No one in the diplomatic sphere has had
a worse December than U.S. State Department officials, but at least their
problems are relatively straightforward. Not so for the Australian government.
Witness the contortions of Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Foreign Minister
Kevin Rudd (above) over recent days: "I absolutely condemn the placement of this
information on the WikiLeaks website," Gillard said
on Thursday of WikiLeaks honcho Julian Assange's State Department cable dump.
"It's a grossly irresponsible thing to do, and an illegal thing to do."
But then here's Rudd in a radio
interview today, placing most of the blame on the United States' own
security measures rather than Assange, an Australian citizen:
When you've got a quarter of a million cables pecking around
out there, and on top of that you have people who have had access in the US
system to these sorts of cables in excess of two million people, that's where
the core of the problem lies.
Gillard herself walked things back a bit (though only a bit)
yesterday, with the Melbourne Age reporting
that "Gillard could not yesterday say that Julian Assange had broken any
Australian law but declared the 'foundation stone' of the WikiLeaks affair was ‘an
illegal act.'"
What's made things tricky, of course, is Assange's arrest in
Britain and Sweden's attempts to extradite him on unrelated charges, and the open question of what legal ambitions the United
States may have now that he's in custody. Australia factors negligibly in the WikiLeaks cables released thus far,
save for a moderately embarrassing cable in
which Rudd offers candid thoughts on Australian trade partner China and some less-than-thrilling
details about which Australian politicians were talking to U.S. embassy
officials. (A new batch, unreleased to the public but obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald, apparently
includes some of the U.S. diplomats' own unvarnished
thoughts on Rudd.) But Assange's nationality, while thwarting the
aspirations of Google-impaired
Americans
who would like to see Assange tried for treason, does make this another sort of
diplomatic issue for Australia.
Assange himself appeals to the patriotism of his countrymen
in an op-ed
in The Australian today:
I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke
their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be
corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the
Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what
happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.
These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created
around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet
technologies in new ways to report the truth.
WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific
journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also
to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story,
then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you
can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it
accurately?
The Columbia Journalism
Review's Joel Meares has a good roundup of
how this has all played in the Australian media. Among other things, a long
list of Australian intellectuals have signed a letter to Gillard's
government in defense of Assange, and Malcolm Turnbull, a leading member of the
opposition, has seized on the issue in a lengthy blog
post:
I note that my colleague Senator George Brandis has
described Mr Assange's actions as morally reprehensible but not legally
actionable, and I am sure that is right. I cannot see how he could be said to
have breached any Australian law and I understand that it is not alleged he has
broken any American law.
Mr Assange is free to return to Australia and if he is
charged with a crime overseas then he would be entitled to consular assistance. So his claims of
being "abandoned" by Australia seem rather melodramatic. On the other hand the
Prime Minister's clumsy accusations of criminal activity on the part of Mr
Assange just reinforce the impression that in this, as in so many other areas,
she is way out of her depth.
Read More
(0)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE