A Liberal PM a few years back said life wasn’t meant to be easy and this goes double when it comes to fiddling about with Constitutional matters. To be fair, Malcolm Fraser did alright out of a bit of Constitutional crisis, but the same cannot be said of the current Malcolm who has a majority of one and a Deputy PM who has a bit of trouble filling out forms.
Now, we’re all human I’m told and it is human to have a bit of trouble filling out forms, so forgiveness would seem to be the divine option here. Sadly, the government has taken a less than understanding approach to this sort of inadequate box-ticking when it comes to Centrelink overpayments, in fact even if you did fill out your forms correctly, a dim view is taken, so karma perhaps is not in their favour at this point.
Rather adding to the schadenfreude is the current regime’s treatment of asylum seekers, which could politely be described as “utterly merciless” which takes us back to Malcolm “Life Isn’t Meant To Be Easy” Fraser who at least didn’t interpret his favourite saying as “Life was in fact meant to be a living hell in an offshore torture camp to serve as an example to others.”
The upshot of all this is that there really isn’t a lot of sympathy for people who (a) aren’t terribly good at paperwork and (b) are are a little bit iffy on the citizenship front, especially it seems, secret agents from New Zealand who are plotting against us, or so it would seem from how our Foreign Minister’s been talking. You can never be too careful with those New Zealanders I suppose.
Anyway, there is shortly to be a short period of unpleasantness where the country consults the entrails of the High Court chicken (or possibly a Kiwi, I haven’t consulted the relevant section of the Constitution on this matter) to find out if Barnaby et al get cut considerably more slack than they tend to cut others who find themselves temporarily embarrassed on the paperwork/citizenship fronts. It’s all rather complicated, so in the cartoon I’ve attempted to explain matters through the medium of quantum mechanics. At the very least, physics professors come considerably cheaper than your average silk.