Questions over Josh Frydenberg’s status and Stephen Parry’s late admission have raised calls ‘to rip the Band-Aid off’ the citizenship issue. The question is: can anyone figure out how?

A citizenship inquiry for Australia’s federal parliamentarians is on the cards – if anyone can figure out how one would work.



Stephen Parry’s late admission of dual citizenship, which communications minister Mitch Fifield has admitted he knew about some time ago, and questions over Josh Frydenberg’s status have focused attention on both Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership and “how to rip the Band-Aid off” the citizenship issue.

Labor has previously held the line against holding an audit, with senior MPs saying they did not believe it is necessary. However, it could be moved towards supporting the call, made most strongly by the Greens, provided there was more than a mud map about how it would work.

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A senior Labor source told Guardian Australia: “Bill [Shorten’s] never ruled it out because he doesn’t pretend to know about other parties’ processes – it’s just that an audit would have a lot of complicated legal and constitutional issues.

“We need convincing that it would actually be effective, who’d run it, how it would work.”

The source said Labor MPs had nothing to worry about, but that the Liberals did.

Frydenberg spent Friday morning denying there were any issues with his citizenship, which centres on his mother’s “stateless” status when she fled Hungary.

But the fresh round of questions, coming as the fallout from Parry’s resignation continues to reverberate through the Coalition in terms of who knew what and when, has given the Liberal MP – and one of Tony Abbott’s chief supporters – Kevin Andrews further opportunity to question how the prime minister was handling the situation.

Less than 24 hours after calling for “strong, decisive and stable leadership”, Andrews followed up on Friday with a comment that the man who sacked him as defence minister in 2015 was “the leader at the moment”.

Andrews, who first called for a citizenship audit shortly after Turnbull again said there was no need for one, did not explain what he meant by “at the moment” while talking to the ABC, but said people felt “there’s a lot of spin, about various issues” and an audit would provide some clarity.

“He’s the leader, he’s the prime minister. I’m simply saying he’s the prime minister,” Andrews said. “What we have at the moment is a clear frustration on the part of the Australian public that they’re not getting what they want. Whoever the leader is, then they need to be responding to this. Mr Turnbull is the leader. There’s no move to change him that I’m aware of. But we do need to respond to the Australian people. We need to listen to them, and we need to lead.”

However Andrews is not alone, with Craig Kelly and Eric Abetz previously having backed calls for an audit.

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Publicly, Labor has maintained there is no need. Labor MPs have been repeatedly called upon to release their documents to prove their own citizenship status, but have refused, telling those who ask that the party’s strict section 44 vetting processes were enough to ensure no problems.

“There’s not a simple solution to say, ‘we’ll find someone to do an audit of all the parliamentarians’ parents’,” Penny Wong told ABC radio on Friday.

“The reality is, people have to check these things for themselves. Everybody has their own family circumstances, everyone has to consider what their arrangements are.”

Those privately advocating for an audit concede there are issues around which authority would carry it out, given the high court is the ultimate jurisdiction which decides eligibility. Complicated foreign national law, which came to the forefront of the Matt Canavan case, is another factor, to which those who sympathise with Frydenberg’s family situation also point.

“Sure, we are looking at how we rip the Band-Aid off, because all these individual admissions are killing us,” one Coalition source said. “When was the last time we spoke about the economy, or any of the other issues we are trying to prosecute? No one wants this. But our problem is we don’t know how to fix it and it won’t stop coming.”