 Alan. Andrew is one of Australia's most highly respected investigative journalists. He's worked on the flagship current affairs programs with both the public broadcasters, he's held senior news limited roles throughout his career, and he first interviewed Julian Assange for Foreign Correspondent in 2010, for which the program won the New York Festival Gold Medal. He's just updated his 2011 book about Julian Assange, The Most Dangerous Bound in the World, which we are going to be hearing more about today and we're really, really excited about that. And tonight Andrew is going to be in conversation with Mary Costa-Kitties. Mary presented SBS World News Nightly for almost two decades and in 2019 she visited Julian Assange in Bellwarsh Prison. Please join me in welcoming Andrew Fowler and Mary Costa-Kitties. Thank you James. Well, would you be founder and publisher Julian Assange has been in Bellwarsh maximum security prison since April last year. He faces extradition to the United States, where he'd be prosecuted under the Espionage Act, charges attracting 175 years in prison. Julian Assange and Huckabeeks have received scores of awards for journalism and human rights, and including the coveted Australian war plea for most outstanding contribution to journalism. And we're going to be talking about the most dangerous man in the world with Andrew Fowler. Andrew, the title is an acknowledgement of Julian's, among other things, of his impact. How would you describe that impact? Now Mary, I think it's difficult to underestimate the impact that Wikileaks had when it really burst on the public scene in 2010. Who can forget being in the helicopter gunship hovering over that bag there square and seeing the people below and hearing the pilots talking as though it was like a game show of a low-money talking about why did people up and then killing them, including two writers and journalists. Now that hit home very hard around the warlock. A couple of that you had to release later on in the same year, and that was the correct murder video, of course. You had later on in the year the release of the Afghan warlocks, the Iraq warlocks and cable gate. And it just ripped off the scab of what the Americans and the Allies were doing in the Middle East. The torturing, killing, the body counts of people who died in Iraq. The UK and the US said that they weren't counting the dead civilians. They were. Wikileaks revealed that 610,000 people died as a result of a non-combatance in Iraq alone. So that's part of the punch-through that Wikileaks brought to us all those years ago, it's a decade ago. And I think that when you look today in the back and say what was the impact, I think that when the Guardian ran those stories page after page after page of the trustees that Wikileaks cables were exposing, as did the mall, the newspapers and the people. Journalists looked at those stories and saw them and saw the truth that had been hidden from us as journalists, maybe because we hadn't pushed back hard enough, of course, because governments have been very good at covering their tracks. But more importantly, it gave us a contentary view of the world. We didn't have to wait for 30 years to find out the truth of what our foreign policy problems had been up to. We didn't have to put up with the censorship. It was there, more data. You make up your mind, and particularly for the readers and the viewers, to make up their mind about what they thought. Because they've filled it in the way. So I want to sit in the way of this information. You could read the newspaper story, you could read the document, and you, the reader, could make up your mind. It was revolutionary. One of the signs called it, scientific journalism. They will be called scientific journalists, but really it's just journalism, that the readers should be given access to as much people as many people as possible. And Wikileaks made that possible, and that is the big pipes through moments, as far as I understand. And of course, one of that, I think, was the internet, and his own commitment to social justice, and his searing intelligence, really. You know, his searing intelligence got him into a lot of trouble, as we appreciate, as people didn't appreciate Julian's searing intelligence. And some people at the Guardian weren't very happy with his searing intelligence, but his commitment to human rights and to disclosing unpalatable public trueness were what drove him. And I think that we as journalists should be more supportive of him than we are now, because of body talkers. And one of the reasons he is seen as such a danger, of course, by some powerful governments, is because of the capacity for endless revelations. It wasn't like the Pentagon piglets where you have published, you reveal this, you know, this total of things that have been happening during the Vietnam War that were concealed from us, the fact that we knew the war was going to be lost. This was, really, having this capacity to upload anonymously, meant that sources would be encouraged. And this might keep happening. The major reason why the United States is persecuting during the scientists for that very reason, they don't want anybody to follow in these footsteps. They try not just to silence him, but to silence the idea. And we're also a couple of them, that's Australia as well, and the other so-called five-wise countries, clamping down on journalists because of that very opportunity. And