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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-02-21 Daily Xml
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Assange, Mr J.

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS (17:09): I move:

That this council—

1. Notes that—

(a) on 20 and 21 February 2024, the High Court of Justice in the United Kingdom will hold a hearing into whether Walkley Award winning journalist, Mr Julian Assange, can appeal against his extradition to the United States of America;

(b) Mr Assange remains incarcerated in HMP Belmarsh in the UK, awaiting a decision on whether he can be extradited to the USA to face charges for material published in 2010, which revealed shocking evidence of misconduct by the USA; and

(c) both the Australian government and opposition have publicly stated that this matter has gone on for too long.

2. Acknowledges the importance of the UK and USA bringing the matter to a close so that Mr Assange can return home to his family in Australia.

3. Requests the President urgently write to the US Ambassador reflecting the resolution of this council.

This motion before us notes that today, on 20 and 21 February 2024, the High Court of Justice in the United Kingdom is holding a hearing into whether Walkley Award winning journalist, Mr Julian Assange, can appeal against his extradition to the United States of America. It notes that Mr Assange remains incarcerated in Belmarsh prison in the UK awaiting that decision of whether he will be extradited to face charges for material published by WikiLeaks in 2010, which, of course, revealed shocking war crimes by the US.

It notes that both the Australian government and the opposition at a federal level have publicly stated that this matter has now gone on for far too long, and it acknowledges the importance of the UK and the USA in bringing this matter to a close so that Mr Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, can return here, safely, home to his family. It also, should it pass, Mr President, requests that you, as the President of this Legislative Council and our representative, write to the US Ambassador, Caroline Kennedy, reflecting the resolution of this council. Put simply, it is time to bring Julian Assange home.

In 2010, Chelsea Manning, an intelligence analyst in the US military, bravely broke US law to blow the whistle to WikiLeaks about US war crimes. Chelsea was bound by military and criminal law. She lived in the United States, and she was a United States citizen. In 2013, Chelsea was convicted of 17 serious criminal charges and sentenced to 35 years' maximum-security imprisonment. Four years later, Manning's government acknowledged the wrong in imprisoning her and her sentence was commuted by the then US President, Barack Obama, and she was released from prison in 2017.

In 2010, Julian Assange, an Australian journalist living outside the United States, with no legal or contractual obligations to the United States, published Manning's material on WikiLeaks. This included thousands of documents that exposed the brutal reality of US-led wars. One of those was the deeply distressing video of a cold-blooded murder by a US Apache helicopter of Iraqi citizens, which included two Reuters journalists.

Since then, the US has been openly targeting Julian Assange in order to prosecute him under the United States Espionage Act. In late 2010, the US National Security Agency added Assange to its 'man-hunting time line', an annual account of efforts to capture or kill alleged terrorists. For the decade that has followed, the US named Assange as effectively an enemy of the state, and in 2019 he was charged with multiple breaches of the US Espionage Act, with a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.

For the past four years, Julian Assange has been held in solitary detention in a UK maximum-security prison awaiting extradition to the US. Unfortunately, it is not the first time this council has had to move to push to ensure that Julian Assange is brought home, but it is, perhaps, more critical now than ever that we speak—hopefully with one voice today—to make it clear that it is time to bring Julian Assange home.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment visited Julian in May 2019 and even at that stage reported serious concerns about his detention and his health. Years later, we have a situation where the very next thing that might happen to Julian Assange is his transportation to the United States. Let us be clear: given Mr Assange's health, any sentence of imprisonment under the notorious US Espionage Act and extradition to the US would almost certainly be a death sentence. It cannot be allowed to come to that.

That is a very large part of the reasons you will see so many people from right across the political spectrum saying that this has gone on far too long. He is now facing a grave risk to his life because it has gone on for so long. That is why this critical next step must be to ensure that Julian Assange is brought home.

