Anthony Albanese refuses to join Labor colleagues over Liberal MP citizenship issues

Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese has refused to join colleagues in demanding Liberal MP Jason Falinski be referred to the High Court.

Anthony Albanese has called for common sense over Liberal MP Jason Falinski’s citizenship questions. Picture: AAP

Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese, a one-time leadership rival to Bill Shorten, has refused to join colleagues in demanding Liberal MP Jason Falinski be referred to the High Court amid fresh questions over his citizenship status.

The opposition is demanding Mr Falinski, the member for the safe Liberal seat of Mackellar, has his eligibility tested in court as cabinet ministers attempt to turn the Opposition Leader’s refusal to refer more Labor MPs under a citizenship cloud into a leadership issue.

The first working day since parliament rose last week has been swamped by the dual citizenship crisis, with Mr Falinski and Labor’s Susan Lamb, Justine Keay and Josh Wilson continuing to face questions over their nationality.

The standoff follows months of debate and referrals and comes a week after senators and members disclosed their ancestry and links to any foreign country.

Neither side is backing down though Labor is now focusing on just one Liberal MP, Mr Falinski, after reports immigration documents contradict claims made on his citizenship register about his family history.

Legal advice added to Mr Falinski’s citizenship disclosure states his father, Stanley Falinski, was born out of wedlock and it was therefore unlikely that either Mr Falinski or his dad acquired Polish citizenship through the MP’s grandfather.

But naturalisation documents in the National Archives obtained by The Daily Telegraph show Mr Falinski’s grandfather, Leon Falinski, and his wife Maria were married in Russia in 1942, one year before Stanley was reportedly born.

Labor has seized on this apparent contradiction, declaring it either a “terrible oversight” or a serious misleading of parliament.

“There is enough doubt over the case of Jason Falinski that he must go to the High Court of Australia,” manager of opposition business Tony Burke said.

“I don’t know whether Jason Falinski is legally allowed to be in the federal parliament. Malcolm Turnbull doesn’t know and Jason Falinski clearly doesn’t know. But the High Court is the one body that can sort this out. He should’ve been referred last week.”

But Mr Albanese called for “a little bit of common sense” in both the Falinski case and shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus’ pursuit of Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, whose mother arrived in Australia as stateless after fleeing the Holocaust.

“There should be a little bit of common sense, (it) should apply across the board here and that’s my view,” Mr Albanese told Sky News.

“There is no one in the Labor Party who didn’t go through a process, who didn’t provide documentation, who didn’t do their best endeavours as is required. With regard to other people, I’m not going to get into and I haven’t, you might note since the beginning of this debate, I haven’t gone into pointing fingers at people and their backgrounds.

“How do I know frankly what the background of someone of what happened in the 1940s? … I think it’d be a really good idea if people stop commenting on things that they don’t know. How about we just leave it to what we do know and based upon the facts.”

Mr Falinski said his lawyers were aware of the National Archive files and were satisfied there was no documentation showing evidence of an official marriage, as he stood by his citizenship declaration.

“Even if any of this is true, they lost their citizenship under Polish law at the time they migrated to Australia,” Mr Falinski said.

His legal advice from Arnold Bloch Leibler does not conclusively say he is not entitled to foreign citizenship and he should seek the opinion of foreign experts, but that he’s eligible to sit in the House of Representatives.

Ms Lamb, who has legal advice that states she acquired British citizenship by descent of her Scottish-born father, insisted she was not a dual citizen because the UK government could not confirm she was British.

But the UK Home Office could not complete her renunciation because it did not have the necessary documents to satisfy itself she was British.

Malcolm Turnbull and his ministers have declared she remains British and should quit parliament.

“I’m not concerned that I’m a dual citizen at all. I’m an Australian citizen, I was born in Mackay in north Queensland, went through all of the processes that I needed to take to ensure that when I was elected on the 2nd of July that I met every step of the way that I was able to sit there,” Ms Lamb said.