The One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, has referred the eligibility of her colleague Malcolm Roberts to the high court herself, after months of confusion about his citizenship status.
Roberts has accepted the motion, but says he will continue to vote in the Senate while the high court considers his eligibility, despite the cloud over his citizenship status.
Hanson’s motion came less than 24 hours after Greens leader, Richard Di Natale, secured the numbers in the Senate to refer Roberts to the high court despite One Nation’s objections.
Di Natale was planning to move the Greens’ motion on Wednesday afternoon, but Hanson got there first.
The Senate president, Stephen Parry, said he hoped the high court would now settle the matter promptly.
Roberts told the Senate he was keen for the high court to clarify his eligibility, and said he was confident it would rule in his favour.
He said the court would give him a fair hearing, unlike the media, which he blamed for misrepresenting his past statements about his citizenship status and eligibility.
“As I expected, and as the media has confirmed, elements of the media have misrepresented my position and statements, not once, not twice, repeatedly,” he said on Wednesday.
“In the interests of honesty, openness and transparency, and with support from senator Pauline Hanson, I will tender my citizenship documents to the high court to confirm that I was eligible to be elected as a senator.
“I am very confident I am eligible, because otherwise I would not have signed that nomination form.”
When Roberts said One Nation stood for “honesty, transparency and accountability”, numerous senators laughed.
Di Natale criticised Hanson’s decision to move the referral motion herself, saying she was only doing so to appear principled and to get ahead of the Greens’ motion.
He said there were “serious questions” about Roberts’ eligibility, and it should not have taken pressure from the Greens to get One Nation to act honourably.
“This is somebody who has made commentary publicly about his status as a dual citizen that bears no relationship with the facts,” Di Natale said of Roberts.
“His story has changed more times than I’ve changed underpants.
“[He] has steadfastly refused to engage in what should have been the appropriate conduct in the first instance, and that was an adjudication within the high court.”
Senator Derryn Hinch told the Senate he had a sit-down with Roberts on Tuesday, and said Roberts assured him that he had taken “all reasonable steps” to confirm his sole Australian citizenship before he nominated for the election last year.
“But following further information I’ve received in the past 24 hours, I now believe, and I don’t want you to pull me up so I won’t say the senator lied to me, I’ll just say I believe he was very economical with the truth,” Hinch said.
Roberts’ decision to keep voting in the Senate despite his eligibility being referred to the high court is unusual.
The Nationals senator Matt Canavan, who has stood aside as minister for resources and northern Australia while the high court considers his own eligibility, has pledged not to vote in the Senate until the high court resolves his case.
Roberts’ account of his citizenship status has changed repeatedly in recent weeks, and a statutory declaration he tabled in the Senate on Tuesday failed to clear the matter up.
His statutory declaration confirmed he was presently not a citizen of the UK or India, and was a citizen of Australia only – but it did not clarify whether he was an Australian citizen only when he nominated for the election last year.
Documents published by BuzzFeed on Tuesday again confirmed that Roberts had been a British citizen in the past, contradicting the senator’s claim last year that he had “never held any citizenship other than Australian”.
It is understood that attorney general, George Brandis, approached Di Natale’s office on Tuesday evening to inform him of Hanson’s decision to refer Roberts’ eligibility to the high court herself.
Labor and the Coalition preferred One Nation to refer Roberts to the high court themselves rather than the Greens, because they did not want to set a precedent of rival parties referring political opponents to the high court to test their eligibility.
