wrote this week<\/a>, Assange is in the mix to win a Senate seat in Victoria.\u00a0 And the Party can win seats in other states with the right candidates.\u00a0 These are big calls to make and they are made with the usual caveat that a week is a long time in politics, but there is in the Australian community strong support for Assange and Wikileaks.<\/p>\nMany Australians think Julian Assange has been dealt a raw deal by the Gillard government.\u00a0 It has been prepared to watch one of its own citizens hunted down by the US in the knowledge that if Julian Assange ends up in the United States he will be tortured.\u00a0 Not one skerrick of political and diplomatic capital has been expended by Ms Gillard and the officials in DFAT to try and work out a political solution which would allow Assange to return to Australia after answering questions a Swedish prosecutor wants to put to him concerning relationships he had with a couple of women in that country.<\/p>\n
That Assange\u2019s Wikileaks movement is growing a political arm in Australia is a logical step.\u00a0 There is no party in this country which\u00a0unambiguously\u00a0believes that we need to roll back the surveillance state.\u00a0 Greens Senator Scott Ludlam from Western Australia has been a champion of this issue but he is too often a lone voice in the Senate.<\/p>\n
Since 9\/11 particularly both the Coalition and the ALP driven by the fear mongers in ASIO, ASIS, the Federal Police and the Attorney-General\u2019s Department, has passed reams of laws and regulations designed to diminish individual liberty.\u00a0 In the shameful absence of a Human Rights Act there has been no check or balance on laws which enable citizens to be surveilled and have their movements controlled or their data raided.<\/p>\n
The other aspect of WikiLeaks and Assange\u2019s views that appeals to me is that it\u2019s the enemy of cosy deals between government and business.\u00a0 And it rightly argues that a government that acts in secret is an undemocratic one. \u00a0The modus operandi of Australian governments from time immemorial has been to indulge in both with little or no real scrutiny.<\/p>\n
There is in the Wikileaks Party a strand of liberalism which has long been attractive to me.\u00a0 That is, that democracy works best when there is open government, transparency and a genuine commitment in word and deed to primacy of the individual.<\/p>\n
The Wikileaks Party and Julian Assange are filling a gap in the political ideas marketplace in Australia.\u00a0 Its fresh approach to policy making and to democratic values is compelling.<\/p>\n
It has reinvigorated my interest in Australian democracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By\u00a0Greg\u00a0Barns April 5, 2013 Julian Assange has been treated appallingly by the Gillard government, and the Tony Abbott led Opposition for that matter.\u00a0 But Mr Assange\u2019 s Wikileaks and its underpinning philosophies of both blowing open the world of secrecy that permeates bureaucracies and the political masters they serve – and reducing the footprint of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3434,66,11],"tags":[123,2554,274,499,500],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3t0mw-Nu","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3068"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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