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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

Over the years, countless efforts have been made to release Julian Assange.

Right now, he’s still likely to be extradited to the United States to face charges that amount to over a hundred years in jail.

The latest attempt to free him has united an unlikely band of allies: members from the Greens, Labor, the Coalition and Independents recently travelled to the US to call for Assange’s release.

Today, Independent member for Kooyong and member of the delegation to Washington, Monique Ryan, on whether Australia’s pleas to free Julian Assange are being heard in the US.

It’s Tuesday, November 7th.

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ANGE:

Monique Ryan, in September, you travelled with colleagues from all sides of politics to lobby the US to drop Julian Assange's extradition charges. Can you tell me about that trip? Who did you meet with over there and what was the outcome of the visit?

MONIQUE:

It was an extraordinary trip, actually. It came about because I'm a member of the parliamentary friends of Julian Assange and Andrew Wilkie and David Shoebridge and Julian Wilson have been the people behind that group for a long, long time.

Put out a call for people to do to go to Washington if people had the capacity to do so. And, and I felt strongly that it was important that someone from the crossbench go. And it came together pretty quickly. So there were members of those, some of the Labor Party, a couple of Greens, a national, a Liberal and I ended up arriving in Washington around the same time and having two days there.

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“A delegation of Australian lawmakers is in Washington seeking the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange-...”

MONIQUE:

We met with Julian's lawyers, both US and UK-based. We met with people from the Australian Embassy, representatives from the US Department of Justice and the State Department, and then with a number of Congress people of all stripes over the course of two quite frenetic days.

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“They say the one thing really that unites them is their call for the charges against Julian Assange to be dropped. They are here sitting down with members of Congress.”

MONIQUE:

And it was really encouraging to meet with the Australian Ambassador, Kevin Rudd, and for him to reiterate his commitment to the cause as well. You know, he obviously had conversations with the Prime Minister about it and he was, as you know, he expressed his determination to work on this as well. So, you know, we may have vacated Washington after a couple of days, but Kevin Rudd is still there and we believe that he is still working hard to secure Mr. Assange, his release as well.

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“David Shoebridge, a senator from the Australian Greens, said the cross-party delegation was representing the majority of Australians in seeking Assange’s release…”

MONIQUE:

It was so interesting to see how a group of people who had nothing else in common really politically were able to come together and work cohesively, pragmatically and sensibly to try and advocate for a single individual. And that felt really powerful in an interesting way. So pretty much every person we met was gobsmacked that we were there and working in the capacity that we were. What we heard again and again was that people had kind of believed that Australians weren't interested in Julian Assange, that they felt that the Morrison government had washed its hands of him and that Australians didn't care what happened with him.

And when we expressed the fact that, you know, the latest polling suggests that nine out of ten Australians want him returned home and believed that he should be freed, they were really surprised by that.

ANGE:

And coming back to the delegation, the group of you that were over there, you know, it is hard to think of anything that unites all sides of politics in this way. You know, Barnaby Joyce said the only things you agree about is the weather and Julian Assange. And even then I think you have different ideas about the weather.

MONIQUE:

We don’t agree on the weather.

ANGE:

Yeah. Why is freeing Julian Assange so important to all sides of politics?

MONIQUE:

It's interesting and that I think we kind of see it from different angles. Again, we all come to the same end, the same conclusion, but we come at it from different angles.

Audio excerpt – News Host:

“We are very excited to have two special guests in studio here with us this morning, two members of Parliament, all the way from Australia, from two very different political ideologies who are in town to advocate for the release of Julian Assange.”

MONIQUE:

I did do a morning show with Barnaby on the second morning, a US TV show, and we did. You know, I briefly discussed the possibility of a post politics morning show that we could do together.

ANGE:

Okay. Do you have any ideas for what it might be called or…

MONIQUE:

No, other readers come up with something? But it was a great show actually, because they had someone from the left of politics and someone from the right. Right. And, you know, it seemed to work quite well. It's quite a successful show, apparently.

