Assange may be out of jail, but in Australia he’s on probation

When Julian Assange set foot back on Australian soil at Fairbairn Air Force Base in Canberra on Wednesday evening, we got a lot more than a freed prisoner returning home. With Assange comes a campaign, a movement and a cult. Although we haven’t heard directly from Assange himself yet, Assangeism came into plain view from the very first moments.

Assange’s clenched fist pumping the air was not a gesture of a contrition or humility; it was a statement of triumphal defiance.

Illustration: John ShakespeareCredit:

And the campaign got under way from the very first statements by his entourage. Within two hours of Assange’s arrival, his two lawyers and his wife held a press conference in the East Hotel near Parliament House. They addressed two themes. First was gratitude to the Albanese government for negotiating Assange’s release. They said Assange, in a brief phone call with Anthony Albanese, had told the prime minister “you saved my life”.

Second was to declare a campaign. Lawyer Jennifer Robinson told the assembled reporters that the prosecution of Assange was the “criminalisation of journalism”. She added: “It’s important that journalists all around the world understand the dangerous precedent that this prosecution has set.”

Lawyer Barry Pollock added that Assange had “performed a tremendous public service” by posting classified US government documents on the internet. It was “unprecedented in the US to use the Espionage Act to criminally prosecute a journalist or a publisher”.

Wife Stella Assange said the prosecution of Assange was a “precedent that can and will be used against journalists”. She urged the assembled reporters to “push back because this affects your ability to publish”.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has returned to Australia with a clenched-fist salute in emotional scenes in Canberra on Wednesday night.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

These speeches set the pattern for every media interview and every appearance for the rest of the week. Assange was not only an individual; he was a martyr for the great cause of public-interest journalism.

Every hostile act against Assange was an assault on journalism, the public’s right to know and democracy itself. He’s more than a man. He’s a cause.

As the respectable face of Assangeism presented the cause at the front of the room, the cult was in evidence at the back of the room. Unseen on the news broadcasts, a crowd of Assangeists pressed forward to try to enter the room, already crowded with reporters, cameras, microphones and a few members of parliament trying to associate themselves with the triumphal moment.

The Assange supporters, numbering somewhere between 100 and 200, pushed and jostled in what the ABC reporter Matt Doran described as a “mosh pit”. And some of the supporters heckled reporters when they posed questions deemed insufficiently worshipful to the Assange spokespeople. The cult members were seeing journalism at work, but wanted to see conformity.

The broad exhortations for free journalism soon resolved into a very specific campaign demand – a pardon for Assange. Stella Assange specifically urged reporters to keep probing into her husband’s case: “Julian isn’t allowed to request freedom of information, make information requests [to] the US government, but you can and I encourage you to … so please do.”

And so the campaign for Assange has not ended with his release and return to Australia a free man; it’s just moved into a new phase. Apparently he intends to keep on campaigning, but now from Australia.

“Julian is the most principled man I know,” said Stella, “and he will always defend human rights and speak out against injustice, and he can choose how he does that because he’s a free man.”

The Albanese government is already a little uncomfortable over exactly how Assange intends to show his appreciation for his newfound liberty. Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong took the precaution of pointing out that Australia’s classified national security information is protected by law: “We expect those laws to be observed by all citizens and by all entities.”

And while Albanese was happy to have his phone chat with Assange publicised, note that he didn’t meet him. He kept him at arm’s length, wary of Assange’s methods and motives.

The Coalition leadership thought that even the phone call was too much and complained that Albanese should not have given him a “hero’s welcome”.

But wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing for Assange to use his global celebrity status to campaign for public interest journalism and human rights?

It depends. Australian journalism could do with some advocacy, absolutely. It is constrained by a few factors. One involves the laws of defamation, which make it extraordinarily risky and potentially costly for media outlets to report fearlessly.

Another is the poor state of laws to protect whistleblowers. There are new federal laws but they’re proving too feeble to provide meaningful protection for the brave people who step forward to bear witness against corruption or other wrongdoing. Military whistleblower David McBride just last month was jailed for nearly six years for stealing secrets.

And human rights everywhere could benefit from prominent campaigning by a famous figure like Julian Assange. But Assange’s history suggests that he’d need fundamentally to change his ways to advance the cause of public interest journalism for human rights.

For a start, his claims to be a journalist is hotly contested by actual journalists. The Australian journalist Peter Greste, who worked for Reuters, the BBC, CNN and others before being locked up in an Egyptian jail on fake charges of terrorism, is now a professor of journalism at Macquarie University.

“Journalism comes with the responsibility to process and present information in line with a set of ethical and professional standards,” Greste wrote this week. “I don’t believe WikiLeaks met that standard; in releasing raw, unredacted and unprocessed information online, it posed enormous risks for people in the field, including sources.”

The US government has conceded that Wikileaks did not result in the known killings of any US sources. But there were many other victims of Assange’s project.

For instance, Associated Press reported in 2016: “Wikileaks’ global crusade to expose government secrets is causing collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill ...

“In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims.”

This is not holding power to account; it’s an abuse of power. It’s not journalism and it’s not in the public interest.

And it’s not necessary to harm the innocent to expose the guilty. The Assangeists’ strongest defence of his actions is that he exposed US war crimes. True, but many journalists have exposed war crimes by the US and none has been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Why not? Because they exercised professional due diligence to protect the innocent and national security.

An Australian case study in how to expose war crimes ethically is the reporting for this masthead by Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters. They reported the illegal murders of Afghan civilians by Australian Special Forces troopers including Ben Roberts Smith. Official proceedings are still under way.

These reporters exposed the guilty, protected the innocent, and have not been prosecuted by any government. If Assange had behaved as an actual journalist, he never would have inflicted misery on the innocent or exposed himself to prosecution under the Espionage Act.

There’s another important test of Assange’s principles and professionalism as he apparently moves into the next phase of campaigning for human rights. His big 2016 data dump contained emails that Russia’s FSB stole from Hillary Clinton and gave to Wikileaks to harm Clinton and help Donald Trump. Clinton has said these were partly responsible for her loss of the 2016 election to Trump.

If Assange knew this at the time, or if history repeated itself, would he co-operate with Moscow, Beijing or other enemies of human liberty to advance his campaign? Even if it helps the most repressive foreign governments wishing to harm our country, our democracy or our allies?

Assange may be out of jail, but in Australian public life he is on probation. Is he capable of actual, ethical journalism? How will he repay the Australian government for its intense efforts in his cause – for having “saved” his life?

In the folk tale of the frog and the scorpion, the frog agrees to carry the scorpion across the river on its back. The frog doesn’t fear its sting because, if the frog died, the scorpion would drown. But, halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung him? “Because I’m a scorpion.”

Peter Hartcher is political and international editor.