Assange, hero or villain? Either way, Albanese is keeping his distance

Julian Assange was direct about his goals in the early years of WikiLeaks. He was convinced the world had too many secrets and believed people were better without them. His teenage years on the internet, including as a hacker who found his way into parts of the Pentagon, led him to a theory about the need to unblock the limits on what people knew about the world.

“Something was missing,” he told an interviewer in 2011. “There was not enough information in our common intellectual record to explain how the world really works.”

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He even came up with the idea of three kinds of knowledge: the practical type, the historical record, and the real story about the world today. This last one, he said, was often suppressed by the powerful. “Our understanding has a great hole in it, which is type-three history.”

Nobody can say they were not warned. Assange wanted the unfettered release of every piece of knowledge he could find. He was, and remains, an information anarchist. Everything he did, and may do in the future, can be traced to the slogan hackers have used since the 1980s: information wants to be free.

Does that make him a hero or a villain? The answer depends on who gets hurt when the data gets dumped.

Sometimes it is an American president who takes the country to war, such as George W Bush after WikiLeaks released the “Collateral Murder” video of civilians being killed in Iraq. Sometimes it is a political leader in a small country, such as Daniel arap Moi in Kenya when leaked cables confirmed his corruption. Sometimes it is a Democrat candidate in a presidential election, such as Hillary Clinton after WikiLeaks revealed emails in 2016 that damaged her campaign.

Donald Trump had no complaints about the leaks, of course. With one remark – “Russia, if you’re listening” – Trump showed that he believed the emails came from Russian hackers. The facts showed he was right.

When Assange obtained a trove of US diplomatic cables in what was known as Cablegate, governments were outraged because their messages were exposed. Officials said lives were at risk because the cables identified people in some countries who were assisting the US. While WikiLeaks did redact some cables, it was too late for the critics. Its default position was that information wanted to be free.

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.

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 burnt.

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.

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 US 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.

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.

There was a sign on Thursday that parliament will treat him with caution. His wife, Stella, and his lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, joined other members of his team in the front row of the public gallery of the House of Representatives, but question time passed without anyone in the chamber talking about Assange himself.

He is, after all, someone the political class cannot control. Assange wants information to be free. Few politicians are likely to agree.

David Crowe is chief political correspondent.