New (Australian) Laws Target Wikileaks
The Labor Government is tightening up Australian law in areas that will have a direct impact on organisations such as WikiLeaks. Only the Greens are challenging the new bills in parliament, and they are receiving scant media attention.
There’s a new extradition law that will make it easier for foreign governments to request extradition of Australians and a new spying law that broadens ASIO’s reach, which has been dubbed the WikiLeaks Amendment.
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Adam Fletcher of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University expressed surprise in a recent blog post that the law’s passage received no media coverage. It was passed "in the aftermath of the infamous Labor leadership showdown and when all eyes were on the Carr for Canberra drama", Fletcher wrote.
The law would enable the government to prosecute WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange if he was living in Australia and had been charged with a crime in the US. Fletcher told me in a telephone interview that whatever Assange is accused of overseas must also be a criminal offence in Australia for any prosecution to take place here under the new law.
http://newmatilda.com/2012/03/27/new-laws-target-wikileaks
Not least amongst Australian concerns should be not only the Government's forelock-tugging to the US (no big surprise there), but also the fact that ASIO so often gets it horribly wrong. And what the hell are our media doing, that the passage of this law wasn't reported and discussed at the time?
Bad enough that the US seems determined to bring Assange to trial (if he's so lucky as to get a trial), but worse, that the Australian government should happily go along with the process. And of course, this is one time when the Opposition, so resolutely opposed to all other legislation, would happily agree with the Labor government.
It's looking more and more as if Assange has no place to hide. It's all so 1984.
