 I move that the Senate take note of the answers that I failed to receive today from the minister representing the Prime Minister today during question time on the matter of Australian citizen and journalist Julian Assange. I recognise that Senator Evans is sent in here in his representational capacity. This is not his portfolio. But what a remarkable response. I asked whether the Prime Minister knew of a sealed indictment against Mr Julian Assange that has been raised by a secret grand jury in the United States. It's not a process that we have in Australia. There are very few jurisdictions that still do grand juries. However, it's something that we need to learn a great deal about. And what the Prime Minister sent him in with by way of a brief, and I've been foreshadowing this all day, I told the press gallery this morning I was going to ask the Prime Minister this, and I foreshadowed it in an MPI earlier in the day, what does the government know about this attack on the democratic rights and citizenship entitlements of an Australian? And the answer that came back, the brief that was given to Senator Evans, was vacant and ambiguous, which perfectly describes the Australian government's response to these matters over more than a year, vacant and ambiguous. When is the Australian government going to step up and do its job? The Prime Minister of the country, Senator Evans told us, didn't necessarily know, although he didn't actually directly engage with the substance of my question, didn't know whether or not such an indictment existed. So some ex-state department guy in Texas running a private security outfit apparently knows because it's been dumped as part of a dump or a drop of five million emails from the organisation Stratfor. He knows this little intelligence outfit knows what's happening, but the Australian government apparently doesn't. Or maybe it does, and that's all we're seeking to find out. Mr Burton, the former Deputy Chief of Counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department, who is now the Vice-President of Intelligence for Stratfor, he turns up in a large number of these emails. His Australia Day message for Australia in 2011 was, we have a sealed indictment on Assange, please protect, and the weed that he refers to is the U.S. government. So if our government didn't know, why weren't we told? And if the Prime Minister or perhaps the Foreign Minister or the Attorney knew that this attack was coming, why wasn't that information shared with the Australian people? Why wasn't it shared with me through the series, the internable series of questions on notice, and then freedom of information requests that I've been lodging to try and assess exactly what the game is and how deeply involved and implicated in it the Australian government is? Mr President, some conspiracies turn out not to be theories at all. The second question that I put to Senator Evans was whether the government had any intention of taking any action whatsoever, anything at all, name one thing that the Australian government might do to protect the very real threats that are now being levelled against this journalist who works for a publishing organisation. In a short time, I will test the Senate's views on whether it agrees that Mr Assange is indeed a journalist and that the WikiLeaks organisation is a publishing organisation. There's a motion on the notice paper that I invite senators who are with us this afternoon to take a quick look. It doesn't call on the Senate to do anything, heaven forbid. It calls on the Senate to recognise that he is indeed a journalist, as the British High Court has done and as the Walkley Foundation has done. I have an idea for the Prime Minister if she hasn't, by the Minister's vague and ambiguous answer this afternoon, didn't seem to indicate that anything had all been done. But here's an idea. Call in the United States Ambassador. That's what the United States Ambassador is here, that's why he's here in Canberra, to keep the flow of communication open about matters of relevance between states, particularly between allies. I haven't had much luck in my request to meet with the Ambassador. Perhaps I'll jump a little bit higher up the to-do list after today. We'll see. The third thing I asked the Prime Minister was whether or not she plans on taking any action and whether the government would perhaps stop obstructing my freedom of information requests and put some material on the record. Let's just know, because the Australian government in this matter will either turn out to have been complicit or ignorant. Either we've been kept in the dark or we've been keeping secrets. The Prime Minister and the rest of the cabinet may think that this information will be disclosed when they're good and ready, perhaps when this story of somebody killed in action as a result of the wiki drop, which has also been disclosed in the emails, that that's now the strategy. We'll wait until the appropriate time, tell the world's public through the world's media organisations that there's been a death and that it's Julian Assange's fault, and then move to unseal the indictment. What a breathtakingly cynical strategy that is. I think it's time that the government simply put some material on the record, because do you know what? You may not get to do it at a time of your choosing, because who knows what material that organisation has on this cabinet and what the Prime Minister knows. We will find out one way or another. Please, Prime Minister, lead with this information.