Sunday 5th of May 2024
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on not answering the question .....

on not answering the question .....

RUBY HAMAD: Hi. Prime Minister, in your gushing speech to US Congress last week, you tearfully proclaimed that America "can do anything!" Millions of Australians cringed. In the year 2011, can we really not have a relationship with the United States without paying lip service to the myth of American exceptionalism?

 

JULIA GILLARD: Well, that's an interesting question. That's an interesting question and I thank you for it but I guess I'm taking a little bit of a different view. I think we can be bold and confident in our own right as Australians and still acknowledge what is great about American and their capacity for reinvention, for change, for innovation and that's what I sought to do in that speech to Congress. We've been in an alliance for 60 years. We're different nations. We're different peoples. I've said we're not little Americans. We're Australians. We've got our own values and our own way of approaching things.

Q&A

on still not answering the question .....

ADAM MARSTERS: Thanks, Tony. Prime Minister, following Wikileaks publishing of classified documents in December of last year, you labelled the organisation's actions illegal, despite being unable to identify any law which had actually been broken. Given the increasingly vocal support for Wikileaks, do you now regret such comments?

JULIA GILLARD: I can tell already my answer is probably not going to please the audience but let me make my attitude clear. First, I want to lay to rest one myth that's kind of got out there. We are supporting Julian Assange the same way we would support any Australian citizen who got into a legal difficulty overseas. We support people who are accused of drug trafficking. We support people who are accused of murder. Whatever view people have about those kinds of crimes, and I'm sure everybody here would say, "Well, drug trafficking is wrong. Murder is wrong," we support Australian citizens who have got into trouble overseas. So my view about the conduct is neither here nor there in that sense. He's getting the same support someone called John Smith would get in the same situation. But I do have a view about the merits and morals of the act and I simply don't see the moral force in it. I have got a lot of respect for people who whistleblow. I know enough about American history to know the history of Watergate and Deep Throat did the right thing getting that information into the public domain. There are people who have worked for big tobacco who have got information into the public domain, been whistleblowers. They've acted and they've acted for a moral purpose. I respect that. At the centre of Wikileaks, I don't see that moral purpose. It's just...

come on julia ..... almost got it out ..... a bit harder ..... push, blow ..... come on girl ..... it's just ..... that it's not illegal!!

now, was that so hard?

dirty tricks .....

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is believed to have been tipped off more than seven months ago about Australian intelligence scrutiny of his whistleblowing activities.

Senior government ministers yesterday claimed to have no knowledge of co-operation between Australian intelligence agencies and the United States government concerning Assange after WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of secret documents leaked from the US Defence Department.

But sources within Wikileaks have told The Age that an Australian intelligence official privately warned Wikileaks on August 11 last year that Assange was the subject of inquiries by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation & that information relating to him & others associated with Wikileaks had been provided to the US in response to requests through intelligence liaison channels.