This makes Assange a volatile force in Australian public life now he has come home after the rapid and dramatic events of this week. He cannot be controlled. He will not answer to established political power. He can choose to take on anyone, at any time.
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No wonder Anthony Albanese is keeping his distance. The prime minister welcomed Assange with a phone call on Wednesday night but avoided a handshake on the tarmac, a press conference together or a polite meeting for the cameras. Albanese has also been wary of saying too much about the work behind the scenes to bring the Wikileaks founder home.
Peter Dutton, meanwhile, is ready to pounce. The opposition leader is silent about Assange, while senior Liberals such as Simon Birmingham and Jane Hume say the Wikileaks founder is no hero. They frame Assange as a convicted felon who admitted to espionage crimes and did not deserve the prime minister’s phone call to welcome him home.
If Albanese gets too close to Assange, Dutton will make sure he gets burned.
The more Albanese talks about helping to release Assange, the more open he is to a Coalition attack for basking in a diplomatic victory when Australians are worried about supermarket prices and energy bills. This is especially the case if Albanese speaks too much about his discussions with US President Joe Biden – because White House national security spokesman John Kirby says the president was not involved in the outcome. The official line is that it was a judicial matter. Any deviation in Australia from the line in the US will leave Albanese exposed.
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The truth, of course, is that Albanese mentioned the matter to Biden within a month of taking office, so the White House knew of the Australian desire to settle the case against Assange. Crucially, the outcome needed the judicial step of the plea deal – something the politicians could not and did not dictate. Assange himself had to decide his plea after his lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, and others negotiated with the Department of Justice. But the political leaders cleared the path to the deal.
The result proved the government’s skill in the international arena, due to Albanese as well as Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong, ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd and high commissioner to the UK Stephen Smith. The government gained a significant outcome that is backed by a clear majority in federal parliament. Even so, it must be careful not to celebrate the result too much.
Behind all this is the huge divide, which will never end, about whether Assange is right to insist on the unfettered release of information that others want to suppress. At its heart, his approach echoes the old definition of journalism: “News is something somebody doesn’t want printed,” said William Randolph Hearst. Wikileaks takes that to the extreme.
Does that make Assange a journalist or just a muckraker? Many in the media business believe he did not have a clear process or an ethical framework for editing, redacting and managing the documents he published.
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Peter Greste, the professor of journalism at Macquarie University and the executive director of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, says Wikileaks helped journalists by releasing information but believes this did not make Assange a journalist. The key point, he adds, is not the job title but the process.
AJ Brown, the professor of public policy and law at Griffith University and chair at Transparency International Australia, says Assange was called the “editor-in-chief” at Wikileaks because he led the effort to analyse, verify and edit information – even if this did not occur with the traditional ideas of “balance” in the media.
Brown sees Assange’s work as public interest journalism. “Indeed, he totally broke and rewrote the rules on what that could and should involve in the modern information age,” Brown says.
Assange will remain a hero to some and a villain to others, but it is better to see him as neither. The Wikileaks founder is a publisher who will release any leaks he can find about how the world really works. We do not know if he will continue this work, but it could make him a cyclonic force in Australian politics and media now he has come home.
David Crowe is chief political correspondent.
Source Agencies
