9 Comments

1. RAB says:
   December 7, 2012 at 3:26 am

   Practicing for her post Election new career as a stand up comedian then I see? Needs work, needs shedloads of work, but yeah do please give up the day job Julie.
2. Julie near Chicago says:
   December 7, 2012 at 2:22 pm

   RAB — “For want of an ‘A’ a point was lost”? I think you mean it would be nice if Ms. Gillard took herself off to harass other people somewhere. LOL!!
3. John Galt says:
   December 7, 2012 at 2:34 pm

   @Julie:

   Although she has given up her UK Citizenship to become an Australian MP, under UK Immigration Law she is entitled to have her UK Citizenship reinstated, albeit only once.

   So she could come back to the UK and try her luck there as a political retread. Labour would love her as she would make a lovely companion for Harriet Har-”person”.
4. Julie near Chicago says:
   December 7, 2012 at 4:17 pm

   Ah, Harriet Harperson! I’m glad to see, JG, that at least you have understood and adopted the linguistic rules of the newer, less demeaning-of-the-Fair-Sex version of English.

   I take it back, you understand it fine, and got a very good joke out of it. LOL

   But please don’t feel obliged to adopt the new rules on my account.
5. CountingCats says:
   December 7, 2012 at 4:37 pm

   Julie,

   Harperson has been her piss take name for a very long time. No offense to JG, but there has been nothing original about that joke for a decade and a half, at least.

   JG,
   I am unaware that Julia had to give up her UK citizenship to go into the Australian parliament. If that is now a requirement it must have happened in the years I was out of the country.

   Although, as an Australian with recent UK ancestry, as things stand she can go to the UK without changing her status, vote, and enter the UK parliament.

   I voted while I was there, and I was asked to stand as the UKIP candidate in the ‘97 elections in Streatham. I didn’t become a UK citizen until after I had returned to Oz, in 2003.
6. John Galt says:
   December 7, 2012 at 9:55 pm

   It’s your country Cats, you should know this stuff:

   s.44 of the Australian Constitution

   “Any person who:….is under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power:……shall be incapable of being chosen or of sitting as a senator or a member of the House of Representatives.”

   Julia Gillard became an Australian citizen in 1974 with the rest of her family. She renounced her British Citizenship in 1998, before entering parliament.
7. CountingCats says:
   December 7, 2012 at 10:16 pm

   JG,

   At the time the constitution was written, anf for most of the rest of the 20th century, the UK was not, in law, a foreign power…..

   I was a British subject until about 1974.

   The Dominions become fully independent under the Statute of Westminster, but I don’t know when the UK started to be regarded, properly, as a foreign country. I remember, when young, the appointment of the last British Governor General.
8. John Galt says:
   December 8, 2012 at 1:35 am

   I was a British subject until about 1974.

   As a matter of interest why? No law against being a dual national is there?

   Always good to have an EU passport even if its just to keep your options open and make travelling in Europe easier.

   …Oh sorry, I forgot…

   “When you’re tired of Brisbane, you’re tired of life”
9. CountingCats says:
   December 8, 2012 at 6:32 am

   JG,

   All Australians were British subjects until 1974, but not citizens of the UK. We had no entitlement to UK passports. It was the Whitlam government which removed that status.