I think the idea of eternally revealing information in a contemporary time is extremely dangerous for governments. They don't want people to know what's going on continuously. Also, that's not guaranteed to protect sources with an anonymiser. And so far, nobody has been exposed by wavelengths as a result of the information they've had. You say in the book, in fact, that this is not true, that the constant assertion that these publications have hurt people, that people have died. In fact, you said WikiLeaks was, on occasion, more careful than the mainstream media. Let me give you an example of that. I mean, let's go back to collateral murder, which is the gunship offering home to the Baghdad Street. I would suggest that any journalists around the world, there would be few of them who wouldn't, if they're TV reporters, grab that video and put it to air pretty much as you got it, once you established it was accurate. What WikiLeaks did was to actually send somebody, Kristin Harathasar, who's now WikiLeaks editor, to Baghdad to check out the veracity of that information. Now, I think that that's a commitment to public service journalism, the like of which you probably wouldn't see in today's book, mate. That's a very good point, because Julian, in fact, has been discredited because of this myth that he is not a journalist. Numerous myths, in fact, that have been attacks on his reputation both professionally and personally. Another criticism was that he was holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy to avoid Swedish justice, to avoid the sex charges. Well, sure. I mean, that's the beginning of the Smyr campaign, or maybe it's maybe 15 percent into the Smyr campaign. I mean, Assange told me personally that he believed the Americans would try to make for writing, and he was keen to stay out the United States for as long as possible. I mean, I know that in 2010 there was a grand jury sitting, investigating, drawing up charges to bring him to America. So they were the charges because there never were any Swedish charges? No, those were the real charges. Why would they never any Swedish charges? Well, they were real. The real intent was to just get him in some way and to grab him. Well, the charges were never revealed because the evidence was so thin, in my opinion. It's my understanding of the Swedish law and the exhibition law that if you want to extradite somebody, you must charge them once they get to the country. The problem is that Assange wanted that. Assange was being kept in the dark about the charges because they hadn't gone through the process of gathering the evidence. And they didn't come from London, who honestly tended to actually investigate, too. Once they reached the stage of forming the charges, then they would have to be revealed just how thin the evidence was against him. That's why I called for him to come to the standstill. And during that time, those eight years in the embassy, and since then, he's been the subject of a relentless campaign. Nils Melzer, the UN rapporteur on torture, has been a tremendous advocate for Julian's predicament. He has indeed. Nils Melzer is one of the great investigators of torture. He's been investigating torture for 20 years around the world. And Melzer, when he saw Assange who went into the embassy and saw him, he said he was really psychologically in torture. And he said also, I think quite crucially, that he'd never seen so many powerful countries gang up on one individual and try to destroy them. That's my extraordinary. But the rapporteur on torture would say that about the United States, Australia, UK, Canada, and New Zealand, and to say that they would gang up to put him away. And he thought that not only Assange being tortured, he should be released and compensated. And what happened, of course, is that the British government said, this is wrong. We don't accept that. We appeal. So they appeal. And the United Nations investigated and found that Nils Melzer's findings were absolutely false and absolutely false. And another criticism is that he's been a Russian tool and that he is responsible for the election of Donald Trump. You say in the book that the revelation that Bernie Sanders was cheated out of the Democrat nomination should have further elevated views to the pantheon of Great Germany. Somebody who's listening hasn't muted their mics. Can I just ask you, you're sitting at home or in this room, you haven't muted your mic. Please do so. Yeah, so they were saying that Nils is a journalist in Australia as well. They were saying we're quite angry because they supported Hillary Clinton and they thought Trump would be a disaster. Personally, I thought Trump would be a disaster as well. But had I been given those documents, had any journalist been given those documents, which show that inside of the Democratic Party, someone was being stitched up and everyone was being held back up for the presidency, I would have thought, I would publish the documents. What journalist in their right mind wouldn't do that? And yes, such is the hatred of Trump, it blinds journalists to what their duty is, which is to reveal without your favor, the truth that the government's got the right to know. And quite frankly, I think that beating it out there, Hillary Clinton would have lost the election. I think the point is so divided, the way they treated Sanders was so appalling and people knew it anyway outside. This was just