Australian of the Year: Julian Assange

"The enormous gap between what U.S. leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."

Michael Parenti, Ph.D, award winning American political scientist

Dr. Steve Harris, the Executive Director of the Centre for Leadership and Public Interest at Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology, last Friday revealed his views on leadership. Harris it seems considers leadership - by a person or by an organisation - to be the vital element a candidate must exhibit when vying for selection of say Time’s Person of the Year or The Australian newspaper’s, Australian of the Year.

Harris’ long-winded report card is split into two: those worthy of nomination for a good-leadership accolade, and those who huddle under the "needs to try harder" umbrella. The copious list is a result of his survey across several spheres of society including media, academe, business, community and politics. For the purpose of this exercise, let’s focus solely on those who have shown “good leadership” and ignore those who Harris’ flagellates for not reaching their potential (for good).

Harris begins with an honest assessment of the names he has received: “All lists are full of good intent, but we can see in them the fingerprints of all the human frailties of subjectivity, politics, commercialism, populism, celebrity-worship, ignorance and bias”, yet Harris ignores that he too falls into that very same well of naked subjectivity. When considering where to place candidates, either in the “good leadership” column or on the “try harder” side of the ledger, Harris slots United States President Barack Obama and China’s President Hu Jintao in the former, even though he acknowledges these leaders have a foot in each camp: “In the Christmas spirit [I]… discriminated in favour of hope and [accentuated] the positive." In other words, he wilfully ignores some facts when they conflict with his story. That’s called poor journalism.

The upside of Harris’ contribution is that his net of candidates is so vast that it surely catches within it the most plausible contenders for The Australian’s Australian of the Year. But there is a downside.

The very large number of candidates he nominates reminds me of many high schools deciding at the start of a year to award say 20 prizes. Not to those who by dint of intellectual effort have displayed genuine academic excellence, but rather to the top 20 students, whose performance is relatively superior. In schools, just as in the professional spheres, sometimes recipients are not worthy of prizes as their performances are, when viewed objectively, very, very pedestrian at best, and often vainly promoting self interest at worst.

Let me illustrate the naïveté of Harris’ roll call is, by focusing on three of his nominations.

Geoff Huegill, the Olympic swimmer, is nominated “for showing nice guys can win and demonstrating the rewards that can come from discipline”. True, Huegill is nice, I have read that often. I’m sure he’s fair dinkum to boot. But just how exactly does one swimmer’s personal triumph against obesity and speed in the pool benefit, advance or fundamentally inspire the other 21 million of us? Please tell.

Another nominee is Waleed Aly, a Melbourne lawyer, who is saluted “for overcoming prejudice to become a leader of the Australian Muslim community, and a respected and influential commentator on a range of social and political issues”. That’s Harris’ spin on Aly. I prefer to see the Monash University lecturer for the exceptionally savvy and cunning apologist for Islam that he has shown himself to be.

An organisational nominee of Harris is SBS TV, the public broadcaster nobody watches, which he claims for “30 years [has offered an] underrated and undernourished contribution to the socioeconomic wellbeing of Australia.” He could have added “under-viewed” and “over-funded” to his description.

That said, Steve Harris does include at least one objectively worthy candidate, WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange, but sadly Harris’ remarks are too late to sway the best known of Australia Day honours, the National Australia Day Council’s Australian of the Year. Assuming the selection committee refuses to consider late entries, given nominations have officially closed, then Assange has no chance of earning that award, to be invested on Australia Day Eve 2011 in the national capital.

Deadline or no deadline, you can make yourself heard by emailing the Council with your views of Julian Assange. (Ensure that you stipulate your comments relate to the award being handed down in January 2011, lest your email be interpreted as an early-bird reference to the January 2012 ceremony).

That said, all hope is not lost.

There is one other prestigious accolade where Mr Assange’s inspirations to all of us can be recognised: The Australian’s Australian of the Year, revealed on the front page of this coming 26 January’s edition of the paper.

The winner in January 2010 was former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, whom the paper feted: “With the exception of wartime prime minister John Curtin, few Australian leaders have faced a more daunting crisis in their first term of office than that which confronted Kevin Rudd”.

The paper draped the former Prime Minister in more glory than was perhaps deserved, and celebrated his economic triumphs as though they were all his, and not the residual of the economic legacy bequeathed by the former Howard/Costello government.

So why did The Australian choose Rudd?

Perhaps the media group considered which Australian above all else achieved the most and at least at the time, constituted the best role model. Such people are chosen for their inspirational qualities, which through their achievements, challenge us to make our own contribution to creating a better Australia. While the paper’s criteria for selection were sound, its choice of Rudd, objectively speaking was poor. Kevin Rudd did nothing he wasn’t called upon to do. Managing the economy is, after all, in the Prime Minister’s job description.

The criteria used to identify a stand out Australian would seem to target someone:

• With a demonstrated excellence in his/her chosen field;
• Who in a major way, contributed to the Australian nation;
• Who is an inspiration for the Australian community;
• Exhibits clear leadership and innovation; and
• Whose future goals and impact from his achievements to date.

Assuming no change to the criteria, who should be The Australian’s winner on 26 January 2011?

