Rebecca White and Anne Urquhart To Run For House Of Reps

Note added March 2025: Recount is being covered here.

I have four (!) articles I'm aiming to write for this site in the next week or so but the first cab off the rank should be the one where my local knowledge is most relevant, that being today's news that Rebecca White and Anne Urquhart will be running for Labor in the federal House of Reps seats in Lyons and Braddon respectively, resigning their State and Senate seats to do so.  The candidate to take on Bridget Archer in Bass, Tasmania's other competitive House of Reps seat, has still not been announced.

Rumours about White and Urquhart running have been around for some time and frequently canvassed on the Fontcast podcast and at times in mainstream media, the White one steadily gathering pace despite having been denied by the candidate in a debate for the March state election.  The Urquhart rumour, together with one that Shane Broad might quit state parliament to run for the federal Braddon seat, has been on and off but it is now clearly on, with the Prime Minister's social media announcing both Urquhart and White as candidates during his visit to the state today.

Wonk Central: The Hare-Clark Recount Bug and the Wangaratta Case

Welcome back to Wonk Central, this site's sporadic series of articles that have been deemed too mathsy, too quirky or too niche for remotely normal human consumption.  In this case, it's clearly all three.

In this episode we take a very close look at the Hare-Clark Recount Bug (which could also be called the Hare-Clark Countback Bug, but "recount" is the term confusingly used for countbacks in Tasmanian law). What is it, why don't we kill it, and is the minister aware of any alternative approaches?  The impetus for this article is a recent court case in Victoria, in which a candidate disadvantaged by the bug in a Wangaratta Council countback in 2017 took legal action but lost.  Among other tries, the plaintiff (a local doctor, former soldier and Australian Country Party candidate in last year's state election) claimed that the use of a countback method that disadvantaged him deprived him of the human right to take part in public life.  

For various reasons, the judgement didn't get into the weeds of whether the countback system in use was fair or whether there was any better alternative.  Therefore, let's go there here.

The Latest Senate Section 44 Cases

Time for another - and I doubt it will be the final - roundup of the issues created by ineligible Senators (or in one case, a Senator-who-never-was).  I have had many questions about the Lambie situation but today's resignation of Skye Kakoschke-Moore also requires detailed comments.

Hollie Hughes (Candidate, NSW - disallowed)

The High Court's decision that Hollie Hughes should not be seated in place of Fiona Nash (apparently because of her intermediate holding of an office of profit while the original election was still open, though reasons are yet to be released) creates a new issue.  Hughes was eligible at the time of the original election but her subsequent employment renders her ineligible to fill the position vacated by Fiona Nash.  The Commonwealth is waiting to see whether the court rules that Hughes was incapable of being chosen, or capable of chosen but incapable of sitting.  If the former, Hughes will be replaced by a special count (resulting in controversial Abbott backer Jim Molan becoming a Senator) but if the latter there is some thought (I'm not convinced) that it might be a casual vacancy.

Glenorchy: What Happens If Most Of A Council Quits While It's Suspended?

Welcome to Glenorchy City Council.  You can be checked out any time they like, but you can never leave.

That was the vibe following recent developments in an already strange and long-running Tasmanian local government dispute, one that is daily creating newer and more exotic flavours of political-law popcorn for electoral ambulance-chasers like me.  My sympathies are with the poor ratepayers of Glenorchy, who are becoming literally poorer ratepayers as they are required to support this niche entertainment as it drags on into season after season.

To begin partway through about book six of Glenorchy Game of Thrones, the GCC has long been wracked with factional strife and hackery (which has often crossed state party lines in odd ways) despite having, at times, some very well regarded Mayors.  The 2014 election saw a team headed by then one-term alderman Kristie Johnston run on an agenda to "clean up Glenorchy and clean out the council".  They were endorsed by Denison federal independent MP Andrew Wilkie - not normally one to put his name to anybody else's bid - who denounced the existing Councillors in no uncertain terms.

More Section 44 Cases In Spotlight

A very long time ago now two Greens Senators resigned after discovering they were dual citizens.  The Senate will refer their cases to the Court of Disputed Returns (typically the High Court) which will determine whether they were eligible to have been elected in the first place and, assuming that they weren't, will initiate a "special count" to fill their places.  In the weeks since then, however, many more MPs have come under the spotlight of the dual citizenship rule in Section 44 of the Constitution, and it's unlikely it has claimed its final victim yet.

The Constitution is very black and white about dual citizenships - section 44 says that if you are a citizen of another country, you are not eligible to be chosen or to sit in Parliament.  It doesn't seem to allow any ifs or buts about all that.  However, the High Court in Sykes v Cleary [1992] found that the Constitution was unrealistic and had to be "read down".  After all, if it were that straightforward then another nation could maliciously impose citizenship on Australian MPs and refuse to withdraw it.  Alternatively, for a given citizen of a given nation, procedures for getting rid of an unwanted citizenship might be unrealistically expensive, time-consuming, slow, dangerous, unreliable or unreasonable.

Bob Day Chaos Thrills The Crowd

It's so crazy it's beyond even poetic.  Firstly now ex-Senator Bob Day takes the government to court using money that may not even exist to argue that the new Senate system has prevented his re-election.  Then he proves his own case multiply wrong by winning.  Then it turns out he might not be eligible to keep his seat and he says he'll resign, then he flags that he'll hang around a bit.  Then he resigns, and then it turns out that he might never have won in the first place - for a different reason to the one he first flagged resigning over.  And it has been cited as a factor in the blowup between George Brandis and the former Solicitor-General, Justin Gleeson (though it's now emerging that that was erroneous and advice involving a different Senator, Rod Culleton, was the issue there.)

What happens now?  Firstly, while Day's seat remains vacant until we find out whether it is a recount or a casual vacancy appointment that will fill it, the Coalition benefits.  The Senate is reduced from 76 seats to 75, meaning that a majority is now 38 not 39, which is effectively the same as having Bob Day automatically voting with them on everything, with the added bonus of him not even being there to do it.  They're probably hoping the court has some really long adjournments.

(Update: The paragraph above was written before Culleton threw a spanner in the works by flagging his intention to abstain on contentious legislation while his own eligibility is sorted.  If Culleton abstains then the combined absence of Day and Culleton is very harmful to the Coalition,  meaning they need 8/9 non-Green crossbench votes instead of 9/11.)

What Would Happen If Jacqui Lambie Resigned From The Senate?

This piece is brought to you by the Department of Absurd Hypotheticals, but there are a couple of reasons for it.

Firstly, as the Palmer United Party Senator for Tasmania now seems to be embarrassing her country, her state and (to the limited extent possible) herself and her party on a more or less weekly basis, quite a few voters wish she would quit.  Lambie has recently called for the resignation of Defence Minister David Johnston, and a natural response for many was to call for Lambie to get out of politics instead.  

It's no more at this stage than wishful thinking.  Lambie comes from a difficult financial background and a likely six years as a Senator will set her up nicely for the rest of her life.  There are also some issues she seems to care about (for better or worse, varying by case) and she probably thinks she can make a difference to them in her role.  So I definitely don't think she's going anywhere - though whether she stays under the PUP umbrella remains to be seen. 

However, those who are thinking of calling for Lambie to quit the office to which she is so unsuited may want to know: if she did resign from the Senate, what would happen?