Time this week seems to be on the government’s side: the Treasurer on Tuesday handed out a budget that promised significant tax cuts, and a return to surplus, largely through a series of complex choices about timing.

And the High Court ruled Wednesday that ALP Senator Katy Gallagher was incapable of being chosen for the Senate at the last federal election, because at the time she nominated as a candidate the UK Home Secretary had not yet registered her renunciation of British citizenship.

The High Court has decided Katy Gallagher is ineligible to sit in the Senate. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

The problem for Senator Gallagher was all in the timing: even though she filled in the forms and paid the fee, her attempts to renounce her citizenship simply came too late for constitutional purposes.

In ruling against Senator Gallagher, the High Court affirmed its prior ruling in the Citizenship Seven Case that a person’s status as a foreign citizen is ultimately a question of foreign law. The only exception, the Court held, is if foreign law irremediably prevents an Australian citizen from renouncing their foreign citizenship, and thus becoming eligible to participate in the process of representative government in Australia.