It is possible the home affairs minister is in breach of Section 44(v) of the Constitution – and if the High Court were to find him so, it would cause yet another headache for the government.
Given the Turnbull government only has a one-seat majority in the lower house, the immediate stakes of the challenge to David Gillespie’s eligibility are as high as they could possibly be.
While minor right-wing parties are advancing specific policy agendas, Australia’s major right-of-centre force appears to be grappling with internal divisions about its policy direction.
The departure of up to two crossbench senators and the uncertainty over who might replace them is giving the government fresh obstacles in their efforts to pass legislation.
Malcolm Turnbull laughs off the suggestion that this week’s extraordinary developments mean the Senate is in chaos. Okay, let’s humour the Prime Minister.
Further uncertainty has been thrown over the Senate crossbench, with the government now moving to have the High Court determine whether One Nation’s Rod Culleton was ineligible for election.
Changes to Senate voting laws and the particular case of Senator Bob Day make for an unprecedented constitutional tangle, and one that will change the make-up of the Senate.
Within hours of Bob Day submitting his Senate resignation on Tuesday, the government announced it would move for the High Court to rule on whether he had been ineligible to sit in the upper house.
The Turnbull-Abbott hostilities erupted in a very public manner this week over the terms of a ban on the importation of the Adler seven-shot lever-action shotgun.
The returned Turnbull government can now add arguably one of the most diverse and potentially volatile senates ever to be elected in Australia to its list of political problems.
The default position for politicians is to sound concerned about housing affordability, but do nothing. This can be explained by the idea of ‘policy capture’, in this case by industry interests.
Family First senator Bob Day is set to propose an amendment to the legislation changing the Senate voting system that would prevent the government using the new rules in a double dissolution.
Early in 2014, federal Attorney-General George Brandis released a proposal to significantly amend our law against racial vilification, Sections 18C and 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act, on the strength…
Few members of the 20th-century political right were more important than Milton Friedman. As an academic, author, television presenter and adviser to Ronald Reagan – who once described his show Free to…