BACK in July, Prime Minister Julia Gillard claimed News Limited newspapers in Australia had hard questions to answer over the UK phone hacking scandal.

She, Stephen Conroy, Wayne Swan, and Bob Brown were vocal in their criticism - and happy to smear all News journalists by association.

Even though there was no connection with the News Of The World scandal, they used the opportunity to launch an inquiry to discipline the newspapers that most vigorously hold them to account.

But this week, when a comprehensive three-month internal audit of News Limited's Australian operations cleared its newspapers of any impropriety, there was deafening silence.

Independently assessed by retired Victorian Supreme Court judges Frank Vincent and Bernard Teague, the investigation of more than 700,000 financial transactions found no evidence of the sort of illegitimate practices and payments to public officials that occurred in Britain.

So, now Gillard's "hard questions" have been answered and News Limited journalists exonerated, the PM, Conroy, Swan and Brown refuse to comment.

You need no further evidence that all that confected outrage was a political stunt, an attempt to intimidate this newspaper and its stablemates.

Good luck with that.

Sweeping audit clears News Limited

Originally published as Political silence on News Limited