Former Australian PM Malcolm Fraser Condemns Australia for Abandoning Assange and Abdicating Sovereignty [If only (sic)!]
In a wide-ranging exclusive interview with WL Central, former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser has accused the current Gillard government of acting as though Julian Assange “doesn’t exist, that he’s not an Australian citizen.” Mr Fraser slams the existing relationship between Australia and the United States as “far, far too close” and claims Australia is “a strategic colony of the United States, under current circumstances.”Condemning both major parties for doing “everything they can to help the United States and nothing that would offend the United States”, Mr Fraser claims that “in many ways our parliament has abdicated Australian sovereignty”.
“If we could ever again get a government that would stand up for Australian independence, that government would of necessity have to do a number of things that the United States would not like,” said Mr Fraser, citing a range of issues, from US bases to immigration policies, where the government was failing in its duties.
“And nobody is held accountable. Nobody pays the price. Nobody loses their job. Nobody is demoted. Nobody is fined. Now, you have to have accountability.”
The former right wing Liberal Party leader says today’s supposedly left wing ALP government is “far more right than I was”. Defending his own record in government, which included conscription for the Vietnam War, the establishment of “shared” military facilities such as Pine Gap, and rumours of CIA involvement in the dismissal of the Whitlam government, Mr Fraser insisted that even former ALP PM Paul Keating, who recently condemned Australia’s’ diminishing influence, “underestimates the danger of the current relationship with the United States.”
Full transcript below
http://wlcentral.org/node/2784
Ciaron O’Reilly
Blog http://ciaron.wordpress.com/
“The poor tell us who we are,
The prophets tell us who we could be,
So we hide the poor,
And kill the prophets.”
Phil Berrigan
Malcolm Fraser appointed Minister for the Army by Harold Holt in 1966, in which he presided over conscription of 19-year-olds sent to the Vietnam war at the behest of the United States Government of President Lyndon B Johnson.
Malcolm Fraser in Vietnam as Minister for the Army — ‘All the way with LBJ’
PShift interviewer, Red Gum, was on hand to ask the former Prime Minister of Australia the inevitable question:
Red: And can you tell me, Mal, why I still can’t get to sleep? And night-time’s just a jungle dark and a barking M16? And what’s this rash that comes and goes, can you tell me what it means?*
Fraser’s response — Defending his own record in government, which included conscription for the Vietnam War, the establishment of “shared” military facilities such as Pine Gap, and rumours of CIA involvement in the dismissal of the Whitlam government, Mr Fraser insisted that even former ALP PM Paul Keating, who recently condemned Australia’s’ diminishing influence, “underestimates the danger of the current relationship with the United States.”
Ian Curr
Dec 2012
Reference
*’I was only nineteen’ by RedGum