This Wednesday at 10.05AM, Australians at last saw an end to the marriage law survey, the indirect product of the High Court’s 2013 decision declaring the ACT’s Marriage Equality Bill inoperative and the High Court’s September decision upholding the government’s instruction to the Australian Bureau of Statistics to perform the survey. Marriage equality is now exclusively a matter for the politicians Australians elected in 2016. But, as a decision from the High Court five hours later makes clear, the 2016 election is still ongoing and doesn’t look like ending any time soon. This time the High Court held that nominee Hollie Hughes was ineligible to be declared elected, because she took a position in the Administrative Appeals Tribunals (an ‘office of profit under the Crown’) during the 15 months that ineligible dual citizen Fiona Nash purported to take her spot in the Senate. This especially startling instance of the Court’s ‘brutal literalism‘ (when it comes to s44) will undoubtedly lead to more questioning of whether some of the people currently sitting in Parliament were actually elected.

The requirements of s44 are challenging, not just to MPs and nominees, but also to the media, which faces the difficulty of reporting on its content and the various processes for testing it. On Wednesday, the media were not assisted by the Chief Justice, Continue reading →