By guest columnist and longtime Assange supporter, Tess Lawrence

Interpol’s Red Notice warrant issued for Julian Assange was bloated with corruption.

One of its presidents was the notorious Jackie Selebi, former Ambassador to the United Nations for South Africa. He reigned over Interpol for the usual four years, from 2004 to 2008.

Three years later Selebi was convicted of corruption and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Interpol’s corrupt Jackie Selebi died at home. Assange may not. Oz gutless

Typically, he was out within a year, released on medical grounds. In 2015 he died at home, a luxury that might not be afforded to Assange now incarcerated in Belmarsh Prison – if America and its gutless servile client nation, Australia, have their way.

The thing is, the investigation into Selebi’s corrupt activities conducted by the since disbanded (of course) elite Scorpions Unit within the National Prosecuting Agency had already started when Selebi received the Interpol gong. That says it all.

If Interpol didn’t know Selebi was corrupt, it should have, but I happen to know they did know.

Interpol. A case of known knowns

It was not a case of known unknowns. No sirree, it was a known known.

Interpol’s Red Notices are supposed to be inviolate of political motive but in Assange’s case, it was. It continues to be thus.

In the Janusian reality of two American presidents, one of them the incumbent, staggering and swaggering into the crosshairs of criminality, breaching and compromising the nation’s security and intelligence, Uncle Sam’s espionage charges against Assange appear even more ludicrous, farcical and spurious, as well as an oblique attack on innocent Iraqi victims to divert attention from American perpetrators of murder.

Assange ‘crime’ was to expose US war crimes

Especially when Assange/Wikileaks’ only ‘crime’ was to expose US war crimes and atrocities, providing the world with categoric visual evidence and forensic proof, damning audio.

US military goons and WikiLeaks Collateral Murder video

It was as if these US military goons were down in the local downtown mall playing violent animated video games, instead of innocent human beings who they were about to deprive of both heartbeat and life itself, flouting the Geneva Convention on a number of body counts.

We witnessed for ourselves the depravity of the US war machine is all its gory, courtesy of the Apache gunsights. What did you do in the war Daddy? Why kids, I shot at innocent little children like you! But hey, don’t cry, they were only Arabs.

On July 12, 2007 in New Baghdad’s Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, during the so-called Iraqi insurgency, there was murder most foul.

Were it not for WikiLeaks or Assange, and his journalistic courage in publishing the video, we may not have ever known of the horror that visited this little village on that day; a day that still haunts those left behind to mourn and who are still trying to live with the after effects of such state sanctioned brutalism by those who once purported to be their liberators.

And yes, whither goest the United States, we go too. Australia remains a member of the Coalition of the Willing; the coalition of the killing.

Apache crew doped up on white supremacy! And meth?

Thanks to Assange, the world saw the thrill killings of mostly unarmed civilians including Reuters journalists and a good Samaritan bystander (killed whilst going to their rescue) and the severe wounding of two innocent children by a merciless army AH-64 Apache chopper crew clearly doped up on a deadly cocktail of white supremacy, racism, propaganda, testosterone and most likely psychoactive military prescribed drugs like meth and amphetamines, the latter a fave for pilots.

US Soldiers laughing as they kill

To hear the soldiers laugh as they kill is beyond macabre or any fog of war excuse. It was as if these guys were on a gang rape, jerking off together, brothers in arms as well as between the thighs. They behaved like psychopaths on a killing spree.

Collateral Murder

WikiLeaks leaked video of Civilians killed in Baghdad

The video humiliated the States and exposed their war crimes. It is the real reason the US wants to take out Assange, by legal means or other. It can’t handle the truth or any exposing of its hypocrisy and duplicity; especially by the likes of an Australian maverick like Assange.

The silly espionage charges against Assange for publishing the Collateral Murder video, should equally apply to ALL of us who published the video and did so voluntarily and in a considered fashion, in the public interest and for freedom of speech.

We all have our finger on Assange’s keyboard, surely. The world has a right to know. Families of victims have the right to know; just as those who are victims of the heinous Gaza-Israel war, have a right to know.

On April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video at the US National Press Club. Why wasn’t the Club indicted?

Assange is not the criminal here. Don’t shoot the Messenger. The individuals who fired on the civilians and shot them down in cold blood – their military masters – and the government that despatched them to Iraq are the real criminals here.

