So what could she have possibly been thinking when she trapped herself by asserting that WikiLeaks had broken the law? Surely she knew this was a red rag to the red raggers. The WikiLeaks story is tailor-made for easy consumption by the young and the white-collar left - Labor's shakiest constituencies, as the Greens try to steal the ALP base. A substantial part of Labor's broader coalition of electoral support is automatically disposed towards sympathising with Assange. They want to believe the worst about America, and about all governments really, and were already suspicious about Labor's links with the US. It's easy to cast Assange as a martyr, pursued across the world and incarcerated on trumped-up charges. As a Labor leader, Gillard has to have been familiar with the mentality of many of her own Labor supporters. She must have known just how sensitively this bundle of issues would have to be handled in order to keep that shaky collection of blue-collar and white-collar supporters together. However, instead of treading warily, withholding judgment, warning of the potential recklessness of WikiLeaks' dump of information, and promising right from the beginning that Assange would be afforded all of his rights as an Australian citizen, she went the other way. She sought to placate the wrong audience and said what the American government would have wanted to hear, not what the fractious left in Australia wanted to hear.

In doing so, she has quite possibly produced another Tampa moment, in which a large slab of her party's support base falls away over what are loosely termed ''Labor values''. For the middle-class left, these values are generally not connected with bread-and-butter issues but with more distant questions of principle. In this case the principle relates to unfettered information. For these Labor defectors, the disclosures in the cables highlighting American concern about Kevin Rudd's frenzied control-freakery - which reflect adversely on his capacity to continue as Foreign Minister - are nowhere near as disturbing as Mark Arbib's apparently deep and ongoing role as a sort of informant to the US from inside the government. The Gillard government's handling of the WikiLeaks disclosures and the attendant controversy over what will happen to Assange has been little short of dreadful. Admittedly, it has had little choice but to be reactive and to respond to the disclosures as they've arrived. But on the wider issue of WikiLeaks' remit, there is plenty that a confident, competent government could, and should, say. The notion that everybody should always be able to know everything that goes on in every aspect of government - which is the operating presumption of WikiLeaks and its supporters - needs to be argued out. Journalists and editors will always favour disclosure, of course. They are in the business of telling stories and disclosure means stories. The business of governments is something quite different. Governments exist to represent the interests of their citizens. In order to operate effectively, they have to know some things that other states don't know.

One of the awful truths about liberal democratic governments is that there is always a limit to just how democratic they can be. For the most part, citizens in a democracy go along with that. Why? Because we establish and elect governments to do the governing for us. We licence them to amass information, collect the taxes, police us, defend us and negotiate with other states. There's a lot of what governments do that most of us don't want to know anything about. On some matters relating to defence, for example, there's a legitimate case for the public not to know everything. Until the development of digital information technology, this compact - with governments getting on with their business on the public's behalf - was largely observed by most citizens in the Western world. But now, courtesy of WikiLeaks, we know that almost any information any of us want can be accessed. Humanity really has reached a new frontier. Assange could be jailed on the Swedish sex charges and WikiLeaks could be put out of business, but a new version of WikiLeaks will inevitably emerge. What will be the new compact between government and the governed in the future? And what will some presumed inalienable right to all information mean for individual privacy and the conduct of nations? We need to start thinking about this. Quickly. Shaun Carney is associate editor.