How Julian Assange’s Senate Bid Will Change Australian Politics

Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, December 2012 © Luke MacGregor / Reuters

On 23 April, John Shipton, an architect and one-time anti-war activist, lodged a sheaf of 540 signatures at the offices of the Australian Electoral Commission in Canberra, and a new party entered the fray. Now the party has a head office – in hipster-central Brunswick Street, Fitzroy – an hourglass logo and Senate candidates set to run in at least three states. There’s a lot of it about these days. Up north, Bob Katter’s Australian Party threatens to take territory from the Nationals; on the Sunshine Coast, in white-shoe valley, Clive Palmer’s United Party promises to provide rich entertainment right up till 14 September. Like these outfits, the WikiLeaks Party is focused on a charismatic figure – one who, unlike Bob and Clive, won’t be seen out on the hustings.

The WikiLeaks Party has the distinction of being the first Australian party to have a leader not merely in exile, but in asylum. Campaigning by video link, Skype and encrypted email, Julian Assange hopes to win a seat in the Senate from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has now spent nearly a year. He is claiming protection against an extradition order to Sweden, on sex-crime allegations – an extradition he believes would be a prelude to onward delivery to the US on espionage charges, stemming from WikiLeaks’ release of a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables.

Although the party is running a serious Senate ticket, it’s Assange’s spot on the Victorian list that is at the heart of the campaign. Shipton, Assange’s biological father, has helped out with WikiLeaks for years. Assange’s mother, the redoubtable Christine, is also involved. With a reported membership of 1500 and counting, the party has every intention of becoming a movement. Its leaders are spruiking figures collected by research company UMR, suggesting the vote for Assange and the party might be as high as 26%. Cooler heads doubt this, but the party doesn’t need anything like that level of support if it can create a series of interlocking preference deals. At the 2010 federal election, John Madigan, the missing-in-action candidate from the revived Democratic Labor Party (DLP), took the sixth Senate spot in Victoria with 2.3% of the primary vote. There is every possibility that a high-profile candidate such as Assange, who has already gained millions of dollars’ worth of publicity for free, could surpass that to secure a virtual place on the red leather benches. Should he do so, the Australian government will be in a bind.