What of Biden and Trump and classified documents breaches?  

The facile US pursuit of Assange is particularly galling given two American presidents, one of them the incumbent, have themselves been accused of breaching security and intelligence protocols in relation to harbouring secret White House only classified documents.

Truthout’s Marjorie Cohn points out one of the may peculiarities of the Assange case:

This is the first time a publisher has been prosecuted under the Espionage Act for disclosing government secrets. In December 2022, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel signed a joint open letter calling on the U.S. government to dismiss the Espionage Act charges against Assange for publishing classified military and diplomatic secrets. “Publishing is not a crime,” the letter says. “This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”

Next week, on the 20^th February, there will be a two day hearing in the UK High Court to ‘determine whether Julian Assange will have further opportunities to argue his case before the UK courts or if he will have exhausted all appeals in the UK, leading to the extradition process or an application to the European Court of Human Rights.

This week, Julia Hall, Amnesty International’s expert on counter terrorism and justice in Europe wrote that:

… If Julian Assange loses the permission to appeal, he will be at risk of extradition to the US and prosecution under the Espionage Act of 1917, a wartime law never intended to target the legitimate work of publishers and journalists. He could face up to 175 years in jail. On the less serious charge of computer fraud, he could receive a maximum of five years…

… If Julian Assange is extradited, it will establish a dangerous precedent wherein the US government could target for extradition publishers and journalists around the world. Other countries could take the US example and follow suit… 

Australia’s political fellatio with US

No matter how appallingly the United States treats our Australian brother and citizen Julian Assange, special mention must be made of the reprehensible behaviour of successive Australian national governments, particularly Labor governments, specifically the current Labor Government led by the professed Assange empathiser, Prime Minister Anthony ‘Albo’ Albanese.

Political cowardice of Albanese

The political cowardice of the Albanese government and its continuation of the Coalition’s foreign policy of political fellatio with the US is sickening.

Australia’s diffidence to its nationals abroad is notorious. Include in that, Australians incarcerated or taken hostage overseas.

Our moral authority is non-existent. Any international standing we may have once had has long been squandered. There are few remnants. Our leaders lack leadership and political courage. The early promise of the Albanese government is fast waning.

There have been ample opportunities for the Prime Minister to consult with the US President about Assange, let alone successive UK prime ministers.

We have again become slaves to the frayed masters of the punyverse and now we are ungrown but frolic with men in long trousers, the secret Five Eyes Club. You scratch my back, I scratch your scrotum.

All these clubs, all these strategic alliances and yet Australia remains unwilling and unable to help Assange.

Time we saw Interpol Red Notice cables

It is time we saw the cables between Sweden, the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States and Interpol in relation the the Assange Red Notice. Can you believe, Interpol did not post a photo of Assange on Red Notice billboard at the time?

To give you an ‘in the moment’ sense of the Red Notice, AIM Network publishes in full Lawrence’s article headlined Investigation: Interpol and Julian Assange’s Red Notice, as it was published in the US based Truthout: Investigation: Interpol and Julian Assange’s Red Notice:

Why did Julian Assange receive an Interpol Red Notice, but Gaddafi only an Orange? Tess Lawrence investigates the murky world of Interpol exclusively for IA, asking some troubling questions and uncovering some startling facts.

• Why was Julian Assange – who has not yet been charged – given the most severe Red Notice by Interpol, when brutal dictator Muammar Gaddafi only received an Orange Notice?
• Do senior Interpol officials have a vendetta against Wikileaks and Julian Assange?
• Is the organisation and its Notice System fatally compromised?

What’s with the Interpol Colour Chart for the world’s most wanted?

Recidivist mass murderer Muammar Gaddafi – he of the all-girl vestal virgin Clit Squad – cops a mere clockwork Orange Notice whilst our Julian Assange of WikiLeaks – exposer of state-sanctioned killers and war crimes and who is fighting extradition to Sweden for uncharged sexual allegations – is king hit with the big ticket Red Notice. Go figure.

There’s something shonky going on in the shady world of Interpolitics. Let’s move in for a closer shufti.

Have you checked out the profiles of alleged crims who normally make the Red Notice billboard? We’re talking big-time kahuna felons here. Terrorists, mass murderers, people traffickers, drug barons and their ilk. Got the picture?

