Nationals senator says if he loses his dual citizenship case, ‘we’ll just see what happens next for me’

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Matt Canavan has suggested he may quit politics if the high court rules him ineligible to sit in the Senate, saying it will be up to his wife to decide if he continues.

Ahead of three days of high court hearings into his and six other parliamentarians’ eligibility over dual citizenship, the Nationals senator raised the prospect he could quit if he loses the case.

“I’ve told the boss, my wife, if the worst outcome happens she is the boss and we’ll work out what we do when and if that happened,” Canavan told Nine News.

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“I’d love to continue doing it but I’ve always said that my job as a father is much more important than my job as a senator, I’ve got five kids, so we’ll just see what happens next for me, if that happened.”

Canavan resigned as resources minister in June, quitting cabinet over his dual Italian citizenship. He renounced Italian citizenship and stayed in the Senate pending the high court case on his eligibility.

Although Canavan was not born an Italian, in 1983 the Italian constitutional court held that citizenship can pass by descent through the maternal line, retrospectively rendering his mother and himself citizens from their birth in 1955 and 1980.

The attorney general, George Brandis, has submitted that parliamentarians should not be disqualified over dual citizenship they did not know they held, and only those who “voluntarily obtained or retained” foreign citizenship should be barred.

Canavan supported that submission, arguing he had “no relationship of allegiance with Italy” of the kind banned by section 44 of the constitution.

The solicitor general, Stephen Donaghue, has suggested Canavan’s case is “materially indistinguishable” from the cases of the deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, the Nationals senator Fiona Nash and Nick Xenophon because they were all born in Australia and say they had no knowledge they acquired foreign citizenship by descent.

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Xenophon has announced his plans to resign, regardless of the outcome of the high court case, while Joyce and Nash are intent on staying in parliament.

Greens Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters have both already resigned from the Senate, although Waters has suggested she may seek to return.

Ludlam, Waters and the contradictor in Joyce’s case, the former independent MP Tony Windsor, have submitted that section 44 bans parliamentarians who are dual nationals regardless of whether they know it or not.

If that strict understanding of section 44 is applied, which has been the majority reasoning in earlier high court precedents, constitutional lawyer George Williams has said that all seven parliamentarians would likely be ineligible.