Rallies around Australia's major cities have come out strongly in support of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. CLA's Raff Piccolo told those attending the Adelaide rally that the government should seize the opportunity to back free speech and transparency.

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Address to Adelaide Friends of WikiLeaks Rally
5 February 2011, Victoria Square, Adelaide
– delivered by Raffaele Piccolo, CLA

The activities of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks should not be condemned! Not only because they are not illegal, as conceded by the federal government and the Australian Federal Police, but also because they are necessary to maintain our democratic society.

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are providing as with a service, for which he should be thanked!

WikiLeaks promotes transparency and open and accountable government. It encourages Governments and public officials to think twice about acting, as they now know that information they have once been sure would never see the light of day, information that they wanted to keep hidden away from the public, may just as equally surface.

As citizens we have a right to be informed of actions being undertaken by the government in our name. I ask, without the information that has come to light, how can governments be held properly to account?

Julian Assange is not only exercising his democratic right, to be informed, but he is also exercising his democratic responsibilities to keep himself informed of what our governments are doing so that they can be held to account.

Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks should not be condemned, but applauded. He should be applauded for not cowering into reactionary comments from public officials that framed his actions as negligent.

WikiLeaks has not undermined national or international security, as was reported it may have.  No, instead it has ensured that governments think twice before invoking the cloud of national security so as allow them to take actions away from the gaze of its population.

Public officials at first came out and condemned the actions of Assange with WikiLeaks, and played on all attempts to tarnish his reputation. They sought to distance any relationship that Assange had with Australia with their failure to provide adequate support to an Australian citizen in need. In doing so they adjudicated him as guilty, without sufficient evidence or a trial.

They have acknowledged that. But now I ask them to go one step further, by not only supporting Julian Assange as an Australian citizen, but embracing what he has created.

He has created an opportunity for cultural change! He has created an opportunity whereby the government can demonstrate that they actually subscribe to the democratic ideals of open, transparent and accountable government that we all want, rather than continue to play lip service to them.

This is an opportunity for the government to implement meaningful change with the way it interacts with its citizens, by making more information available to them…so as to ensure that we can effectively participate in our democracy.  This is an opportunity to eliminate the culture of secrecy that currently exists amongst public institutions.

Representative democracy is built on trust. One way of maintaining – and, better yet, strengthening – trust between a government and its people is by being as open and accountable about what it does as far as possible.

However if the government is to miss this opportunity and not react appropriately, then it can expect the cynicism and disengagement that currently plagues our society with regards to government relations to continue.

If the government misses this opportunity then we are going to have to rely on more people with the same democratic convictions as Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to ensure that government is held accountable. 

If the government misses this opportunity then they will be stuck with having to demonstrate how and why making this information available is not in the public interest.

So again I call on government to embrace Julian Assange and the moment he has created!