confirmation. But it's another experience too. You make it very clear in the book that you thought it was the principal thing to do. Let's move on from the myths about you and these assertions to some of the new material in the book that you've just updated. Tell us what you found out about the deal that Waldman tried to broker and the context of it and what happened. Well, Adam Waldman, who's a lovely interesting character, has been described as being like the poorest government in the brain. He actually turns up at the most unexpected times and he came up to the ever-seeing mech of the McEwen's people and broke a meeting with a person from the Department of Justice, David Kaufman, who was head of counterintelligence. And they were having this backwards and forwards discussion about how to deal with the issue of Julian's confinement. And the Americans, that's the Department of Justice, were actually saying, well, what would Julian do? How would he help? And the discussion, as far as I understand it, was something like this that Kaufman said, well, what would you offer? And they said, well, Julian would actually be able to say who was not the leader. In other words, he probably explained what he said before, which is it wasn't the Russian state and it wasn't the state actor. Well, he may or may have even given some evidence. And some evidence, exactly. But pointing away from not pointing to sources, not revealing sources. And what happened subsequently to that is the discussion that moved on to, well, what do you want? Well, would Julian be given free passage from the embassy? Will he go to America or not? That's the question. I mean, he probably thought it probably wasn't a good idea that they were talking about those kind of things. And you then go back a few months to, this is in 2017, like a few months. And interestingly enough, the FBI director, Comey, when he learned of these negotiations, these discussions said they should stop. This was relayed to Kaufman. That's written through Kaufman, took to Kaufman and they decided, we're not going to stop. We're going to go on and they carried on. Because what was at stake here, as far as the Americans were concerned, was the release of documents called Vault 7. And they were the inside workings of the CIA. They fell into two tronches. And the first lot, when they were released, caused not much of a flatter, but they were very concerned about the second lot. And so Julian has these documents that are extremely powerful and revelatory. And at that very moment, in the weeks leading up to the release of them, there was a change of leadership in Ecuador. And the person who the party was elected was related, that it helped him get asylum, that it changed the president. The president, the new president, was very close to the Americans. The Americans were leaning on him. Pence had been there, the vice president, and the IMF had done a deal with the Americans with the military. And Julian could feel the net closing. And he, as far as I understand, who he's told me before, he believes he's releasing for the maximum powerful impact. That's what he goes, the people who blow the whistle and give him documents. And so he thought, I would say, the net's closing, I've got to get this stuff out. And he did. And when he launched the fourth seven, it did go like an exorcism. This all straight through the middle of the CIA, because it revealed, really crucially, if you want to pick it, what it revealed was that the United States had spied on China. The CIA had been penetrating Chinese industrial complexes, factories, and doing, doing to the Chinese, what the Americans say the Chinese do to them. So that was a crucial point. Compiler went completely ballistic with the CIA director, and accused Wikileaks of being hostile intelligence agency. In fact, you also detail in the book the spying on Julian Assange and his lawyers in the embassy by the very party that's prosecuting him. So just take us through how this came to pass and the role of the standard dear banks. Well, what's interesting is following that, you can imagine that things got a little tighter in the embassy. And the organization confused the global, under the cover global, the base in Spain had a contract to basically run CCT cameras, I would like to see Europe help any large installations in Sydney for security purposes, stop breakings, things like that. Well, suddenly in about 2015, they started installing cameras that have been called sale inside the embassy. So one of the questions. And also microphones. And they recorded conversations between Assange and his lawyers in great detail, and funneled them back to Madrid. And then the special splitting of the computer server, they gave one law to the Americans. And the other law went to the government. And so the spent the winds of the Americans gave basically a 24 a run down of everything that happened inside the embassy. Now, who the Americans were is not it's not clear to be able to say exactly who they were. But by piecing together the information, because I've done going through policy many pages of transcripts, like every member, you can see that the information made this way all the way to the State Department. And how do we know that? Because when you mentioned before journalists called Cassandra Fairbanks, she was interesting character, she'd actually been a Bernie Sanders supporter. And then when Bernie had been so badly treated, she