The lifting of the order on Tuesday means Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak​, his predecessor Abdullah Badawi​ and Indonesian leaders Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono​ and Megawati Sukarnoputri (who all deny any wrongdoing), may now be named in the event they are subject to any allegations in future court proceedings involving Australian businessmen charged with foreign bribery offences. The court ruling by Justice Hollingworth is one of the first tests in a superior Commonwealth court of the need, and the difficulty in the digital era, of balancing a country's national security and diplomatic interests against the public's right to know. The ruling is scathing of WikiLeaks, essentially finding the organisation committed a criminal breach of a suppression order based on false and misleading justifications. WikiLeaks' founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange has spent months in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after publishing thousands of protected documents from regimes across the world, including US diplomatic files. The prospect that he or or his organisation may face criminal charges in Australia comes in addition to prosecutions may yet face in the US and elsewhere. Justice Hollingworth's ruling dealt primarily with the question of whether to publicly release the contents of the order, which was first sought in June 2014 by Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).

The department argued that the suppression order was needed to protect Australia's national interest in the event that certain foreign leaders were named, and consequently embarrassed, in future court proceedings. The court case in question involves allegations that two Australian subsidiaries of the Reserve Bank, and their former executives, paid bribes to foreign banking officials in order to win banknote printing contracts in Malaysia, Indonesia and Nepal. As Fairfax Media revealed on Tuesday, and in earlier reports, several of the foreign politicians subject to the suppression order, including Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, have been confidentially linked to the corruption scandal. But as none has been charged in Australia with any crime, it is unclear if this information will actually be aired during future court proceedings. Recognising the potential that this could potentially happen and that these foreign leaders would not be unable to defend themselves against the "truth or falsity of those allegations", DFAT argued their names should be suppressed. DFAT also warned that if they were named, and consequently embarrassed, it could put at risk Australia's ability to secure counter-terrorism and defence co-operation from the countries involved.

Justice Hollingworth said that DFAT's application was founded in law and reason. Further, she said that even with the suppression order in place, the central corruption allegations being tested in court could, and had been, freely reported. This contrasts with WikiLeaks' assertions, made when it breached the suppression last year, that the gag order "effectively blacks out the largest high-level corruption case in Australia and the region". "With this order, the worst in living memory, the Australian government is not just gagging the Australian press, it is blindfolding the Australian public," Assange said in his press statement. Whereas Justice Hollingworth dismissed these claims as baseless, she found WikiLeaks' decision to breach "the DFAT order at least 37 times, in tweets to its 2.3 million followers" had effectively rendered the suppression obsolete. As such, the judge found the order should be lifted. What is not dealt with by the court ruling, and only hinted at in the now-vacated suppression order, is what the Australian government has actually discovered, but never tested in court, about the complicity in international corruption of some of our Asian partners.

This issue has nothing to do with the court case, but everything to do with the question of why Australia, and our ostensible overseas partners in the regional anti-corruption fight, haven't exposed the full story of the Reserve Bank bribery affair. As one source recently told Fairfax Media, the Commonwealth is conducting a "selective prosecution" and the questions of just how high the scandal goes remains an ugly, open stain.