It’s unlikely that Senator Bob Day’s disappearance from parliament will be a national tragedy. He was a thoroughly regressive individual looking to revive an Australia that he imagined existed in 1954.
No homosexuals, no hookers, no environmentalists – just God saving the Queen.
“If you own your own home, you’ve got a job, you’ve got your finances under control, you live in a safe neighbourhood, you don’t need the government,” he told the Adelaide online newspaper InDaily in 2013.
At the time he was showing a reporter around his property on Fullarton Road in Adelaide, which is now at the heart of the pecuniary interest crisis that is to come before the high court. At the time it was called the Bert Kelly Research Centre, where there were some ultra-conservative outfits as tenants, including Cory Bernardi’s Conservative Leadership Foundation, the Samuel Griffith Society (dedicated to upholding the constitution!), the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance and Menzies House, plus Family First. Books by the likes of David Flint and Ian Plimer were launched from the Fullarton Road property.
Bert Kelly, a free trade Liberal member of parliament from 1958 to 1977 and the original author of the Financial Review’s Modest Member column, would be turning in his grave if he knew what was being carried on in his name.
It was from here in 2010 that Day set about rebuilding Family First, which at that stage looked like the political arm of the Assemblies of God parishioners in Adelaide. His aim was to remodel the party along the same organisational lines as his Homestead Homes business – ie, Builder Bob in charge of everything, which might have something to do with the current mess.
There were other hairy issues in the party’s post-Steve Fielding era, with attempted preference deals between Family First and the Australian Sex party, and tweets from a Queensland Family First member equating gay marriage to “legalising child abuse”.
The party had racked up $200,000 in debts, including money owned to members of Family First’s executive committee. Up to that point the party’s main financial backer was Peter Harris, whose building development companies went into liquidation in 2010-11.
The dangers of Family First depending on property developers was a lesson that should have been learned in 2010, which proves once again that the godly are not possessed of special insights. While Day has been comfortably warming a Senate seat the customers of companies he controls have been complaining about shoddy workmanship and semi-completed homes.
Day says he would “relish the opportunity to get to the high court” and is clinging to Garfield Barwick’s 1975 interpretation in Webster’s case of s.44(v) of the constitution.
As he was fond of doing with the Tax Act, Barwick constructed the constitutional protection so narrowly as to make it useless. He found that a family company of Senator James Webster (Nat. Vic), which had been contracted to supply timber to the government was not in breach of section 44(v) because they were not standing contracts, rather arrangements to supply from time to time.
This seems to fly in the face of the purpose of the parliamentary eligibility provision of the constitution which is designed to disqualify candidates whose conflicts of loyalty risk affecting their performance.
Day was actually in the high court this year in a doomed challenge to the new Senate voting amendments. It led the then solicitor general, Justin Gleeson, to remark to Chief Justice Robert French that Day’s challenge to the law effectively was also a challenge to the process by which he was elected to the Senate in 2013. Here’s Gleeson in March 2016 at a preliminary round in the high court:
They [the submissions] have the rather startling proposition that Senator Day is, in fact, not Senator Day, he is Mr Day. He has been sitting invalidly in the Senate for the last three years. No legislation has validly been passed by the Senate. Now, why – I will call him Senator Day – would leave it until, as it were, five minutes to midnight before this election to bring before this court three arguments which impugn his own position as a senator has been left totally unexplained.
To press the point, the chief justice asked Day’s counsel, Peter King: “But do you accept that you are challenging the validity of a process of voting in Senate elections which has been in place for many years, long before the current amendment?”
In other words, the solicitor general and the chief justice were of the view at that point that the logical extension of Day’s argument was that he was ineligible to sit from the moment he was elected in September 2013. These are not the same grounds for ineligibility that are now in contention, but nonetheless show that Day had long been confused about his entitlement to sit as a senator.
As for Rod Culleton, if he does appear in the high court it promises to be memorable. He told the media yesterday in the hokey, blokey, bush-wacking tone of One Nation:
I’m not sure whether I’m gonna participate in any high court jurisdiction and if I do I’ll simply go down, shear a sheep and take the belly fleece and stick it over my head and represent myself, because I’m a true Australian standing up for the Australian people.
Oi, oi, oi.
