On citizenship and the ease of nominating for Parliament 

John Kotsopoulos writes: Re. “They’ve got form: how easy is it to nominate for parliament?“(Wednesday)

It was fun for a while to see the undoing of the pompous but it now its surely  time we stopped the uncertainty and the lawyers’ picnic that the MP  citizenship fiasco is becoming.

Larissa Waters was an unknowing victim of a change to Canadian law just months after was born which had the retrospective effect of bestowing Canadian citizenship on her.

John Howard changed the Marriage Act banning same sex marriage and at the same time retrospectively withdrew Australian recognition of same sex marriages lawfully carried out in other countries. Why can’t we show some creativity and use these precedents. Why not bring in retrospective legislation to their nomination for Parliament as a renunciation of any foreign citizenship status however it a accrued dating from the day before they nominated for election.

Niall Clugston writes: Re. “They’ve got form: how easy is it to nominate for parliament?“(Wednesday)

The problem with Bernard Keane’s comparison of standing as candidate with applying for a pension or registering a pet is that we don’t have government approved candidates in our elections. And I don’t think it would be desirable.

John Richardson writes: Re. “They’ve got form: how easy is it to nominate for parliament?“(Wednesday)

The façade of integrity in matters electoral is not just an issue for our national Parliament, but at all levels of government.

For example, in last year’s local council elections in NSW, candidates were required by the NSW Electoral Commission to submit basic information about themselves in the form of a Statutory Declaration, with that information then made public on the Commission’s website. All sections of the declaration had to be completed, including details of a candidate’s membership of any political party; in the absence of any such membership, the candidate was obliged to enter “N/A” in the field provided.

After being made aware that a successful candidate in the election had not declared her membership of a major political party, local electors made inquiries with the electoral commission, expecting that they would investigate the matter. Imagine their surprise when the electoral commission informed them that its role was to ensure only that all sections on the declaration had been completed, but that their responsibilities did not extend to ensuring that the information provided was accurate. The commission went on to suggest that the matter should be referred to the Office of Local Government.

In due course, the Office of Local Government also advised that it was not their responsibility to ensure that candidate declarations were completed accurately & suggested that the matter should be referred to the NSW Police, as they were the body in NSW responsible for enforcement of the Oaths Act.

Now, given that our local Police Station operates only on a part-time basis (a common circumstance in regional Australia) and given that the Police usually require some prima facie evidence of a crime before they will allocate resources to pursue an investigation, rightly or wrongly, our concerned citizens got the message and dropped the matter.

The sad truth is that there are now people in our community who have learnt from first-hand experience that the electoral system, like so much of what we commonly refer to as “government”, is just a sham.

While many citizens, including myself, believe that all politicians should be required to respect the laws of the land, some of the more cynical among us are more alarmed by the apparent inability of our political class to “game” a system that is so readily open to abuse.