The crossbench senator Nick Xenophon will become the seventh MP to refer himself to the high court after finding out he’s a British overseas citizen, but has accused his political opponents of “exhuming” the information.

Xenophon, whose father came to Australia in 1951 from the then British territory of Cyprus, had been awaiting confirmation from the British Home Office as to whether he was a citizen by descent.

“The circumstances of this are bizarre and rare,” he said.

Xenophon, whose father Theodoros Xenophou is from Cyprus – a British colony until 1960, had been increasingly pulled into Canberra’s citizenship fiasco after he joked about his own citizenship status at a Sydney book launch last month.



After he did not hear back from Greek and Cypriot authorities when he contacted them in an attempt to renounce any possible foreign citizenship, he decided to approach the British Home Office for clarification.

“I am checking with them and seeking documents, and once I have them I will release them,” he told Guardian Australia on Friday.



On Saturday, Xenophon called a news conference in Adelaide to say he had received advice from the British Home Office overnight that they considered him a British overseas citizen.

He said the “great irony” of the situation was that his father travelled to Australia decades ago from Cyprus to escape British colonial rule.

When Cyprus gained independence, most Cypriots lost their British citizenship except those who moved to one of nine countries, including Australia. This made Xenophon’s father a British overseas citizen, a status that automatically extended to Xenophon, who was born in Australia.

Xenophon told reporters on Saturday that the advice he received from the UK was “that this whole scenario is quite a rare peculiarity”, adding that being a British overseas citizen was “quite useless” and gave him no rights to live or work in the UK.

“To add insult to injury, the European Union of which Cyprus is a member does not consider a British overseas citizen to be a UK national,” Xenophon said, describing it as a “third-class” of citizenship “just one notch above being stateless”.

“So while this form of citizenship has been described accurately as useless, it appears to have been exhumed by my political opponents to try and render me not so much stateless as Senate-less,” he said. “To those politicians and their staff beavering away at this, presumably over many, many hours and days, I say; ‘didn’t you have anything better to do with your time given the urgent and serious problems and challenges that South Australia and the nation faces?’

“No wonder so many Australians are disgusted by our current broken state of politics.”

He said he would refer himself to the high court once parliament resumed, in a fortnight.

Xenophon is the latest federal MP to get caught up in the citizenship tangle.

On Thursday evening, the deputy leader of the National party, Fiona Nash, joined Barnaby Joyce in referring herself to the high court – in her case, on the basis that she has British citizenship by descent.



Xenophon told Fairfax Media on Friday that he would not resign if it was confirmed he had British citizenship by descent.



“It has to go to the high court,” he said.

– Australian Associated Press contributed to this report