Tony Burke accused of breaching ministerial code in mass citizenship ceremonies

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke is facing a serious allegation that he breached ministerial conduct by excluding an independent MP from a major citizenship ceremony in Sydney while inviting the crossbencher’s Labor challenger.

More than 4500 people became citizens during the three-day event in Olympic Park over the weekend, including now-voters in the division of Fowler.

The federal seat’s holder Dai Le has said she was not invited, howevera Home Affairs spokesperson has told NewsWire she was.

Regardless, Labor’s candidate Tu Le did attend and reaped the benefits of photo-ops with new Australians.

It comes against a backdrop of claims that Labor has been rushing through citizenship ceremonies to stack electorates in its favour.

The Albanese government has rejected the allegations.

Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said on Monday it was “extraordinary behaviour … in the dying days of a desperate government to schedule these unscheduled, unprecedented, extraordinary Home Affairs Department citizenship ceremonies to ram through 12,000 citizenships in the days before the election is called”.

Mr Burke told Sky News last week the mass ceremonies had been held to help clear a “huge backlog”, and brushed off any suggestion there was a political advantage for Labor in the events.

“I don’t know if you’ve got some secret insight as to which way people are going to vote. I don’t,” he said.

“What we had was a huge backlog … of people who were entitled to have these citizenship ceremonies and different councils weren’t having enough ceremonies.

“I just say to the people who are complaining, have a bit of patriotism about this. People standing up and saying, I want to make a lifelong Pledge of Commitment to Australia is a good thing.”

Home Affairs’ handling of the citizenship ceremonies was set to be probed during Senate Estimates on Monday.

Senator Paterson told Sky News ahead of the hearings that Mr Burke “really needs to answer some questions about this today and I’ll be putting questions to the Department of Home Affairs about this today”.

Asked if he thought excluding Dai Le was a ministerial breach, the man vying for Mr Burke’s job said: “Yes, I think it clearly does and I’ll have more questions for the Home Affairs Department about this today and other invitations that they might have made or not made to other politicians.”

“These ceremonies are happening all around the country at the moment and it looks like they are playing political favourites here, but that will be a very serious issue for the Department of Home Affairs, for the secretary, Stephanie Foster,” Senator Paterson said.

“And I want to understand what, if anything, the department did to satisfy itself that this wasn’t being abused for partisan political purposes as it very clearly appears that it was.”