Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

as if it were his choice. Are we really hitching our wagon to this country? We need to have this honest discussion. We can talk about strategic issues in our region, and we can talk about threats to Australia's sovereignty and to our nation, but why aren't we being more independent of the United States? I do not think this is a good time for us to be going further down this rabbit hole of selling out our independence to the US at a time when I have grave concerns over the state of their democracy and their institutions in the years to come.

There are a lot of good people in the US Senate and the US Congress, and he gave me a lot of hope, to go over there last year and meet with some of these people and see the progressive caucus. I'm exasperated as to why we don't see more of them in our media—why we see these two old white men in US politics all the time—when there are so many good people coming through the US system. So I did want to say I do have some hope for the democracy in the United States. There are a lot of good people there.

But I'm particularly concerned—I wanted to finish on this note today—and I know my colleagues are also particularly concerned, as are many people in this Senate chamber and in the other place, about the treatment of Walkley Award winning journalist Julian Assange by the US Department of Justice, an extraterritorial overreach that I believe is one of the biggest abuses of power of our time. This is our friend and ally, trying to extradite for the first time ever on espionage charges, political charges, an Australian journalist for doing their job in a foreign jurisdiction. This has never happened before—never. They couldn't do it to a US journalist, because it would be a breach of the first amendment, but they are going to try and extradite an Australian journalist to spend 175 years in jail for disclosing their secrets, their war crimes, their corruption, for WikiLeaks.

While our delegation—and Senator Shoebridge was with me in that delegation—had very constructive meetings with the Department of Justice and others, what kind of friend would do that to an Australian citizen, especially an Australian that is a hero to many people in this country, probably the only person who exposed what happened in the Iraq War? No-one else has been brought to justice for that illegal and immoral war and that conflict that dragged our country and other nations into the so-called 'coalition of the willing'. We saw instability across the region for decades and, based on different estimates, millions of civilian casualties. We see horrific images coming out of Gaza now, but we didn't see many images out of the Iraq War around these hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent civilian casualties. WikiLeaks and Julian Assange were the truth-tellers of that war, thanks to whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and others who blew the whistle and provided those documents, which were published by WikiLeaks and, may I say, by all the major media institutions around the world. Some of them are also winning awards for their coverage of some of these key leaks, like the rules of engagement leaks and others.

Julian Assange is in a maximum-security prison in the UK waiting to be extradited. He still hasn't been charged with anything by the UK, and the US is seeking to extradite him as a political prisoner. We know surveys in Australia show that more than 80 per cent of Australians find that completely unacceptable. Our House passed a motion just two weeks ago, which the Prime Minister spoke on, calling for his extradition to end. I know our ambassador over there, Kevin Rudd, is working to see his extradition come to an end, as are Julian's family, his legal team and many, many good people. Yet the US continues to push ahead with this. I'd recommend to all Australians who want to know more about this issue to go and see the movie The Trust Fall, which is showing at Village Cinemas around the country. I guarantee you that you will not walk out of that cinema unchanged and not feel this injustice and this anger towards our key ally, the United States.

So, while we're hitching our wagon to AUKUS and spending hundreds of billions of dollars that we could be spending on so much more in this country where it's needed, just remember what they're doing to Julian Assange. Are they the kind of friend and ally we want to be tying 100 per cent of our defence future to? I know I'm not the only one who has grave concerns about this. I thank Senator Shoebridge for the work that he has done on this bill.