Is the Senator eligible

to sit in our parliament at all?

The current row over the hijab wearing Senator who has "quit" the Labor party in order to sit on the cross bench has shown how unaware most of us are about what the purpose of the Downunder Senate is.  It has become something it was never intended to be.

The original intention of our founding fathers, those who wrote the Constitution we are still using, is that there would be two houses of parliament. There would be the House of Representatives which would be the lower house and the Senate which would be the upper house. The lower house was to be the house where people would have the local representative they had elected to represent them at the local level. The upper house members were to be elected to represent the entire state.

It was never intended that the Senate would become a place of party politics. Of course it has become precisely that - perhaps to our detriment.  

It is because of this there have been calls for the Senator to resign and allow her place to be taken by someone from the political party to which she once belonged. That her actual role is that of Senator for a particular state and not a particular party is not being mentioned of course. To do so would be to acknowledge the Senate is not supposed to be a place of party politics. It is also what allows her to go on taking a place in the Senate. 

On the other side there is also an argument that the Senator herself does not understand her role. She is there to represent a state. She is not there to represent another country, another government, another political group, a terrorist organisation or any other entity outside the state she has been elected to represent. If she wants to do those things then she has to do them elsewhere - and not in her role as a Senator.

There is also the interesting (and entirely legitimate) question of whether the Senator is actually eligible to be there at all. The Constitution does not allow citizens of another country to enter parliament here. There are good reasons for that. The Senator is almost certainly a dual citizen and the claim that the government of another country has not permitted her to renounce her citizenship of it is not good enough. There were problems with other members of parliament not so long ago. It was politically expedient at the time to make a huge fuss about that. This time the matter has barely been mentioned. The reasons for this are surely something which need to be questioned?