Gail Alexan­der

UNC Sen­a­tor Anil Roberts com­mit­ted a most egre­gious con­tempt of the Sen­ate with his re­cent ut­ter­ances on his so­cial me­dia broad­cast.

That was the pro­nounce­ment yes­ter­day from Gov­ern­ment Sen­ate leader Franklin Khan, who called for Roberts to be brought be­fore Par­lia­ment’s Priv­i­leges team. That mat­ter was be­ing de­lib­er­at­ed up­on yes­ter­day.

The mat­ter con­cerned cer­tain pub­lic state­ments by Roberts, fol­low­ing last Tues­day’s rul­ing by Sen­ate Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo that Roberts leave that sit­ting.

Khan added, “The spe­cif­ic state­ments at­trib­uted to Sen­a­tor Roberts were de­liv­ered in two episodes of his show ‘Douglar Pol­i­tics’, broad­cast on Feb­ru­ary 23 and Feb­ru­ary 26.”

He not­ed the show was car­ried on var­i­ous so­cial me­dia .

Khan said Roberts used satir­i­cal sub­text to al­lege that in the dis­charge of her du­ties, Sen­ate Pres­i­dent Kan­ga­loo was bi­ased to­wards him. It was not­ed Roberts re­ferred to him­self as “boom­ing voice” and the Sen­ate, as a “Kan­ga­roo Court”.

“While this may ap­pear to some as harm­less com­e­dy, it is not. It is in fact a dan­ger­ous pat­tern of con­duct on the part of this Mem­ber that threat­ens this in­sti­tu­tion of democ­ra­cy. This es­teemed Sen­ate func­tions on the ba­sis of well-es­tab­lished rules, pro­ce­dure and prece­dent, and if any­one of us wish­es, there are re­spectable and dig­ni­fied ways to chal­lenge the rules of this Sen­ate and the de­ci­sion of the Chair of this House,” he added.

“ In his dis­turb­ing and out­ra­geous re­flec­tion on the Sen­ate, Sen­a­tor Roberts has there­fore brought the Sen­ate as a whole in­to pub­lic ridicule.”

Khan not­ed Robert’s ut­ter­ances are al­so in di­rect con­tra­ven­tion of a pre­vi­ous rul­ing to mem­bers and Roberts in par­tic­u­lar on a sim­i­lar mat­ter .

He said Roberts, as a for­mer par­lia­men­tar­i­an, knows bet­ter.