Assange statement on Australian police raids on #ALP #AFPraids #ozpol #auspol

Friday May 20, 2016 13:09 AEST



The Australian Federal Police (AFP) raids on the opposition (ALP) cannot be tolerated. Raiding a suspected media source for a story embarrassing to the government is bad enough. But to raid the opposition during a federal election campaign in order to hunt down the source of such stories makes Australia look like it has become an Asian democratic backwater. Of course, it is hard for me to have much sympathy for the hypocritical ALP, which created what it called a 'whole of government' task force against me, which included the AFP, in-order to ingratiate itself with the US. But the issue is not about ALP or the government. It is about the rights of all Australians to know what their government is up to. When the opposition and the media work together to publicly reveal infrastructure mismanagement they are doing their jobs and doing it well. When police conduct raids on the opposition during an election to hunt down media sources they are not doing their job. They're stopping all the rest of us from doing ours. It is not the role of policemen to interfere with elections--whether instructed to do so by the government or not.



Julian Assange

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