 This is an honour to be here and to be in the company of Juniors and especially John Shipton. John is an old friend but I would suggest almost a fourth member of David's wonderful sculpture and that is John. John's campaign. John's campaign, yes please clap him. Yes there has been a film made about John's campaign but I've seen it over several years and it is one of the most heroic acts I've seen and none and I can't pay tribute more to John. His calm, steady support for Julian is utterly inspiring. So thank you to John, thank you to Dean Yates and thank you to David for this wonderful sculpture. It's an extraordinary likeness of the sense of what these three men achieved. You get a sense of their heroism. So to have it here in Sydney I think itself is almost heroic but here it is and I for one am grateful. Julian has been a friend of mine for quite a long time now since he first went to England and through almost all of that time he has suffered incarceration and persecution of some kind. I liked Julian almost from the moment I met him. I liked his dark sense of humour. He's funny. I liked the fact that he was sharp and not a member of the media club in any way. In fact not a member of any club. I liked his thoughtfulness. I interviewed him at my home in London and his thoughtful pause before answering every question produced something that was incisive and erudite and I came to like Julian very much and to be I hope one of his true supporters. I last saw Julian not long ago. It was just before Christmas in Belmarsh's prison. He was in relatively good spirits. For two hours we talked about almost everything but not the case. We talked about books and as I sent him a collection of books. We talked about life. It almost seemed at one point especially when he laughed that things might be alright. Some things might be alright. But of course that's not the case. We know that in the arcane system that has imposed itself on Julian. He is still waiting for a judge to approve an appeal to go forward. His laughter and his good spirits of course are a shield. When the prison guards began, I notice this every time, began to jangle their keys. That's their way. They like doing it. It's their way of telling you that time is up and that it's time to go. He fell silent. And normality, this protest normality of him in Belmarsh returned. And when I crossed the room to the other side and was leaving, he did as he always did. If you can imagine this. He put his fist in the air with a clenched fist and he shook it in defiance. He is the embodiment of courage. There are those who are the antithesis, the opposite of Julian in whom courage is not heard of, along with principle and honour, stand between him and freedom. I'm not referring to the mafia regime in Washington, whose pursuit of a good man is meant as a warning to us all, but rather to those who still claim to run a just democracy in this country, Australia. Anthony Albanese was melding his favourite latitude. Enough is enough. Long before he was elected Prime Minister last year, he gave many of us precious hope, especially Julian's family. As Prime Minister, he added weasel words about not sympathising with what Julian has done. Apparently we had to understand his need to cover his appropriated arse in case Washington called him to order. We knew it would take exceptional political, if not moral, courage for Albanese to stand up in the Australian Parliament, the same Parliament which will export itself to Joe Biden in May and save the following. As Prime Minister, it is my government's responsibility to bring home an Australian citizen who is clearly the victim of a great vindictive injustice, a man who has been persecuted for the kind of journalism that is a true public service, a man who is not lied or deceived like so many of his counterfeits in the media, but has told people the truth about how the world is run. I call on the United States, a courageous and moral Prime Minister Albanese might say, I call on the United States to withdraw its extradition application, to end the malign farce that has stained Britain's wants in my courts of justice, and to release Julian Assange unconditionally to his family. For Julian to remain in his cell at Belmarsh is an act of torture, as the nation's rapporteur has called it, it's how a dictatorship behaves, unquote. Alas, my daydream about Australia doing right by Julian has reached its limits. The teasing of hope by Albanese has now closed to a betrayal for which history will not forget him and many will not forgive him. What then, what then is he waiting for? Remember the Julian was granted political asylum by the Ecuadorian government in 2013, largely because his own government had abandoned him. That alone ought to bring shame on those responsible, namely the Labour government of Julia Gillard. No ego, no ego was Gillard to allude with the Americans in shutting down WikiLeaks for his truth-telling that she wanted the Australian federal police to arrest Assange and take away his passport for what she called his illegal publishing. The AFP pointed out that if they had no such powers, Assange had committed no crime. It's as if you can measure Australia's extraordinary surrender of sovereignty by the way it treats Julian. Gillard's pantomime grumbling to both houses of the US Congress is cringing theatre on YouTube. Australia, she repeats, is America's great mate, or is it little mate? Her foreign minister then was Bob Carr, another Labour machine politician whom WikiLeaks exposes as an American informant. One of Washington's boys in Australia, Carr boasted knowing Henry Kissinger, his hero. Like other government ministers, Carr claimed that Julian was receiving full consular support from his government. But when Julian's lawyer, Gareth Pierce and I met the Australian Consul General in London, Ken Pascoe, I asked him, what do you know of the Assange case? Just what I read in the papers he replied with a laugh. Today Prime Minister Albanese is preparing this country for a ridiculous American-led war with China. Billions of dollars are to be spent on a war machine of submarines, fighter jets and missiles that can reach China. Salivating warmongering by the country's oldest newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, is a national embarrassment or ought to be. Australia is a country with no enemies and China is its biggest trading partner. This terrain's ability to aggression is laid out in an extraordinary document called the US-Australia Force-Posture Agreement. This states that American troops have, and I quote, exclusive control over the access to and use of armaments and material that can be used in Australia in an aggressive war. That almost certainly includes nuclear weapons. China, as the yellow peril, fits Australia's long history of racism like a globe. However, there is another enemy they don't talk about. It's us, the public. It's our right to know and our right to say no. Since 2001, some 82 laws have been enacted to take away these rights and protect the Cold War paranoia of an increasingly secret state. They involve secret courts and secret evidence and secret miscarriages of justice. And this Australia is said to be a model for the master across the Pacific. Bernard Collery, David McBride, and Julian Assange, deeply moral men who told the truth, they are the whistleblowers and the victims of this paranoia and our national heroes. On Julian Assange, the Prime Minister has two faces. One faces Jesus with hope of his intervention that will lead to Julian's freedom. The other face ingratiates itself with Joe Biden and allows the Americans to do what they want with us to lay down targets that could result in catastrophe for all of us. The question is this, will Albanese back Australia or will he back Washington? If he is sincere, as some supporters of the Labour Party still think he is, what is he waiting for? If he doesn't secure Julian's release, Australia will cease to be sovereign. We will be little Americans, official. This is not about the survival of a free press, as it's often said. There is no longer a free press. The paramount issue for Julian and for all of us is justice and our most precious human right to be free. Thank you.