Labor Leader Bill Shorten’s credibility in tatters over the dual citizenship crisis
OPPOSITION Leader Bill Shorten has for months misled the Australian public after continuously claiming Labor’s vetting processes were thorough, strict and airtight. None of his MPs could possibly be dual citizens, he repeated.
NSW
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BILL Shorten has for months misled the Australian public.
He continuously claimed Labor’s vetting processes were thorough, strict and airtight.
None of his MPs could possibly be dual citizens, he repeated over and over again with a straight face to television cameras.
Five Labor politicians have now been exposed as foreign citizens: David Feeney, Katy Gallagher, Susan Lamb, Josh Wilson and Justine Keay.
They had failed to renounce their British citizenship prior to the last election.
Gallagher clung on to the liferaft of her legal advice for months, desperately insisting she wasn’t a British or Ecuadorean citizen.
The High Court brutally found otherwise.
Meanwhile, Lam, Wilson and Keay fraudulently sat in Parliament at taxpayer expense, refusing to have their cases heard in the High Court.
Now, the Labor MPs are refusing to technically resign until Friday, so that they can continue to take advantage of taxpayer funds to pay for their hotels, flights back home and staff.
What a joke.
Instead of being transparent and accountable to the Australian people, Shorten and his office used bullying tactics to try and shut down reporting on their dual-citizen MPs.
They mocked stories questioning the citizenship of Labor MPs and said they were “wrong and embarrassing”.
Now, the MPs have all been forced to resign and Shorten has egg on his face.
Labor risks losing the marginal seats of Longman and Braddon to the Liberals and Freemantle to the Greens, while the Liberal Party could pick-up Mayo with Alexander Downer’s daughter, Georgina as candidate.
Malcolm Turnbull needs to win just one of these electorates to strengthen his one-seat majority.
The downside is all in Labor’s court.
It would be tough to find an Australian who hadn’t heard Shorten proclaim no Labor MPs had any questions to answer over their citizenship.
Trust is already a problem with the opposition leader, emerging repeatedly in research conducted by political strategists.
The public have been struggling to take Shorten at his word. This issue will now be exacerbated and his deception over the dual-citizens in his ranks will badly damage his credibility and integrity.