Senate debates

Wednesday, 2 August 2023

Matters of Public Importance

Assange, Mr Julian Paul

6:06 pm

Photo of Gerard RennickGerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I support this motion to a degree. I think that there should be some facts put on the table. My understanding of it was that the crime that was alleged against Julian Assange should have been put onto some Guardian journalists who released the encryption code that gave access to the WikiLeaks file. That was actually done by the Guardian. These particular journalists wrote down the encryption code in a book that they wrote about WikiLeaks. So I fail to see why Julian Assange is being held accountable for this so-called crime and not the Guardian journalists who released the encryption code. I'm also led to believe that there is another leaker of data, who leaked similar files to the ones that Julian Assange is being accused of being guilty of leaking, and the US government isn't actually going after them. Furthermore, it has been reported that Robert Gates said that no Afghan troops or interpreters or American soldiers or Australian soldiers were actually put at risk, I'm led to believe. I don't necessarily think that we should be putting our troops in jeopardy when it comes to these wars, but, at the same time, I do believe in the role of free speech and I do think that we need to hold governments to account for the decisions that they make when they start to go into other countries.

What's particularly annoying about the Assange case is that he was basically disclosing information in regard to the Iraq War. I think everyone in this chamber agrees that the Iraq War was a gross violation of human rights. There were never any biological weapons of mass destruction. The whole thing seemed to be a set-up. My view on this is that, the year before this war was started, Saddam Hussein said that he was going to start accepting payment for oil in the euro, and anyone who has followed the machinations of the Bank for International Settlements and prior wars throughout history knows that, whenever you start to attack a currency, that is when the bankers come in. We saw that when they took out Gaddafi. He was talking about bringing in an African dinar, backed by gold. That's not just my opinion. A bloke by the name of Sidney Blumenthal, who was an adviser to Hillary Clinton—this was later leaked on WikiLeaks—advised against that. We know that, after World War II, the Bank of England was nationalised, and all of the debts from World War II were stuck into the Bank of England. That was the way the wealth was transferred from the Old World to the New World, similar to World War I, where Germany copped all the debts.

So I think that there needs to be much greater scrutiny. It's very unfair to hold Julian Assange to account for basically trying to get to the bottom of what was going on in the Iraq War. Yet again, that went on, and this is what I fear with the Ukraine crisis, that it's just going to become this perpetual war machine. Eventually it'll slip onto the back pages, but there will still be people getting massacred in Ukraine or being shot to bits in Ukraine in 10 years time because it suits the journalists or whatever in the deep state to push this stuff onto the back pages.

Another thing that needs to be noted is, where do you draw the line today on what is it journalism? I know there was a court case in 1971 where the US military tried to hold the New York Times to account for an article they posted about the My Lai massacre. The New York Times won that case because the US court upheld the right to know and the right to freedom of speech. As we transition to the internet world, bloggers and others are entitled to the right to freedom of speech. As I said, I don't think we should jeopardise our troops, but there has been no evidence shown whereby anything that was leaked out of WikiLeaks jeopardised any troops. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now over, so there is no longer an ongoing threat from any of that information that was leaked. Furthermore, the question needs to be asked: why is Julian Assange in jail under heinous conditions when people that were responsible for many more deaths aren't actually having the finger pointed at them and being asked, 'Well, how did we get into the situation in the first place?'

I think in the name of humanity and in the name of our international relations—and this is not an attack on the people of the US or Great Britain; this is an attack on the deep state, which was taken over the governments of these countries— (Time expired)

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