An open letter from the federal Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group, which was published in TheWashington Post and signed by 63 federal parliamentarians, emphasised the wrongdoing by the US to deny him his liberties. That letter concluded by saying:

We note with gratitude the considerable support in the United States for an end to the legal pursuit of Mr Assange from members of Congress, human rights advocates, academics, and civil society, and from within the US media in defence of free speech and independent journalism.

Today, Mr Assange's legal team is making the final plea to the UK's High Court to block his extradition to the US. If he is convicted, the US will set a legal precedent that means any publication of US government information by anyone, anywhere, could result in espionage charges under those US laws.

Just to stress this again, it should be quite clear to most people now that the US Espionage Act is here being applied to somebody who is not a US citizen, who was not in the US at the time. It is being used in a political way to silence freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Should it succeed, should Mr Assange be extradited, this will be damaging—beyond damaging—for journalists in the future, damaging for the ability of the media to hold governments to account, to say uncomfortable things about governments, things that might be uncomfortable for their own government, and to know that you can tell the truth without facing imprisonment and without facing a risk to your own life for laws that are established in another country that should not apply to you.

That is why there is global support for Julian Assange to be returned home. It is particularly strong in Australia, as it should be; he is an Australian citizen. He has become symbolic of journalists right across the world, who face attacks on press freedom, often shrinking government accountability and, in some jurisdictions, persecution ranging from political prosecutions through to murder.

A motion very similar to the one that I put before the council today last week passed the federal House of Representatives with the support of Labor and the Greens. I acknowledge there the work of my federal Greens colleagues the Hon. David Shoebridge, Senator, and the Hon. Peter Whish-Wilson, Senator, for pushing for this at that federal level as well as, of course, my Greens and other colleagues in the House of Representatives. I also want to acknowledge the work of Jodie Saad and Adelaide for Assange for their advocacy and all others who have pushed for justice for Julian.

As WikiLeaks wrote in their statement responding to the extradition news, Julian Assange's freedom is coupled to all our freedoms. To quote the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights:

The safety of journalists is not just a question of personal security, it is a question of the safety and health of entire societies. It is a moral imperative—for the future of all of us—that we do everything possible to protect it.

This man has suffered enough. This matter must be brought to an end. I hope that we join together today and say clearly from this Legislative Council in the Parliament of South Australia that we want to see Julian Assange brought home. With that, I commend the motion.

The Hon. F. PANGALLO (17:17): I fully endorse the comments and the motion that has been put up by the Hon. Tammy Franks. This is the third such motion that has come before the Legislative Council. As members know, I have previously put up two, and I was intending to put another up, but I think the Hon. Tammy Franks summed it all up in her motion.

I am hopeful that today we will see a change of heart from the two political parties, certainly from Labor, who have already indicated that they now will support moves to get Julian Assange out of his prison hell and returned to Australia. They did so in supporting Mr Wilkie's motion in the federal parliament last week, and it was a resounding result. It was a complete about-face by Labor, who, because of the influence of the foreign minister, Penny Wong, had previously twice in this place told Peter Malinauskas to oppose the motion that was seeking what we are seeking here today.

Clearly, Labor now has found a conscience about Julian Assange and what has happened to him over a number of years, and particularly what has been going on in the Belmarsh prison, and now there are concerns about his mental health and wellbeing. The state of his health has been raised in the proceedings currently before the UK courts. The fact is that he has been held in there for far too long and there is no point in keeping him in prison, awaiting the outcome of his appeal.

This may well be Julian's last roll of the dice in terms of trying to avoid extradition to the United States. We know that the Americans tried to get Mr Assange extradited to the US by stealth when a concocted story of rape allegations was made, which was later abandoned by the Swedish government. There was no evidence that Mr Assange had ever committed that crime, and it was the common belief that Mr Assange was being set up in order to have him extradited to the United States to face proceedings there for doing what any journalist worth his salt would do, and that was to expose horrendous war crimes and also the murder of innocents that came as a result of that.