jumped across to Trump. And of course, the Trump can welcome this, you know, this refugee from the next with open arms. So she had great contacts with the Trump campaign, including a guy called Arthur Shorts, who's rather, I think it'd be kind of say, I could rather embrace it with a media as a hate kicker. And so she got a very well with Arthur. And Arthur talked to her. So when Arthur told her things, she then told Julian, because she was a great supporter of Julian, so much. And when Arthur learned that she'd been talking to Julian, he was less than happy and told his son, extremely unhappy, you told him all these things, I can't talk to him or I can't trust you. The question is, how did Arthur know that she'd been talking to Julian? He said, by the way, there's a big investigation State Department. Some people, my best friends, run from Whitestone. How did he know that? How did he know that she'd been talking to a scholar? And what she said, to look at and close, it's the State Department had access to the information. And what's significant about that is that if the State Department has got access to it, and in any way alert prosecution to that information, then the argument could be had that the whole case falls in that heap, because it's illegal in the United States, I understand, certainly in Europe to spy on clients and their lawyers. There's a really important point about the prevalence of that information and who had access to it. Well, a lot to go to hinge on British justice. And so far, it hasn't been promising. We saw during the hearing earlier this year that Julian was barely able to communicate with his lawyers. And indeed, all along, he hasn't been able to prepare out for this case because of hand access to lawyers, even to documents he needs to read his defense. Yeah, I think the problem with the case, I mean, many, many different cases, depending on what you say, as long as you're not being able to talk to his lawyers, not being able to sit in the court world, being held in the cage like some sort of community billmarked prison, this is the UK's Autonomous Bay. We're locking people up there in the early 2000s. He has a problem with dealing with the US, so the UK justice, as I said for you, the UK justice system, because the UK justice system is not behaving justly. How can the judge who presides over the entirety of this case, how can she preside over it? That's not the person in the hearing, but the person who's actually a little bit lady of the flock. She is related to a member of the House of Laws and Husbands. He sat on the Security Intelligence Committee of the UK. He had a business relationship with the former head of MI6. And according to the rules and regulations that govern which cases you cannot sit on, she's a complete brink to that. She should have nothing to do with this case. Yes, she's compromised. And also the Office of the Prosecution in the UK compromised themselves. And we know this because of the FRI documents that Stefani Marvitsi obtained. Well, they do indeed. You're referring to the Swedish case? Yes. Well, it's a lot of curious matter, isn't it, when the Swedes are pretty much losing interest in the case, mainly because of the internal criticism that the prosecuting authority in the Swedes is coming under. And according to the FRI documents discovered after great work by Stefani Marvitsi, who was an Italian journalist, that in those documents, she discovered one piece that hadn't been blacked out. And it was simply said it was a message from the British, from the German posthumous service to the Swedes, saying, don't get cold feet. Don't you dare get cold feet, I believe. Thank you correctly. Don't you dare get cold feet. What is happening here is that the British are only too keen to get assigned into Swedish custody. Well, that there was pressure from the UK on the Swedes. Yes. Just moving on, because we've got a lot of material to get through, there's new indictment now, but no new charges. No. And it wasn't served to the court, it wasn't served to the defence, it was served by the media. What do you make of this? Well, it seems to me that the problem here is that the Americans realise that they're charged in which they accuse Assange of helping Chelsea Manning get access to a computer system that she had access to, legally anyway, was so thin and so vulnerable because there was no offence really committed there. There's no offence of encouraging Chelsea Manning to break in and do something she wasn't entitled to. It was to help her hide her identity. So that was the most important thing. I think that these charges now are stepping back from that and saying, well, if we don't get that one off the ground, then what we'll do is we'll say he stood in the hall and he asked questions of people and said, if you find information out about the Americans, what they're up to, they're over us on the British or the Australians or anybody else on the Russians, please get the information and give it to us on WikiLeaks. So that was what he was actually doing it. So they're accusing him now of conspiring and encouraging people to hack computers. It shows to me that this first charge that he was actually held on when they dragged him out of the embassy after, by the way, after he had exposed the spine, it was the 24 hours they dragged him out. So it's like to me that that's what that's about. It's a catch on. It's catching up with the failed