Barnaby Joyce has called on parliamentary colleagues concerned about their eligibility status to refer themselves immediately to the high court, and has branded his Liberal and Labor colleagues “dopey” for standing back initially to let Nationals take the rap in the high court.



Asked to respond to criticism of the National party by its Liberal Coalition partner about its apparent failure to follow proper candidate vetting processes before the last federal election, Joyce replied: “Ah, Stephen Parry.”

The president of the Senate, the Liberal senator Stephen Parry, informed the government on Tuesday that he may be a dual citizen through descent. Joyce was ruled ineligible by the high court last week on the same grounds and is now facing a byelection in his seat of New England.

“It shows how dopey they were,” Joyce told Guardian Australia. “All the National party did, like good old country folk, they got busted and fessed up.”

Joyce rounded on his government colleagues, and opposition MPs. “Now various Liberals are coming forward, and there will be Labor too – make no mistake, there will be Labor ones too.

“They were all playing this dopey little game where they were waiting for the Nats to take the rap, and then sneak in behind and say, ‘Well we don’t have to do that.’”

He said Nationals MPs had not deployed any delaying tactics. “As soon as we knew, we went down to the chamber and fessed up.”

Joyce said any parliamentary colleagues concerns about their status had only one option. “If you think you’ve got a problem, that’s what the high court is for. You refer yourself to the high court and let them make the decision for you.”

The citizenship crisis has convulsed the Turnbull government for months, and Parry is not the only MP facing questions about his eligibility.

If he is found to be a UK citizen, he will become the eighth MP to be caught by the requirement of the constitution that parliamentarians not be dual citizens and, given the high court’s definitive ruling last week, may be forced to immediately resign.

The citizenship imbroglio has claimed Joyce, who faces a byelection on 2 December and his Nationals deputy leader Fiona Nash, who is unlikely to return to politics unless the Liberal Hollie Hughes, is found to be ineligible to take up her position as a New South Wales senator.

The nightmare may not be over for the Turnbull government, which has lost its one-seat lower-house majority courtesy of the Joyce’s ineligibility. There have been persistent questions about some federal MPs who could have acquired citizenship through descent.

The Greens and some crossbenchers have been calling for a audit of the entire parliament for some time.

While the Turnbull government and Labor opposition have so far resisted calls for an audit, which they say unfairly places a reverse onus of proof on MPs and senators, pressure has grown.

The Liberal MP Craig Kelly told Lateline on Tuesday that he would back a “full audit”, to be conducted by the Australian Electoral Commission, which he said would bring the issue to its head and “draw a line in the sand”.

“The reality is the media are onto this, the media is going through checking everyone’s records,” he said. “There is an informal audit being done by the media which is like a death of a thousand cuts.”

The attorney general, George Brandis, described the idea of an audit as a “witch-hunt” and the acting prime minister, Julie Bishop, told Seven’s Sunrise on Wednesday parliamentarians’ citizenship issues were being dealt with “on a case-by-case basis”.

“Each member and senator has a responsibility to ensure that they are eligible to stand for parliament,” Bishop said.

The Labor MP Meryl Swanson told ABC’s AM: “We need to know, we need to be sure that everyone’s there and they have eligibility.

“There can’t be one rule instituted by the high court for some … and then others just mopping their brow, saying, ‘Phew, we dodged that.’”

The Liberal National party MP Llew O’Brien also said he would support an audit if the Australian people want one.

At a doorstop in Sydney, acting leader Tanya Plibersek said that Labor was “very confident no Labor MP is a dual citizen”.

Asked about an audit, she said: “We have got strict processes and careful procedures when people are applying to be candidates.”

“There isn’t any chaos that involves the Labor party, it is chaos of the government’s own making.

On Wednesday the Greens leader, Richard Di Natale, told Radio National that the citizenship issue was casting a “huge shadow over parliament at the moment” and the 45th parliament is “entering constitutional crisis territory”.

Di Natale said the “obvious course of action” was for Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten to agree to an audit, and accused Turnbull of “acting in a cowardly way” by refusing and letting “the cards fall where they fall”.

Plibersek dismissed the Greens claims as “ridiculous”, noting that the party had two senators who were found to be dual citizens.

“They obviously have very serious vetting problems and they’re looking for a way to make that an issue that is common to all political parties.”