Sunday 16 July 2017

Scott Ludlam didn't know

he was still a Kiwi? 
I find that hard to believe...if only because at least one other person did and advertised the fact there might be a problem. It is the sort of thing someone on the Senator's staff would have been immediately alerted to and questioned.
Is it just possible that Ludlam was hoping that, if nothing was said, he might get away with it? Did anyone else in the Greens know?
Questions were asked long ago about Tony Abbott and whether he had renounced his British citizenship before he became an MP. Yes, there were people who were anxious - even very anxious - to see him ousted. They got their way but not because he wasn't properly elected. 
Labor is trying to get rid of another Coalition MP - simply because there happens to be a post office in a shopping centre owned by the MP. Their argument is that he is receiving another benefit from the Commonwealth - illegal for a politician. I suspect that argument is on rather shaky ground. It's a business paying rent on a commercial basis - hardly a benefit as such as they chose to be there. If the decision does go in Labor's favour there is no guarantee that they would win the resultant by-election anyway.  
But citizenship, especially dual citizenship, is a different story. I would renounce my Downunder citizenship for citizenship of the UK if it meant the right to live and work there. That seems only fair to me. I doubt I would want to live anywhere else now... NZ perhaps. I am too old to cope with traffic going down the "wrong" side of the road in most of the rest of the world. 
I know someone who has lived in the UK for many years - about fifty  - who has never renounced her US citizenship. It means she has never been able to vote.  I think that might bother me. There might be other things which would niggle too - and there is a lingering question of why anyone would want to retain their citizenship of a country which has long since ceased to be "home" and to which they no longer have any ties. 
I doubt Ludlam has too much emotional attachment to NZ but he must have known about the citizenship issue much earlier than was claimed.  The real problem is that, should he admit to that, there is a hefty salary which needs to be returned...and, if it can be shown that he did know and that the Greens knew, then perhaps they need to think about returning it. The rest of us would have to do that in similar circumstances...indeed we might find ourselves in a great deal more trouble than the Senator. 

1 comment:

cathyc said...

I must say, I have less sympathy for this, given there are now two back to back. But I think it is fair to say, as they acknowledge, that they need more proper form to their organisation with proper admin support and so on. When the other pollies all announced they were okay, I was struck by the fact that more than one of them commented that they were positively harrassed by staff until they had ensured they were compliant.

Given that I think that the overriding concern for Australia is the environment, I do vote Green from time to time, but I really hate to think that my vote is wasted....