first charge. It's so weak. And I think that that's a sign of just the weeks of the case. The problem is that just how low, just a little evidence is required to get him to the United States. You don't have to prove the case to get him there. You just have to show it was a case to answer. And that is a problem because if Julian Assange ends up in the United States, I think he will be in great trouble. And 175 years isn't what we're talking about. We've got people there that wanted to, if by the means of election, he called Assange a high-tech terrorist. I mean, the hatred for him will be palpable. And the country, as you can see, is so divided that I don't think it would be possible to get a fair trial. That's more than it was in Virginia. Andrew, you and I and others can see that there's been a relentless unfolding of an injustice here. Yet our prime minister says Julian, you should face the music. And I would ask you, why do you think the Australian government is taking this decision? What should they be doing? Well, he's not alone, by the way, in saying that Julian Assange faced the music. You go back to 2010, Julian Gillard said that he broke the law. To the extent that they called the federal police, the federal police investigated and found that he's not broken the law. Now, the Attorney General at the time said, I'll take away his passport. And Kevin Rudd, Kevin Rudd said, well, you don't have a right to take away his passport. And by the way, if Assange needs some material of help from his prison cell, I'll send him a computer. And that's because, you know, this is Rudd actually supporting an open government or open government. And he actually lost quite a bit. The WikiLeaks reported a lot of stuff about what Kevin Rudd said about the Chinese, which was extremely embarrassing and unpopular. But having said that, he still stood by Assange. If you then roll on to later on, Bob Carr, who's now become someone who says, yeah, that's enough for Assange to be brought home, he would say that he thought that Assange had perceived more than enough consular assistance, more than enough consular assistance, more than usual. And then he said, no, I didn't actually say that. That was because I was getting sick and tired of Christine Assange. And I wanted to just basically, you know, pay her out a bit. I mean, what is this about as the foreign minister saying this about somebody just to settle an old score? Then we roll forward to the current incumbents. And we've got Scott Morrison saying he just faced the music. And they, the question is almost redundant. Most people know the answer. The reason it's like that is because Australia is so close to the United States that it's terrified, terrified of offending the great master. It is horrified. And so it will do anything not to offend them. And Assange is like, he's out there. There's no worry about it. It doesn't help the public to forget about him. If the public forgets about doing Assange, I think they'll live to regret forgetting about him, because I don't think that he will survive if he ends up in the United States. And that will be on the hands of the people, not just the public, but the politicians need to have to understand that the public does support Assange. So what Murray's kind of harm is to say that he's receiving consular assistance. He gets the sort of assistance that the one else gets in this situation. Yeah, consular assistance is really just, as you said before, it's like issuing your passport. It's helping you find your lost train ticket, get the stolen bags or whatever it is. This is not a cultural assistance matter. This is a political matter. The government needs to talk to the British, particularly rich, particularly Boris Johnson, who says the extradition relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom is very one-sided without going into details. They've got their own problem with other extraditions that they want to bring people back to America. They can't do it. So that's what you need to do. It's a political decision where this government says it's a political prosecution, and therefore we believe you should not send him to the United States. On the basis that it's a political extradition and under the terms of the treaty, I understand that you can actually make their argument to say as a political crime, you shouldn't be extradited. And we have Australia has intervened in the past. They've come to James Richardson, he digressed it, Michelle Corby, who talked about it in the book, saying if we think he was a drunk brother, we would have sent over a couple of QCs to help. Well, that's exactly what happened with Michelle Corby and John Allen did do that because they want her appeal. But the difference is that on one side, you've got Asia and our neighbors. And this is where we really punch down. This is where we flex our mighty muscle in Asia. We feel would involve them to stand up and speak truth to power. We can deal with that. Can we deal with the United States of America? Absolutely not. Absolutely. We just go to water. I mean, it is extraordinary to see a country so cranked up to another power. And I mean, I was I migrated to Australia many years ago, and I was told the great strength of Australian character, spirit, all those things. The United States, forget it. Forget it. We just give in whatever they want. Andrew, I think we've both been disappointed by the failure of journalists to see that