Yes, there were thousands of documents that were released. In fact, Mr Assange had also notified the authorities that he had had these documents, and he warned of their impending release. Regardless of that, what he had done was in the public interest, in the global interest. Speaking as a journalist myself, if that information—and I have said this before—had come to me, I would have had absolutely no hesitation in running that story, absolutely no hesitation. It is all about transparency and the public interest. We all had a right to know how American forces were conducting themselves in those operations. That evidence, if people have seen that video, is horrific. Of course, the Americans were totally embarrassed by that information coming out, along with all the other information.

I must point out that, despite the release of all those documents and names and other information that has come out as a result of the WikiLeaks leak, not one person has been harmed or killed as a result of it—not one person. The only persons who have taken umbrage are the United States government—and then it tries to invoke its Espionage Act, which, as the Hon. Tammy Franks has pointed out, is a piece of its own legislation that it tries to police to others around the world. They have no jurisdiction outside their own borders to try to implement this act in order to get their pound of flesh and get Mr Assange back to the United States.

You wonder what is going to happen when they get him there. There could be no purpose in having Mr Assange return to the United States. I think everyone is aware and probably would acknowledge that what he has gone through for the last 10 or 15 years has been horrendous: horrendous for him and horrendous for his family. There was the period in which he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, and then those charges were dropped. Then, of course, he was later arrested for breaching bail conditions in the UK. Since then he has spent time in Belmarsh prison, most of it in solitary confinement, in the most cruel of conditions. All this is because Mr Assange believed in his motivation: he believed in his craft, his profession as a journalist, and believed in exposing the wrongs. As a result of that, he has been punished for telling the truth.

Telling the truth should not be a crime. It should not be subjected to harassment and influence by governments, particularly that of the United States, just in order to make somebody pay for creating an international embarrassment for them because of the way they behaved.

Again, I will say this: journalism is not a crime. I have heard opponents to my motion previously try to say that Julian Assange was not a journalist. I cannot understand why anyone would try to describe him as a person who was not a journalist. His job was the dissemination of news information. He did that through his WikiLeaks site, and he was also given a Walkley Award, which is the highest distinction that a journalist in Australia can achieve.

It is quite clear that there is now unanimous support around the world for some mercy to be shown towards Mr Assange. He has already had strong support from many news organisations around the world, particularly in Europe and the UK. He has also had strong support from governments, especially European governments, which have demanded he be released and be allowed to return to Australia.

I want to touch on the enormous support that Mr Assange has received from so few, not only in this country but also overseas, which is now growing, particularly in Australia. There was a small band of people who were actively protesting outside the offices of Penny Wong, the foreign minister. The Adelaide for Assange group is run by Jodie Sard, who has done a fantastic amount of work in continuing to put out messages expressing concern about Mr Assange and also calling on governments to act.

This group has been meeting outside the offices of Penny Wong now for more than a year and a half. It could be getting to two years. I have spoken outside those offices two or three times. I know that the Hon. Tammy Franks has also spoken. There is always this group of determined protesters there. Sometimes it only numbers a dozen or so people, but they are always there sending that message.

Incredibly, since they have been there, they have not even been acknowledged by anyone from Penny Wong's office, nor has Penny Wong agreed to meet with Mr Assange's supporters. That has not happened at all. But now we see that there is a change of heart, and it is pleasing to see that finally Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is saying that something has to happen and that something needs to be done. We do not know if he said something to President Joe Biden on his last visit there, although it seems that he may well have raised Mr Assange's case.

We will wait to see what happens and wait to see what reaction the US government gives to that overwhelming endorsement of the motion that succeeded in our federal parliament last week. It sends a very clear message to the Americans that Australians have had enough, the Australian government has had enough, and we want to see our citizen returned home. It is as simple as that.

