‘He did the right thing’: Assange’s father ready for reunion

No matter what a United States court says about Julian Assange, one man wants all Australians to know the Wikileaks founder should be declared not guilty when he returns home.

Assange’s father, John Shipton, arrived in Canberra on Tuesday night in the hope he could embrace his son on Australian soil for the first time in 15 years.

John Shipton is in Canberra to greet his son, Julian Assange, later on Wednesday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“He stood his ground, he did the right thing,” Shipton says of the controversial work by WikiLeaks to reveal alleged war crimes, diplomatic cables and other secrets others wanted to hide.

“He stood in the icy, cold wind of truth and remained upright – he remained upright for 15 years. You’ve got to give a lot of credit to that man.

“And the smears, the lies, the calumnies, the double-dealing and the effort by certain members of the legacy press to climb up on his corpse, or at least attempt to, that was off-putting. But I don’t care. The fight was to bring him home to Australia.

“I believed in my heart that Australians would respond to the call for righting an injustice and seeing a sense of justice being done. And I was not wrong in that.”

Shipton last saw his son in Australia about 15 years ago, before Swedish authorities issued an arrest warrant over sexual assault allegations, the first legal step in what became a long effort by US authorities to extradite him to an American court to face espionage charges.

“Julian has been fitted up,” he says. Shipton never believed the claims against his son and praises legal experts who, he says, picked apart the sexual assault accusations. (One of them, Nils Melzer, was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture for six years.)

Shipton believes Assange was and is a journalist who revealed news others wanted to keep secret, and says he is just as deeply Australian as other expatriate journalists such as John Pilger or Phillip Knightley.

While he did not get involved in the formal negotiations over a plea deal, Shipton spent years campaigning for Assange on seven trips around Australia. He recalls the welcomes he received in places like Castlemaine in Victoria and Wagga Wagga in NSW.

He praises Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and others, including Foreign Minister Penny Wong and the two key diplomats involved, Kevin Rudd in the US and Stephen Smith in the UK. But he emphasises the cross-party support in federal parliament from Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals, the Greens and independents.

He names members of parliament ranging from Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie to Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson, former Nationals resources minister Matt Canavan and former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce.

“If you want to do something, here’s the lesson: make it cross-party,” he says.

“That’s the lesson, because they’re all Australians, these people, and they want to advance Australia. So make umbrella ideas the public can support and both sides of parliament can weld themselves around.”

Shipton is seen by some as an apologist for Russia because they claim he has spoken at a pro-Russian rally after the invasion of Ukraine, but he denies this and says he was speaking about his son. “I was ambushed by Cossack people who surrounded me with Russian flags and took photographs,” he says. Of the invasion, he says he is against all war.

The claim against him is another reflection of the concern that Assange used information from Russian hackers to release emails that undermined Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign. While Shipton was photographed in Canberra on Wednesday morning wearing a Russian hat, with an Assange badge on the front, he says he was given this during a New York winter.

Shipton saw Assange in Belmarsh Prison in the UK when he could, most recently last month, but still sounds stunned that he can see his son in Australia once more.

“I think it’s staggering. Can believe that the entirety of the institutions of the United States – the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of State – all lined up against Julian Assange,” he says.

“And the Australian government managed to unpick that Gordian knot and allow him to return. It’s just astonishing.”

There are challenges ahead for Assange. His wife, Stella, says the family is broke and will have to start a fundraising campaign to find about $750,000 to cover their costs, including the charter flight to bring him home.

Shipton says his son will at least be able to hear the call of a magpie in the morning and see and smell the Australian bush.

“He’s got here just in time to see the wattle bloom,” he says.

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