Other politics
Assange’s homecoming is only the start
The long way home
Never has there been such theatre around a consular matter as we have seen with Assange’s homecoming. We now know that it was carefully choreographed, with a cast of lead actors from Australia’s political and diplomatic elites – even Barnaby Joyce had a role.
With Assange’s release the way is now clear for public discussion of issues around the reach of law and rights beyond national boundaries, press freedom, and our relations with two countries that have been prominent in our history.
Peter Greste has written in The Conversation about the implications for journalism arising from the Assange case. “This case has undeniably had a serious chilling effect on public-interest journalism, and sends a terrifying message to any sources sitting on evidence of abuses by the government and its agencies”, he writes. But he believes there is a distinction between Assange’s work and the work of professional journalists: My own prison ordeal gave me a taste of what Assange may be feeling. He’s out – but the chilling effect on press freedom remains.
Also writing in The Conversation Emma Shortis of RMIT writes on the difficult diplomatic path our government has navigated in its dealings with the US: With pressure mounting on the Biden administration, its pursuit of Assange was becoming both damaging and untenable. The media has covered Australia’s domestic political interest in the Assange case, but there are also has interests that go well beyond the US-Australia relationship:
The decision by the US to pursue a citizen of one of its closest allies for the publication of information, while simultaneously condemning authoritarian states for doing much the same, was both hypocritical and damaging to American standing in the world.
That point is also made by James Ball, writing in The Atlantic: What was the point in prosecuting Julian Assange?. “The world’s most powerful government now looks small in the very worst ways”, he writes.
Contrary to some views that Assange’s release is only an Australian matter, it has commanded quite an amount of world-wide media coverage, and a strong statement from the American Civil Liberties Union. In fact some on the American libertarian far-right celebrate Assange’s work as an exposure of the deep state. In this regard it is informative to watch Sarah Ferguson interviewing Trump-supporting Congressperson Marjorie Taylor-Greene on the ABC’s 730 program. (14 minutes). It will have you wondering if the classifications “left” and “right” still have any meaning.
Two other Conversation contributions, Julian Assange has been in the headlines for almost two decades. Here’s why he’s such a significant public figure by Matthew Ricketson of Deakin University, and Julian Assange plea deal: what does it mean for the WikiLeaks founder, and what happens now? by Holly Cullen of the University of Western Australia, fill us in with historical details of the Assange case. Cullen explains the convergence of political pressures that helped determine the timing of Assange’s release.
There have been hundreds of media interviews and there will be hundreds more, but one that stands out is a 10-minute interview with Kathy Lette, who lived with Assange for some time while she was married to human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson. Her account neatly weaves together personal and political aspects of Assange’s life and mission.
Anyone familiar with foreign policy will realize that although senior politicians are often involved, consular matters are strictly non-partisan. The fact that the government committed huge resources into seeing justice was done for Assange says nothing about the government’s approval or disapproval of his case. As David Speers writes, Julian Assange is back in Australia and for Anthony Albanese the job is done. There was no need for the shadow Foreign Affairs Minister to make a catty partisan statement about Albanese’s phone call to Assange on his arrival, and no need for the media to make it an issue. (Is Birmingham unaware of the story of the prodigal son?)
There will be ongoing argument about whether some of Wikileaks’ content jeopardised legitimate military operations. There is no doubt, however, that it has exposed a great deal of material that governments did not want exposed because of political embarrassment. The problem of over-classification remains, and there is no incentive for any government to do anything about it.
Dutton’s nuclear campaign heightens pressure for campaign finance reform
In the roundup of 30 March we linked a Conversation article by Kate Griffiths urging the government to get a move-on with campaign finance reform.
Dutton’s excursion into nuclear fantasies increases the urgency for campaign finance reform. That’s not because there is a nuclear industry ready to push money towards the Coalition – any serious analyst in the nuclear power industry would realize that there is no chance that nuclear power in Australia can be justified on economic grounds.
Rather, it’s because Dutton and his backers realize that if the Coalition is elected the nuclear program will notgo ahead. Their excuse for not going ahead would be about delays caused by environmentalists and activists, obstruction in the Senate and by state governments and so on. Therefore there would be no alternative to extending the life of ageing coal-fired stations, and fast-tracking some new ones, with promises that in time emissions will be dealt with through carbon capture and storage.
In times past the Coalition could always count on funding from the business community, but those sources are less bountiful these days. No business seeking to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the government’s economic transformation policies is going to donate to the party that is campaigning to derail the transformation.
But those businesses that may enjoy a few more years of easy profits in a continuation of business-as-usual could be willing backers of the Coalition, particularly the coal and gas industries.
Real-time exposure of election funding could effectively head off such a flow of money, because neither the Coalition nor the fossil-fuel industry want their strategies to be exposed.
Lest one believes this scenario is a way-out conspiracy theory, it’s essentially as described by John Hewson in last week’s Saturday Paper: Dutton’s far right fantasy, in which he concludes:
He probably knows it [his nuclear plan] can’t ultimately be delivered as he has described, which will allow the party to fall back on coal and gas – to the delight of its fossil fuel donors.
The Australia Institute has a 13-minute video describing how the Minerals Council of Australia has worked, and still is working, to thwart any departure from the economic structure that has served the extractive industries so well – as they did when the Gillard-Rudd government tried to introduce a resource-rent tax. Not that all mining companies would be on board this time, because some have seen the opportunities offered by our energy transformation, but there are still enough coal and gas businesses to fund a serious campaign.
The Australia Institute has coordinated an open letter to the government calling for campaign finance reform, with five uncontentious proposals, including a demand to “disclose political donations to parties and candidates regularly throughout the year, and lower the donation disclosure threshold”. The Australia Institute’s proposals are not as far-reaching as Peter Malinauskas’ suggestion that all political donations be banned (covered in last week’s roundup), but they are such that it would be hard for any politician to mount a defensible case against them.
The changing fortunes of Australia’s left
In his last week as presenter of Late Night Live, Phillip Adams has brought together three political experts who talk about the left in Australia: Left for dead? The Australian left, then and now. Or perhaps you can call it a gathering of four experts if you include Adams, who is probably the last ABC presenter able to remind listeners of previous membership of the Communist Party.
To quote from the ABC’s website:
Phillip Adams is joined by comrades Frank Bongiorno, Jon Piccini and Meredith Burgmann for a romp through the history of the political left in Australia and an assessment of what's left of the left today.
There is more than a touch of nostalgia in their contributions, but they bring their observations up to the present day, noting that the federal Liberal Party seems to be suffering from some of the same tensions that bedevilled the Labor Party in times past before they managed to deal with their internal tensions. They leave open the question why the Labor Party has had much better electoral success at the state level than at the Commonwealth level.