Night and day, Labor’s the one for heavy vetting, according to Bill Shorten’s song sheet
Katy Gallagher is gone. The Australian yesterday:
Labor senator Katy Gallagher has been thrown out of politics after the High Court found she was ineligible to sit in parliament ... for failing to rescind her British citizenship before the 2016 election.
More bad news for the opposition, The Australian Financial Review yesterday:
... Labor’s Justine Keay, Josh Wilson and Susan Lamb all announced their intention to resign in the wake of the ruling ...
How can this be? Labor had the best MP-vetting in the business. Nine’s Today show, November 9, 2017:
Deborah Knight: Can you guarantee that no Labor MPs or senators will be caught up in this?
Bill Shorten: I am more than satisfied that Labor MPs, through our vetting process ...
Knight: Can you guarantee rather than “more than satisfied”?
Shorten: Yes, I am. Yes.
Knight: Rolled gold?
Shorten: Yes, I am very confident.
Oops — less than a month later, Gallagher was in trouble. The Canberra Times, December 5, 2017:
Katy Gallagher looks increasingly likely to face the High Court ... Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and Labor frontbenchers defended the ACT senator and former chief minister’s efforts to renounce dual British citizenship ... describing her attempts as superior to deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce and former Nationals senator Fiona Nash.
Bill’s faith was unshaken. More from The Canberra Times:
“The difference between Katy Gallagher and Barnaby Joyce is the difference between night and day,” Mr Shorten said. “The law’s very clear. If you are a dual citizen you have got to demonstrate that you take all reasonable steps to renounce the citizenship of another country. Mr Joyce and Senator Nash had no evidence ... they didn’t even try and argue that they had taken any steps whatsoever, whereas Senator Gallagher certainly can.”
Donald Trump explains why he put the kibosh on Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement, yesterday:
(It)was supposed to protect the US and our allies from the lunacy of an Iranian nuclear bomb (but it) allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium and, over time, reach the brink of a nuclear breakout. (It) lifted crippling economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for very weak limits on the regime’s nuclear activity and no limits at all on its other malign behaviour, including its sinister activities in Syria.
Surely Iran will just speed up its bomb project? Analyst Richard Goldberg explains the outlook to Vox yesterday:
Put aside the idea that Iran is going to race to the bomb now ... both Republican and Democratic administrations have agreed that they would use military action to prevent that scenario, and the Iranians know that and are therefore unlikely to provoke that response. Iran also doesn’t want to become politically isolated, and if they were to race to the bomb, they would lose the support they still have right now (beyond the US). Trump has some time here to ratchet up the pressure again, to unlock the lockbox where all our sanctions have been the last few years, and to use any other means of state power possible to coerce the regime to change its behaviour. When that pressure becomes so severe, the leaders of Iran must once again choose between regime survival economically or negotiating over all their malign activities, and I think they’ll have to negotiate.