Audio excerpt – News Host:

“We have a member of Parliament, Barnaby Joyce, and also a member of Parliament, Monique Ryan. Great to have both of you here.”

MONIQUE:

For me, the primary thing is freedom of the press and the fact that I think that media worldwide is under threat, the freedom of the media, and that if journalists internationally feel that they can be pursued by the US on foreign soil for things that they say they publish in the public interest, if the US government feels that the publication of those facts and the facts aren't in dispute here, but that the publication of those facts is not in the US government's interest. Well, that's going to put a stop on journalists worldwide publishing things that we need to know.

Audio excerpt – Monique Ryan:

“We have great respect for your Constitution and your First Amendment right to freedom of the speech, of speech and freedom of the press. And we, I guess, expect a reciprocal level of respect for our press and for the speech of our citizens. And we don't want this to become a point of difference between Australia and the US.”

Audio excerpt – News Host:

“Right.”

MONIQUE:

So it's not just the rights and the freedom and the protection of journalists. It's the rights and the freedom, the protection of people and our need to know truth. So I come at it from freedom of the press. I think Barnaby goes from a slightly different angle, which is that if we allow the US who are putatively our closest allies to behave in this way, then how do we call other governments to account if they behave in this way?

Audio excerpt – Barnaby Joyce:

“If for me, it's not so much about Julian Assange as a principle, it's a principle about extraterritorial reach. Let's put a turn around us. Imagine a guy from Ohio and all of a sudden he lives in Ohio. He's never committed an offence in the United States at a state level or federal level. And then Australia says, well, he's committed offence for us, and then he goes overseas and next thing you know Australia's saying, well, he's coming to jail in Australia, he's going to stay there for 175 years.”

MONIQUE:

And that is an important point. You know, we've recently been talking to the Chinese government about Ching Lei and the US government has been talking to Russia about Evan Gus Kovic, who's a Wall Street Journal journalist who's currently being detained by the Russians. But what more moral authorities do we have to advocate on their behalf if we're allowing the US government to behave in this way against Julian Assange?

And I think David Shoebridge and Peter Whish-Wilson and Tony Zappia come at it from slightly different angles again, but we all ended up at the same conclusion.

ANGE:

Can you describe what you know about what Julian Assange's life looks like currently and what concerns you have about the conditions he's in?

MONIQUE:

So Julian Assange is currently held in Belmarsh Prison, which is a high security prison in the United Kingdom. David Shoebridge When he was in the UK last year, you tried to visit him and was not able to do so. We know that he has very limited access to visitors and that I think is allowed out of his cell for under very brief periods every day. His wife, Stella, has real concerns about his physical and mental health. She's been quite open about those. She's indicated that she believes that if he is extradited to the US, there's a real danger that he might consider suicide.

Jennifer Robinson, who is his Australian but UK based lawyer, has indicated that she feels that it's likely that if he goes to the U.S. he'll be held in conditions which are, you know, tantamount to the conditions people have been held in in Guantanamo Bay. And that, you know, again, that that would be very, very concerning in terms of the potential impact on his physical and mental health. He has had a minor stroke and is in poor, he's fragile, he's frail, he's in poor health. And this feels punitive. He still hasn't been convicted of any crimes. And this whole procedural nightmare for him has gone on for a very long time.

ANGE:

After the break – Are Australia’s arguments about Julian Assange working on US leaders?

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ANGE:

Monique Ryan, let's talk about the nature of the charges beyond just the concern for Julian Assange's treatment and his seemingly indefinite detainment. You think the charges should be completely dropped. Can you explain why?

MONIQUE:

Well, the first thing is that when the Cablegate documents were first released, more than a quarter of a million of them, the Obama administration did look at taking action against Julian Assange. Two things to note about that is that he wasn't actually the first person to publish them. They were published on another website initially. And but then when he published them, they were also very quickly propagated by a number of large international media organisations, which included The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, El Pais, and subsequently many, many other media organisations. And when the Obama administration looked at this. Essentially they concluded that there was The New York Times problem, which was that if they prosecuted Julian Assange for publishing those documents that have to prosecute all these other major media organisations as well, which wasn't practically possible.