Right now, the American President could write an order to withdraw those charges and even give a pardon to Mr Assange, if he wishes to do so. You would think that it would be in the best interests of the relations that we have with the Americans that Mr Biden would now at least do something that would appease the supporters of Mr Assange and what the Australian parliament wants and hopefully what the South Australian parliament wants.

In closing, I would also like to acknowledge the work that has been done by Mr Assange's family, his wife in the UK, his father, his brother and others who have consistently and constantly traversed the globe seeking out support from various leaders and countries for their son. It has been a long journey for them, but one hopes that we are finally getting to a resolution, and a satisfactory resolution, that will see Mr Assange able to return home to his family. He has some children, who are longing to see their father, and he also has family in Australia.

Again, I point out that I will not hear of members in this place, members of the opposition, the Liberals, condemning Mr Assange for the work that he did as a journalist in the free world. It is all about free speech, it is all about transparency, it is all about accountability. It is also about ensuring that truth is told. This is what one of the foundations of journalism is all about. It is about truth-telling and also being able to expose criminal acts in the public interest. That is what he did. It is exactly what he did, and he should be lauded for that.

I hope when he is released that he is lauded when he returns to Australia. I certainly would look forward to actually meeting him and thanking him for his determination, his dedication, his commitment and also the sacrifices he has had to endure the last number of years. With that, I say that I will strongly endorse the motion by the Hon. Tammy Franks.

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (17:31): The Liberal Party is, consistently, not going to be supporting this particular motion, as we did not in the federal parliament recently. Our reason is not that we disagree with all the content that is in the motion but is the simple fact that Australia is not a party to the legal proceedings currently underway in the UK. Australia is unable to intervene in the legal processes of another nation, just as we would not accept another country intervening in Australia's legal proceedings.

The former Coalition government made representations to both the UK and US authorities about Mr Assange's case. The Coalition and the Australian High Commission in London sought to provide consular assistance or assistance with medical support to Mr Assange, just as we would do for any Australian citizen who is held in detention overseas. However, Mr Assange refused these requests and since 2019 has not provided his consent for information about him, including on his health and welfare, to be shared with Australian officials.

I appreciate that some members of the public feel very strongly about Mr Assange's situation, but as I have said, Australia needs to respect the rule of law in countries such as the US and the UK. There is no doubt that it would be in everybody's best interests, none more so than Mr Assange's, for his case to be resolved as soon as possible. We will not be supporting this motion.

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY (17:33): I rise to support the motion of the Hon. Tammy Franks, and I congratulate her on bringing this motion to the chamber. Julian Assange is this week appearing before the UK's High Court of Justice to appeal against his extradition to the United States. Mr Assange has spent the last five years in London's high-security Belmarsh prison while challenging his extradition to the US over matters relating to documents published on the WikiLeaks site, which Mr Assange founded.

I would just like to remind people that Chelsea Manning, who leaked those confidential documents—some classified, some not classified but very sensitive—to Mr Assange has had her sentence commuted by President Barack Obama. She has actually been free for seven years.

It is not unusual for the Australian government to make statements, plead to a government, send motions to a government or represent Australian citizens to a government even though they are not party to legal proceedings.

We can just take the example of China. We often call on the Chinese for mercy or leniency or for a fair trial for Australian citizens. I remember about 12 years ago a young South Australian citizen was hanged in Singapore for drug-related charges. Unfortunately, we were not very successful on that occasion, but Australia made very strong representations to that country. The Liberals are really scraping the bottom of the barrel with their excuses not to support this motion.

To repeat the sentiment expressed by the Prime Minister last week, there are, of course, many varying views about the conduct of Mr Assange. Regardless of where these views stand, this drawn out matter cannot go on indefinitely the way it currently stands. Whilst it is not appropriate for any country to interfere in the legal processes of another, it is appropriate for the commonwealth government to put their very strong view to the countries involved: that enough is enough and, in the present circumstances, this matter should be brought to an end.