Julian Assange has been in the mine. A failure to comprehend the implications and consequences of his persecution and his prosecution. We're seeing the disturbing rise of authoritarianism in Western liberal democracies, where governments are enforcing this new social contract, which they've snuck up on us. How is it affecting the role of journalists and more broadly our freedoms? Well, that's a very good question and quite a long way to answer. I'll just make a point that Daniel Ellsberg made about 2010, and he was talking to Julian about these issues of Assange believed that if you could expose the rottenness inside organizations, that they would collapse under the weight of their own criminality. There's a great believer in that. And what Daniel Ellsberg said is, on the contrary, what will happen is they will get tighter and tighter, worse and worse, harder and harder and more authoritarian. It'll be just the reverse. You need to fight against that and be weary of it. But what we've seen is just that, ever since the exposition of 2010, it's become more and more draconian, more and more authoritarian and harder and harder and harder for journalists to do their jobs. The government in this country has introduced, I mean, there was no protection for journalists. There's a protection implied in some of the charges that may have to pass through the Attorney General, and he may or may not decide to prosecute. There are certain sort of small things that you might be able to argue in court, but it's up to the court to decide whether or not you're protected. It's absolutely hopeless. There is no real defence. And when you see what happened to the ABC, where the Federal Police just went in the front door and started rifling through the files of the ABC, this is the ABC, this is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I mean, this is the Australian Institution and the Federal Police are going in and just looking through reporters' notes. I mean, this is extraordinary. This is absolutely extraordinary. And the ABC to their credit, I mean, they push back and they fall back. But this has been slowly eroding, slowly eroding. The journalists have been too willing to give up, too willing to give in. The ABC, for example, got their hands on simple filing cabinets for Asio documents. And Asio said, we want them back. What did the ABC do? They gave them back. I can barely believe I'm saying this to you. No journalist will hand back classified or confidential documents until they've been through them. And until they've worked out whether or not the public has a right to know information contained in their documents. So the slippery slope, the slide is coming all the time, ends up with the fence going in the front door and rifling through your files. So the resistance is not too late to resist. To resist this, but it's increasingly difficult. Andrew, I think we're going to take some questions from people who are watching now. Okay, lots of questions. Andrew, does the Democrat presidential win offer any chance of dealing with this prosecution being stopped? No, not at all. It's fine with the same thing. There is no difference. The only difference would have been Sanders, but he was marginalized and pushed out the door by the establishment of the derogatory party. I think, although, I'll tell you, I hope that Joe Biden wins. But as for Assange, I think there's no chance of any change. He's the guy called Assange or I take terrorists out there banging the drum. We can see more wars coming. I mean, I think one thing about, I'll be brief, about Trump is that he actually reigned in John Bolton. Pretty good going, I think. I mean, he took the bomb as a last resort, but he did at least stop him from thinking of the same acts he would carry out. I mean, it would be involved in all wars if Hillary Clinton was present and convinced of that. There's a question about discussing further the global precedent being set by prosecution. Prosecution, I think they mean Assange for press freedom, especially in the light of the threat to prosecute ABC journalist Dan Oakes for exposing war crimes in Afghanistan. Well, the prosecution set by the precedent set by prosecuting Julian Assange, if the US can prosecute someone for committing a so-called crime, not in the United States and can have them extradited, not a United States citizen, no crime committed by the US or have them extradited, prosecute them and put them in jail until they die, to death sentence, really. What's the significance of that precedent? I mean, couldn't they extradite the Guardian editor next year? It's a warning to every journalist. In fact, it absolutely is that if you report something that the United States of America, the science is not in their national interest, it's actually and maybe used information that they consider to be classified secret, they can extradite you, they will attempt to extradite you. And that has a chilling effect on journalists, so actually have that fear hanging over them. And that's the reason why Assange case is so important for journalists. If you don't get it, if you don't get it before, you must get it now. You're next, but of course, Russ Bridger is not being prosecuted. The raids in Australia happened straight after Julian was dragged out of the embassy. And David McFly tweeted the other day that he was aware that Australia consulted the United States before taking action against him and Dan Oates. That