When the Trump administration then came in, they initially charged Julian Assange with a single count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, which was related to essentially hacking. There was an allegation that had helped Chelsea Manning and extricating the documents that she then shared with WikiLeaks, and then they added an extra tranche charges under the US Privacy Act of 1971, which is really not really fit for purpose for this sort of prosecution.

Daniel Ellsberg, who's the whistleblower who released The Pentagon Papers, which similarly said the situation identified war crimes related to the Vietnam War, has described Julian Assange's prosecution as an even greater travesty of justice than his own. His charges were ultimately dismissed.

The issue is that we have to have people who can draw attention to those sorts of actions in the public space. And essentially what Julian Assange did was to publish truthful documents in the public interest. And the overlap with that and what investigative journalists do every day is such that it feels punitive to prosecute him for something that good investigative journalists do all the time and that we need them to continue to do.

ANGE:

Julian Assange's brother, Gabriel Shipton, said he hoped the trip that you went on would pave the way for the Prime Minister to discuss this with President Biden on his recent visit. And Anthony Albanese did discuss Julian Assange with Joe Biden. But ultimately nothing has happened yet. Assange is still behind bars. Do you think the Prime Minister pushed hard enough for his release?

MONIQUE:

My understanding of these sorts of processes is that nothing happens quickly and that…

ANGE:

Assange has been behind bars for a long time…

MONIQUE:

Well, he has to…the Department of Justice has to go through the processes that it has. I remain really optimistic that the representations that were made on his behalf and that the Prime Minister made on his behalf more recently have been effective. We know that there's been movement from the US Congress and that there's been non-partisan representations from US Congress to President Biden on this matter as well. Now, I've remained really optimistic that we'll see some positive moves in the near future.

ANGE:

And so you think the delegation was a success and it was worth it?

MONIQUE:

It felt powerful. But in the end, you know, the answer will be the outcome. And we all look to say an outcome in the very near future. But if we don't achieve that, then, you know, it will have been a disappointment. But I don't think we're ready to pass judgement on that just yet.

ANGE:

And let's say that those diplomatic conversations and approaches don't lead to Julian Assange being released from where he is now in in London. What options are left for him and for his freedom?

MONIQUE:

Well, people have raised the question of plea bargains or plea deals and things like that. And that's a matter for Mr. Assange and for his lawyers to talk about. It would be a very dangerous precedent, though, I think, were he to be extradited to the US and put on trial for this. And I think it would be a difficult trial for the US government to hold because many of the documents and the pieces of evidence that germane to this issue will be brought back into the public sphere and examined again. And the embarrassment that Mr. Assange caused the US government in the past will be revisited in that process.

ANGE:

And Monique, what message does Julian Assange's story send to Australians who believe in the importance of truth and transparency, do you think?

MONIQUE:

Well, I think what Mr. Assange said early on when he was asked about his motivations for setting up WikiLeaks in 2011 was that the goal is justice and the method is transparency. We all know that we need more transparency and more integrity in our government. The other thing that Mr. Assange said was if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth. I don't know anyone who doesn't want more truth, integrity and transparency from their government. All of us need to push for those as best we can.

ANGE:

Monique Ryan, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

MONIQUE:

It's a pleasure.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today…

All 11 Greens senators staged a walkout of the Senate over the Albanese government’s position of not calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.

Deputy Leader Mehreen Faruqi accused the government of using weasel words on what she described as ‘war crimes’ and ended her question with the statement ‘Free, free Palestine’.

Trade Minister Don Farell, who was acting leader for the government in the senate, accused the Greens of using the moment for political advantage.

And…

Centrelink will get an additional 3,000 staff members to deal with helpline and payment delays.

At the press conference to announce the measure Government Services Minister Bill Shorten placed an aluminium foil ‘robodebt’ mascot into a bin.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am, we’ll be back again tomorrow.

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