FYI
--
Wikileaks Party to contest Australia polls
Whistleblowing group's founder Julian Assange will be in contest despite being
holed up in Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Last Modified: 25 Jul 2013 10:43
Assange made the announcement with a videolink from London to Melbourne's
Fitzroy library [EPA]
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Thursday officially launched his political
party to contest Australian elections this year.
Assange said the WikiLeaks Party (WLP) would field seven candidates for upper
house Senate seats in the states of New South Wales, Victoria and Western
Australia.The 42-year-old Australian will run in Victoria, saying he planned to
be an independent scrutineer of government activity.
"WikiLeaks Party's core values of transparency, accountability and justice are
the template against which we will examine any important issues for
Australians: tax reform, asylum-seekers, climate change policy and more," he
said in an opinion piece in an Australian newspaper The Age
"Putting the WLP in the Senate is the same as putting Australia's best
investigative journalists in the Senate, that is what the dishonest Canberra
establishment fears most," he said.
"We will not accept legislation or government policy that is based on
inaccurate, poorly disclosed or inadequate information. In this way our
positions will always reflect fairness, good government policy and practice,
and protecting the interests of all Australians."
Australia is due to go into the polls before the end of November with Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd's Labor up against the Tony Abbott-led conservatives.
Opinion polls suggest Abbott will narrowly win.
Papua New Guinea
A key plank of Rudd's re-election campaign is a hardline response to deter
boatpeople, announcing last week that all unauthorised arrivals would be sent
to Papua New Guinea for assessment. They will be either settled there, sent
back home or shipped to third countries.
Assange said one of his party's first actions would be to demand full details
of the government's arrangement with PNG to be made public.
Spokeswoman for the WikiLeaks party, Samantha Cross said told The Age that
Assange stressed how the party 'would keep the bastards honest' and said that
he wants to be back in Australia to take up his seat.
Assange has been living inside Ecuador's embassy in London since June 2012 as
he fights extradition from Britain to Sweden, where authorities want to
question him over alleged sex crimes.
He believes that if he wins a seat in the Australian election, the US will drop
its grand jury investigation of diplomatic memo leaks and Britain will follow
suit. The UK refuses to grant Assange safe passage out of the country for now
and Australia has been outspoken about his whistleblowing activities.
Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies
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