wouldn't surprise me because that's exactly the intervention of the intelligence means that if you're pulling the threads of the intelligence apart, you'll find that the threads of American intelligence involved in that story are certainly and consequently that is a risk. I mean, there's a risk, but also we would tell them, tell the Americans because Australia uses so much American intelligence, so much of the hardware that's used to suck up information is American American control. So they basically have a copyright over this stuff a lot of it. I'm not sure the breakdown, but the majority of it, and the hardware particularly, is American. So you can see which way the wind is blowing if you're a journalist. I would encourage people not to take being noticed of this whatsoever, but to go and do their jobs. But we know that people higher up the command chain will be thinking seriously about bringing on another way to the ABC because there's a fear and it's designed to instill fear in everybody, censorship, to censor us, to stop us from knowing. I mean, for goodness sake, can you imagine what's going on right now that we don't know about when we knew about what was happening in 2000 and then in 2007, maybe three years ago. I mean, they don't want that that's the United States particularly, particularly the current administration, do not want to have their dirty or their washing in public. And there's another question here about the Labour Party. What's Abernazis Labour Party doing now? Do you think anything's going to change if Labour are in power after the next solution? Probably not. I wouldn't think so. Maybe Abernazis sticks very closely to the script on deterrence and security, even when it's completely vacuous, office, and so is my purpose. They just stick with it because you can't criticize the United States. It's impossible and it's such a bad way of thinking of not engaging. You just say nothing, you just fall along slavishly. So, you know, if we end up with American society, they're going to launch some kind of a cyber attack on Taiwan or on China, but we'll be part of it, because there's something meshed in it. There's something meshed in American foreign policy. Someone else said that they're interested in further discussion on the Australian government's response. We talk about the difference between the way the Australian government reacted to the detention of journalist Peter Grester in Egypt and the reaction to the Assange situation. Of course, they have an excuse, a facile excuse with Grester because it's Egypt and they can write Egypt off as, you know, a country where you have to protect your citizen against human rights abuses. On the other hand, it's the same thing again. It's the same thing. It's a country that's not that powerful, and so consequently, we can lean on it, and the Americans will probably help lead as well. But if Peter Grester had been picked up in the United States for doing good journalism, he would still be in the United States. He wouldn't be free. And I think Peter Grester needs to understand that the journalists stood up for him and they put themselves out to support bringing him back to Australia. And what Peter Grester did was to write a column saying that during Assange was not a journalist. Now, the importance of that is that without Assange being a journalist, the Americans were prosecuting successfully under the Espionage Act. The thing that stands between Assange and prison in America is his journalism. He has first amendment protection. It's not guaranteed, but it's as good as you're going to get. Without it being a journalist, there is not much protection left. And I think that journalists need to think very clearly before they say that Assange is not a journalist because it's a death sentence, potentially. That's a very, very good point, Andrew. And also, it's about the changing role of journalism and who is a journalist particularly today? Sure, who is a journalist. I mean, many years ago, it was, if you weren't half your money as a journalist or as a writer, you could be a journalist. But now people are journalists who publish material. So there are many more journalists in the world before. Are they publishing material for public interest? Yes, they're journalists. If they gather information to give it to a foreign power, then you can prosecute them under the Espionage Act. But Assange has never done that. Assange has always published. He's published material. He's authenticated. He's quickly withdrawn to a lot of trouble to authenticate material but never published anything that's not genuine. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. Authenticate everything and publish what you know to be true, which is pure journalism. Which goes back to the Hillary, the Richard Hillary emails and that's to do with, were they authentic? Yes. Are they in the public interest? Yes. Publish them. That's what we do. Yes. And the most important role of journalism to hold power to account. Because if we're not doing that, then... But not holding power to account. We've met and we're earning a lot more money working from a large organization that wishes to silence journalism. And there are many of them. You may work from a government, for example, who will pay you a lot more money to misrepresent the truth. And to journalists who haven't got enough time to check it very often now, that you would by being a journalist, struggling