Apart from Julian Assanage, I find it impossible to come up with a single Australian who better addresses all five criteria listed above to the extent that Assange does. A sneak peek at say the National Australia Day Council’s shortlist doesn’t exude confidence in that body’s decision-making skills whatsoever. The resumes of say the three finalists from the most populous states in the federation (NSW, Victoria and Queensland), identify quality candidates such as Professor Larissa Behrendt (an indigenous rights lawyer), Simon McKeon (an philanthropist and investment banker) as well as Professor Noel Hayman (an indigenous doctor).

All nice folk I’m sure, but I’ll wager that none have changed the world for the better for millions quite as remarkably as WikiLeaks has by exposing, humiliating, debunking and unmasking lies and misrepresentations of politicians including, but not limited to, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Senator Mark Arbib, Chinese leadership’s views of Australia’s Defence Forces, United States Department of State’s deep hostility to Russia, calling it a “mafia state” and pan-Arabian fear of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

In the process Assange has empowered all of us.

So who exactly is Mr Assange and why are his contributions of more merit than those of other Australians?

Assange is a journalist who reports but doesn’t comment. His politics are unclear, he doesn’t seem “left” or “right” but closer to what Americans term “libertarian” than to anything else.

While it is expected that he will broaden WikiLeaks focus to unmasking deceit and double-dealing of nations beyond the United States, to date he has not done so, but the early signs are comforting. Neither has he so far set the dogs of transparency on the corporate world. In particular, on who did what to whom and when in respect of the breathtaking $800 billion stimulus package so many on Capitol Hill took great pride in selling. But the good oil is that all will be revealed soon.

When United States taxpayers learn the intimate details of the sweetheart deals involved, perhaps once more American working families will look with contempt at Washington and its sycophants on Wall Street. We can only hope.

A reading of Julian Assange’s “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” reveals that his goal for years has been to employ technology in his quest to “radically shift regime behavior [for which] we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed.”

Assange likens nations and corporations to massive conspiracies, which need to be brought down in their entirety. Not by exposing their lies, but through degrading their ability to communicate and to connive, by impeding the organisation’s ability to think as a conspiratorial mind. He seeks to oppose the power of the state by treating it like a laptop, removing its plastic cover, pouring treacle all over its hard drive, while jamming one screwdriver into each of its USB ports. He is not interested in merely surreptitiously copying a file or two, as it were, when nobody’s watching.

He views conspiracy and authoritarianism as two sides of the same coin by arguing that the only way authoritarianism can continue to exist and function without oversight is by preventing its intentions from being widely known. By virtue of its concealment it inevitably becomes a conspiracy.

The problem this creates for governments becomes an organisational dilemma it must solve. If the conspiracy must operate in the shadows, how does it communicate, plan, makes decisions, discipline itself, and meet new challenges? The answer is, by directing information flows. But once those flows are disrupted or corrupted and the organization’s goals have been publicised, then the electorate is stirred to radical action and the power of the conspiracy is diluted, but alas rarely extinguished.

Members of a conspiracy collect data about the world in which they operate, process it amongst themselves and then act on the result. Their “actions” are aimed at altering or maintaining a preferred (political) environment.

Assange’s end game is to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s dynamic environment. The point is not to evaluate if a particular leak is effective in say modifying a government policy or directive. Instead, the goal is to disable the conspiracy’s data collection and processing systems, which will at first slow then impede the cabal’s functioning, to the point of destroying its abilities to be effective. Once it is no longer effective, it will shut itself down and the cabal will be no longer.

And that’s his point.

He isn’t after a change in one policy, such as Western governments conspiring to keep autocrats reigning over hundreds of millions of Muslims from North Africa to the Arabian Gulf. Not at all. On the contrary, his goal is to remind us of the conspiratorial functions of every government. All governments lie to their electorates, some peddle bigger lies than others. Some lie with greater regularity.

What are our instincts about government? Will we be smitten with the Stockholm Syndrome and see governments as opaque as they are becoming more and more transparent? Or will we celebrate that someone, somehow displayed the courage and applied the technology to unmask those in the West who deceive their electorates both in times of peace and in times of war, for what is most likely their personal gain.

It is hoped that Assange will soon extend his innovation of an electronic drop box to courageous men and women in other nations, both Western and Eastern as well as to non-state actors, such as the Taliban, the Palestinian Authority, al-Qaeda, Lakshar-e-Taiba and Abu Bakr Bashir’s Jemaah Islamiyah. By doing so, Assange will remove the “anti-American” pejorative prefix that is currently perhaps unfairly ascribed to him.

While to date he hasn’t completely changed journalism, he has made a magnificent start. His goal has been noble and his efforts victorious.

Australians now know truths about their world that their elected leaders would prefer were kept hidden. For instance, we now know that former Prime Minister Rudd told us one thing about China and told United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton quite another. So was he lying to us, or was he lying to her?

The wicked forces assembled against Mr Assange, both at home and abroad, may slow him down but they cannot stop him. Moreover, they must not stop him.

The perpetuation of deceit by democratically elected representatives is a danger to the health of democracies worldwide. It is a depressing comment on the character of men, that so many repulsive characters in a range of cities from Canberra to Riyadh to Washington D.C. are willing and eager to put their personal interest ahead of their public commitments. After all, if these characters were not duplicitous, then WikiLeaks would have unearthed no deceit.

This coming 26 January when deciding on the Australian of the Year, the management and staff at Rupert Murdoch’s the Australian have a choice.

For the sake of democracy, let’s hope the Australian makes the right choice.