As outlined in remarks made by the Prime Minister to the commonwealth House of Representatives last week, the Australian government, as well as its diplomats, continue to make representations at the highest level to the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom about this matter. I understand the foreign minister has asked the High Commission of the United Kingdom to continue to convey Australia's expectation that Mr Assange is entitled to due process, humane and fair treatment, access to proper medical care, and access to a legal team.

It is not new to this chamber to support Australian citizens when there is a belief that due process has not taken place. This chamber was the only parliamentary chamber in the country, about 10 or 12 years ago, to pass a motion, by one vote, calling upon the repatriation of David Hicks. That was strongly opposed by members of the Liberal opposition at the time, but it got up by one vote, and that one vote was Mr Andrew Evans from Family First.

Family First actually split their vote for the first time—I do not think they have done it since—because, after discussions, they realised that, forgetting about David Hicks and a lot of negative publicity about David Hicks, for any Australian citizen to be in a jail or incarcerated for five years (it may be a little longer) without charge is an appalling lack of due process.

This chamber passed a motion, by one vote, and, not long after, David Hicks was repatriated. This chamber may have had some very significant influence on the way that happened. Not long after that he was released back into society as a citizen.

With this motion, and the motion of the commonwealth parliament that was agreed to last week, it is quite clear, from all levels of government, and we agree, that it is time to bring Mr Assange home.

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS (17:37): I thank those speakers who have made their views known today. I particularly thank the Hon. Frank Pangallo for effectively co-sponsoring this motion with me today. We both had the same idea once we saw the move at a federal level, a shift in the language if you like, from the federal Labor government, to see if we could test the waters for South Australia to become the first parliament to express its full support to bring Julian Assange home.

I thank the Hon. Michelle Lensink of the Liberal opposition and I thank the Hon. Russell Wortley of the Malinauskas government for their contributions to this motion. I note the Liberal opposition will not be supporting the motion; I certainly hope, in terms of their party vote, where they have put a case to the council that they respect the rule of law, that they reflect on the fact that the rule of law would dictate that a member of a nation state who is not a member of another nation state should not be subject to laws such as the Espionage Act of the United States of America if he is an Australian citizen who was not in America at the time of his supposed crime—the crime, of course, of telling the truth, a crime of journalism. Journalism should not be seen as a crime.

That is what is at stake here, when the US government attempts to use its 1917 Espionage Act against a journalist and a publisher for the very first time, one who is not a US citizen, who is not in the US and whose publications were not based in the US. If that is successful, it will have redefined investigative journalism as espionage. That will have judicial reach right across the globe.

If you want to talk about rule of law, that is the biggest threat to the rule of law I see here in this debate. That is why every human rights organisation and journalists' union of note, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union, Reporters Without Borders, the National Union of Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists, PEN International, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel, which all published the WikiLeaks revelations, have signed an open letter opposing his extradition.

Politically his extradition is opposed, as I have said, by parliamentary groups in Australia, but also in dozens of countries, including eight in Europe. Even the Pope has expressed his opposition to what is happening right now to Julian Assange. We can see that the rule of law in fact is the thing that is very much under threat here. I ask the Liberal opposition to reflect on their argument that this is somehow contrary to the rule of law.

With that, I note that I believe we will be the first jurisdiction at a state or territory level to move such a motion, and I welcome that. It has taken far too long. I know the Hon. Frank Pangallo, well before his time in politics, and certainly me in my time in politics, some 14 years now, have called for WikiLeaks and for Julian Assange to be free, have called for the defence by politicians of the freedom of press, have seen this for what it is in terms of the American government's attempt to quash, to silence, to put the fear into any journalist or any person who might expose their war crimes or their wrongdoings.

This will have a chilling effect, unless Julian Assange is freed. It already has had a chilling effect for some 14 years now; it has gone on too long. With that, I commend the motion and look forward to the Liberal opposition having the gumption to actually express their votes and be prepared to divide.

Motion carried.

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