to hold, as you said in that cliche, but I think very accurate description of journalism, holding truth to power. Because unless you're doing that, what's the point? Why bother? Why bother being a journalist unless you're doing something like that? Another question. The soundest lawyer, Dupont Gretti, has become the French foreign minister or justice minister? Justice minister. Yes. And we know that Francis A. Sange was seen as Simon in the two events connected. Well, I think that probably during the Sange, we wish they were. But I think that he got the job because he was a rather outlier. I mean, he's offended. See, the chap, offended by the left and right in France against the Me Too movement, but wants to see Marine Le Pen's party criminalised. So he's got, you know, so Macron speaks to him. But the upside for WikiLeaks is that he actually campaigned to get a son brought to France. And I think that, you know, if there's an upside to it, then that's it. And you'd be happy to have at least a friend in court, rather than an enemy in an adjacent country. I just want to ask you another question about something you said earlier. And that is how we, where we go from here as a society, because if pressure is going to be on journalists and media organisations to self-censor, and then what you're saying is that someone outside an independent, like Julian Assange, by doing what he's doing, he is making the governments go hard to control the narrative. Or how is this resolved? How is this going to be resolved? What's the way forward so that we can have a fairer society? I mean, that there will always be these tensions. They'll always be these tensions. We're just moving to an extreme But I think that the question about security and national intelligence is it's clear to say that there are some things that are not many. And Paul Barrett, who was previously to say defence here, he said there were a handful of secrets. Most of the stuff that's out there, most of the stuff that WikiLeaks produced was to secret level, which is, by the way, not a very high level. But governments wish to control every single piece of information. And the problem that we came to media because of the way that the internet and Google and Facebook have destroyed the model and advertising has been sucked away, they can't hold governments and federal organisations account the way that they should. How do we actually get ahead of that? You have to have a system to support public broadcasting, which is why the cuts on the ABC point the finger directly at the way the government wants to run. They want to run down. They're delighted that newspapers are shocking. They're delighted they can then put their press releases out and have them meddle in there. There's no one standing in the way. They'd like to run the ABC down and run it out of town and run it out of business. And then they'd have complete control. I mean, there'd be some in the liberal party, the national party, that would say, no, that's not true. That's absolutely not true. But the ideology is to destroy all questioning opposition. And just by the way, the point of the finger of China and Hong Kong is a little bit rich, considering what's been happening with Assange and the failure to stand up for somebody who does hold truth to account. The answer to your question is, I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that by having robust, healthy, open discussions like this and talking about these issues can actually make people think about what kind of country they want to be in and to wrestle with those problems. I think you're absolutely right. And I think we also need leaders who are big enough to say, you know what, I think that was a mistake. I think we can do things differently. And with the courage to stand up to our allies, because we don't have that. No, we don't have that. We don't have that, but we're about to see America, maybe not disintegrated in my lifetime, but it seems to be putting more in at the moment. And how are we going to manage this step away from engaging with China? Australia just needs to be more independent than this huge white, the passing jab of people who want to be more independent. If you want to be independent, you're going to have to pay for the two and a half trillion GDP. I don't know. That's part of the debate. Do we want more independence so that we're not involved in foreign wars? If foreign wars were the British, if foreign wars were the Americans, or if foreign wars were the Chinese? I mean, that's the sort of position you've got to get to to engage the public and talk to the public. I think honestly, that's where we stand. And understanding why we enter foreign wars is so important. And many of Wikileaks releases enable us to do exactly that, as as summarised, so will in this book, What Understand What, which really gives us insight into Americans' foreign policy and how Australian foreign policy is linked to that. We need, as the public, to understand all of that. Thank you very much, Andrew. It's been a great discussion. I'm sure people listening wish that, you know, there were other questions that could have been answered. But I think we have to stop it. Stop it there. Good luck with the book. I hope that, you know, the launching of your update forth is going to focus on this very, very important issue, but not just personally for Julian, but also for us as a society. Thanks very much, Andrew. Thank you.