligible to sit in parliament, a devastating blow to the 77 people who voted for him.

But the thing is, Pauline Hanson and One Nation had been here before. In 1998, the election of Heather Hill as a One Nation candidate for Queensland to the Senate was challenged on the grounds that Hill was a citizen of a a foreign power - the UK. Despite Hill's creative defence that the United Kingdom is not a foreign power to Australia:

On 23 June 1999 the High Court of Australia, sitting in its capacity as the Court of Disputed Returns, decided in Sue v Hill, that Hill's election was invalid because, at the time of her election, she was still a citizen of the United Kingdom. The case clarified for the first time that the United Kingdom had become a power foreign to Australia.

So Hanson had been through all this before. And, strongly in support of the constitutional law, she reckoned Senator Roberts was dinky di:

"I am strongly of the belief that everyone in this chamber should be an Australian citizen, should not have allegiance to another country and I truly do believe that of Senator Roberts," she said.

But it was complicated:

"It is a very complex case with regards to Senator Roberts. You don't understand the full situation, so therefore I'm not going to go into this. It will be decided by the High Court".

Hanson wasn't the only one of the opinion that the nuances of Senator Roberts's citizenship status were beyond the grasp of us mere mortals. He went on Sky News to chat to Paul Murray, the face of the hip young right, and Murray assured his audience that he had seen the million percent proof Roberts wasn't a British citizen, although neither of the people watching at home were allowed to have a peek.

It turns out that the complications here were that Roberts truly, cross his heart hope to die stick a needle in his eye believed that he was solely an Australian citizen, and he'd sent an email to a domain ending in just to absolutely super dooper double check.

Anyway, Roberts is out of the Senate to go spread his brand of merriment in Queensland state politics, but Pauline Hanson powers on. The point of all this is, she should have known better. Her First Class Honours from the School of Hard Knocks should have blessed her with the ability to recognise a pattern here and make sure her Senate candidates were actually solely Australian citizens not just pretendy ones. And maybe before she demonises the unemployed she could be a little more cautious about wasting millions of dollars obfuscating and breaking the law.

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