Julian Assange: a mirror to our national shame
Julian Assange: a mirror to our national shame
The national silence towards the fate of Australian journalist Julian Assange says a lot more about us than it does about him.
A London court recently ruled Julian Assange could be extradited to the United States, but here in Australia, amongst the 24/7 pig iron spin and the faint Christmas cheer, you almost wouldn’t know it. On Twitter, #auspol spoke of teal clad independents, the people who once voted for Josh Frydenberg, given a second chance to redeem themselves. The blue ticks were at work bashing Escher stairs around the re-framing of the Gladys saga, another redemption story, while talking about Taipan helicopters with their newly found expertise on the nature of modern war-birds.
The press has recently struggled to tell the story of climate change and a one-in-a-hundred-year pandemic, it has failed to push our society to understand the Geneva-convention-riddled abomination that is offshore detention, to communicate the slip in parliamentary standards, to demand more from our elected officials, yet is only partly to blame for these things — we all share in that shame. The combined failure of journalists to articulate the grave situation of one of their fellow colleagues and the significance of it, the very people that once handed him awards not so long ago, is one of the most profound failures in the history of Australian journalism, and something that further condemns the industry to ruin.
News that a fellow Australian journalist would now be a “Prisoner of Two Worlds” to be torn apart in the anglosphere, once unthinkable, did not get much of a mention from the morally muted Australian press apparatus this week. Somewhere between AUKUS and “Barnaby Joyce: A New York Xmas Lockdown”, with the pointless political analysis and the trains of thought, the dozens of things that don’t matter but should, in all the words fit to print, our journalists couldn’t scratch up more than a few between them for Julian Assange.
Julian Assange is from Townsville, Queensland. The son of two Australians, born in Australia, he grew up in over 30 Australian towns and cities by the time he reached his teens. At age 16, in 1987, in Australia, when most kids his age were beginning the firmly consolidated age of hyper-capitalism, Julian Assange took on a concept from a roman poet called Horace as his hacker name, Mendax. His rumoured involvement in the legendary WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989, while never proven, demonstrated a unique talent, quickly establishing him as a key player in a nascent technological universe.
By 1993, when the internet was only used by a fraction of our kangaroo-cricket society, when the world wide web was a glimmer in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye, Julian Assange offered assistance to Victoria Police to provide “technical advice and support [and] to assist in the prosecution of persons suspected of publishing and distributing child pornography on the internet”. Later that year, he created Australia’s first internet service provider (still running), and then went on to lay down some of the foundation stones of cryptography and encryption. Before Australian families owned mobile phones, Assange was pioneering concepts that would define the fundamental tenants of the digital realm. While we were working how to plug a 28.8k modem into our PC, Assange began to articulate the philosophy of data security, and this was all by 1997, the year we first began to wrap our heads around Lycos and Alta Vista.
The purveyors of truth in our society wrote more on The Winx stand at Randwick than they wrote on the landmark decision to render an Australian citizen on opaque and vague espionage charges, a man held in stateless suspended animation for almost a decade forgotten by his nation of birth. While the rest of us sit numb to the news, and our government sits impotent to a shady prisoner exchange between our AUKUS partners, maybe the years of prison islands and the foreign wars, the plutocracy, the podium shared with China and Egypt for press concentration, and all the Harvey-Norman-interest-free has finally caught up with us.
We once cried with the Bali Nine on death row, for Schapelle Corby, and even Asian-looking Aussies convicted for heroin traffic in Singapore. Our governments actively pursued and advocated for the release of Australians detained abroad and our population widely supported it. Our journalists seemed to care about it too, the national coverage defining the perception of the issue and the way everyday Australians understood the issue. David Hicks joined Al Qaeda after firing RPGs from Belgrade to the Khyber Pass and we somehow got behind him too, because that was the Australian way, yeah?
We live in a country in which five hundred aboriginals have died in custody since a 1991 Royal Commission and eleven since a damning report by the Australian Institute of Criminology in June this year. A place where we watched our nation’s first people all get together at Uluru just to tell them its “not desirable”, where they can’t get us to give them a gig in our constitution and you struggle to find an article telling the story. Our society now demonstrates a growing lack compassion toward the poor and desperate, born of white-Anglo nihilism, fostered by the duopoly, lost in the quarter-acre mentalities of the ascendant, the distracted, and the complacent. Is it any surprise Assange feels this silence in a land where the home to Bilo is just a catchphrase?
In the post-Khashoggi world, one where the feds can still see avenues to raid the ABC, when journalists around the globe are fighting for diminishing press freedoms, our pasteurised journalists in cardboard tetra packs sit in dry store, relegating their opposition to whispers on the back pages of their websites and institutions. As the fundamental pillars that support organised society wane against the onslaught of climate catastrophe and COVID, when the rich, powerful and greedy consolidate wealth over the many, where are the journalists who will tell the story? How do journalists in Australia speak to the people when they work for draconian corporate overlords who are antithetical to the very essence of their tradecraft?
The outpouring of concern towards the fate of Assange from swathes of the international community of journalists, has not been expressed by the fraternity back home. Perhaps, like our recent embarrassment at Glasgow, this lackluster response to the plight of this Australian of global significance reflects on the state of the Australian press, our society, and our broader international reputation more than we would like to admit. Across all of our walks of life, we have trouble admitting that we may now be less enlightened than many of our global denizens, that more recently, down here with our Anglo-beer goggles on, we have not been able to grasp our own identity, see our place in the world or conceive of our own future.
There seems to be a lot of space to argue about the particulars of this case across our various partisan and ideological lines, but no space to argue about the fate of an Australian citizen here. Is there no common ambiguity to discuss such a clear-cut scenario? Journalists should be falling over backwards, in unison, to petition for the release of any colleague held in foreign detention, as a priority, no matter what the circumstances.
Perhaps Assange is like the Nick Cave of Australian journalists, respected far more comprehensively and genuinely abroad, built on a common understanding on what he is trying to achieve, somewhat despised by the shallow minded back at home who can’t understand the significance of it all. In some places around the world, people sit at backgammon tables and cafes, in parks and forums and try to make sense of it all, but here in the backyard BBQs of Australia, if you say something that triggers collective shame, or inspires some form of imagination, you may not get an invite to come back. The way some of us see it, and the way the press refuses to tell it, we never invited Julian Assange in the first place.
Over the last two decades of incongruous national direction and wilful ignorance, we have become collectively numb and callously blind to the horrors we now enable in the changing paradigm of our national character. When the footage from a helicopter gunship took Assange from an internationally recognised journalist to a national security threat to the grand strategic imperatives of a superpower, who would have thought that a few years later the journalists, and us too, would end up in the cockpit, detached from the carnage that rains down on the innocent below. Guilty by association. It is our national shame that we have brown people rotting on islands, that Aboriginal people are being wilfully denied recognition by us all, that wealth disparity and economic injustice is condemning a generation to the underclasses, and for this — allowing an Australian citizen to be archived in a US supermax prison built for El Chapo, simply for being a trailblazing Walkley Award winning journalist.