If you’ve not been following along with proceedings in the High Court today (don’t blame you TBH) you’ve been missing out on probably the most utterly cooked and bizarre hearings the nation’s uppermost legal facility has ever heard.
One Nation senator/probable marionette puppet come to life Malcolm Roberts has spent significant time in the stand today, having his citizenship nonsense heard and assessed. Roberts is one of a handful of federal politicians currently facing scrutiny from the court because they kinda, sorta, might have been, almost definitely held dual citizenship with other countries at the time of their election, which – as far as the Constitution is concerned – would rule them ineligible to serve in Parliament.
Despite the fact that a mountain of evidence suggests that he was almost definitely a British citizen at the time of his election, Roberts has always asserted he’s held no other citizenship than Australian. ‘Course he was born in India and didn’t move to Australia until he was 19 years old. But that’s apparently semantics as far as Roberts is concerned.
Still, today’s been his day in court and HOT DAMN has it ever been mind-boggling.
Despite the fact that Roberts’ own lawyers accepted the fact that Roberts did, at some point in his life, hold British citizenship, and that he might also have been an Indian citizen by birth, Roberts repeatedly denied everything while on the stand, asserting instead that it was his belief that he was – and we shit you not quote – “stateless” up until his arrival in Australia.
Somehow, it gets weirder.
Those comments came just after the court heard that Roberts sent two emails renouncing his British citizenship – the one he said he never had – to two incorrect email addresses in the May prior to being nominated as a senator.
One of the email addresses had been decommissioned in 2010, and the other flat-out did not exist and barely had the structure of a standard email address. How, you ask? It ended in “sydney.uk.”
Sydney. Dot. UK.
Further still, the first incorrect email Roberts sent contained a subject line that reportedly had something along the lines of “am I still a British citizen?”
Again, a British citizen that Roberts claims to have never, ever, ever been. Even though he typed an email asking if he still was. And even though his lawyers accepted that he was one.
Nope, Malcolm Roberts has always believed he was Australian. Not even this barnburner of a court quote can sway him.
Roberts: I always believe I was Aust. Judge: But you didn’t come to Aust until 1962.
— Josh Robertson (@jrojourno) September 21, 2017
Politics. The only field on the face of the planet where you can just kinda fail upwards.
