Stop Press: Abbott says lawbreakers should be prosecuted

I presume that the US government is going after the people who provided information to Assange. As for Assange, if he’s broken the law he should be prosecuted.

Thus opined Australian Opposition leader Tony Abbott on the ABC’s Insiders program. Mr Abbott’s remaining statements on the topic of the Wikileaks controversy went on to drive home what he evidently considers a winning formula:

Well, as I said, if he’s broken the law he should be prosecuted. That’s what should happen. ... Well that’s up to the relevant authorities. If he's broken the law he should be prosecuted.

Well, it would be most unusual for a politician to profess that lawbreakers should not be prosecuted.

But Mr Abbott, like his opposite number Prime Minister Julia Gillard, was unable to say which law(s) Julian Assange is alleged to have broken, thus completing a deuce set of apparent cluelessness in Canberra.

Moreover, being in lock-step with US policy on the dreaded Wikileaks ‘threat,’ the Gillard-Abbott bipartisan chorus might also play well with US negotiators in Australia’s horse-trading for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

Readers may recall how, the last time an Australian government prostrated itself before US policy demands, forty US trade negotiators filed into Australia on the eve of the Iraq War to hammer out the vaunted Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, which in the end delivered bugger all of any real benefit to Australia.