No more Mr Nice Guys in the dual citizen debacle

The gloves are off in the citizenship row. The key principle applied in the early months will be cast aside as the government confronts internal disruption and a threat to its control of parliament.

Once, the government claimed that it would be dangerous to use one party’s numbers to force an MP from another party to face the High Court over his or her citizenship.

Now the government is more than willing to use its numbers to send some of Bill Shorten’s colleagues to court.

The new approach will be simple: when in doubt, vote for referral. “That’s what we’ve done with our MPs and that’s what we’ll do with theirs if we have to,” says one Liberal.

Malcolm Turnbull was outmanoeuvred on Wednesday when he met Shorten and sought a bipartisan deal on the process to decide who went to court. Shorten emerged with a demand for an earlier deadline for MPs to produce documents.

Shorten doubled down yesterday. His office issued a letter to Turnbull with a series of demands soon after the Prime Minister boarded a plane to two leadership summits in Asia. Labor seemed likely to catch Turnbull off guard again.

Turnbull wrote his three-page rejection letter from the plane with a barb at Shorten’s “absurd” demands and a dig at Shorten’s “anxiety” about Labor MPs who could have been dual citizens when they nominated for the election. The response was swift and effective.

The sense of crisis continues to grow with conservative Liberals like Kevin Andrews talking about a leadership change being a “last resort”.

Any uncertainty over Turnbull’s control of parliament fuels instability and heightens the threat of a spill. Reshuffle speculation fuels uncertainty to the same end, just as it did in September 2015.

Shorten can easily exploit the Coalition’s warring sides, especially the interventions from Tony Abbott and allies such as Andrews, to magnify the crisis and encourage a spill.

With so much at stake, Turnbull has no time to play nice over who goes to court.