Wednesday 3 August 2011

Gillard keeps mum on News Ltd meeting

Julia Gillard says News Ltd has a responsibility to answer "hard questions" from Australians, but the prime minister isn't talking about her own conversations with the company.
Ms Gillard had a private meeting with editors from Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd newspapers in Sydney on Tuesday night after she was invited to address a gathering of editors and executives by News Ltd CEO John Hartigan.
Last month, Ms Gillard said revelations of the UK phone hacking scandal, which resulted in the demise of Mr Murdoch's 168-year-old newspaper News of the World, had disturbed Australians.
She said Australians would have questions to ask of News Ltd and the company had a responsibility to answer those questions.
But as for her meeting with News Ltd editors, those talks were private.
"I'm not going to go to individual matters discussed," she told reporters in Melbourne on Wednesday.
"It was a broad-ranging discussion, it was a good discussion, canvassing a number of topics."
Opposition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull said Ms Gillard should reveal what "hard questions" she posed during the meeting.
"I'd be interested in what she said," Mr Turnbull told ABC Radio on Wednesday.
"She said in a rather menacing way that Rupert Murdoch had some hard questions to answer in Australia.
"Then when she was asked what those questions were, she couldn't nominate them."
On Tuesday the prime minister said it would be a private meeting, but she expected to talk about her vision for the future and the government's reform agenda.
"Such meetings have been addressed by prime ministers and opposition leaders in the past, so when I was invited by Mr Hartigan I accepted the invitation," Ms Gillard said.
@'SBS'

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