Try as I did, I just couldn’t find anyone else in the entire of Red Notice history as far down the criminal dude chain as our Julian. And, apparently, never before has Sweden requested a Red Notice based on similar circumstances and allegations. What’s more, Interpol sources say that the Red Notice posting of Julian Assange is the first and only case of its kind. Is that true Interpol?

Interpol is such a funny little secretive and paradoxical clubbette – always going on about how worthy and important it is to data sharing, preserving international security, the ongoing tumultuous fight against terrorism and corruption and the eradication of international crime by enabling all of their 188 members with the power to fight organised crime – including that well known bastion of human rights, justice and democratic egalitarianism, Libya.

Ipso facto Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the Philippines, Morocco, Sudan, Australia, Britain, the United States, Russia, India, Indonesia, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan and all of the rest of us who are guilty of hypocrisy and political expediency and who wallpaper our economies with banknotes sullied with the sweat and blood of the disenfranchised, the bullied, the defeated and the enslaved.

We dance naked before our fully clothed despotic masters and do their bidding on the pretext they do ours. Ahhh… political fellatio – a higher art form when conducted between consenting countries rather than desperate homo sapiens.

Only a matter of weeks ago, the West and its subordinates were extolling the virtues of the important geopolitical positions and posturings of the likes of dictatorial psychopaths Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gadaffi – Libya’s self-proclaimed ‘King of Africa’.

The facts that these two share the same incompetent hair colourist as Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and appear to have been dipped in formaldehyde should have given us a few clues. They’ve had so much cosmetic surgery they probably haven’t any tear ducts left. That’s why they can’t cry, for pity’s sake, and why they didn’t need all those tear gas canisters we authorised and branded with our logo.

What do we care about their peoples; our brothers and sisters; our kith and kin? Other tribes they may be – but of our own species? Well, sort of. Just. But hey, they were really losers weren’t they? Big time. They deserved the Governments they didn’t vote for. Like us.

Julian Assange Interpol Red Notice

Former Interpol President Jackie Selebi Convicted of Corruption

Just like Interpol deserved its former President… who was done for corruption, fraud and racketeering and such things. True dinks, I kid you not. Yes, the President of Interpol!

While we’re at it, I’m puzzled as to how an international agency such as Interpol could be so incompetent that it couldn’t even find a photo of Julian Assange to go with his Red Notice posting (see above). C’mon, fair suck of the fellatio sav, haven’t they heard of Google or in-your-Facebook?

Interpol remains publicly contemptuous of – and unaccountable – to the world it purports to serve.

For a start, they’re supposed to be the top guns, the crème de la crème, of information gathering sleuths, data merging, analyses and people tracking. Well, I’d like to see a group like Transparency International investigate Interpol. You know that Interpol is not supposed to do any political favours?

But I’m not convinced. Call me churlish… perhaps I’ve been inhaling too much tear gas. Or not enough!

Take the way Interpol crisis managed their corrupt President, Jackie Selebi.

In 2002, the then National Commissioner of the South African Police Service, was elected as Interpol’s Vice President – and a couple of years later, in 2004 he was voted President.

I’m assuming that Interpol would practice normal HR due diligence and conduct background checks not only on its thousands of employees worldwide but also on its elected officers.

After all, doing these checks is their forte. Surely no-one would be exempt from these basic policing protocols and security checks?

Of course, on the surface of it, Mr Selebi’s credentials were impeccable, no question. As were his connections…well, most of them. After all, he was a former head of the ANC Youth League, an MP, South Africa’s representative to the United Nations and Chair of an Anti-Landmine Conference, Chair of Justice, Crime Prevention and Security and all of that. Goodness, the man even won a Human Rights Award! (What a co-incidence, Julian Assange has won several of those too…).

On September 10, 2007, South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority issued a warrant for Selebi’s arrest. Did Interpol post a Red Notice on their President? Course not. How come he didn’t resign as President of Interpol until months later, on January 13, 2008?

And why is my feverish mind and feint heart suddenly darting over the Kenyan border and thinking of the tragic murders of human rights activists-lawyer Oscar Kamau Kingara and his assistant John Paul Oulu? Both men were gunned down in their car whilst stuck in a traffic jam near the University of Nairobi on their way to a human rights meeting. These courageous whistleblowers had refused to cower before corrupt police and political thugs—and the report they helped produce in 2008 was to result in that courage being met with even greater cowardice by their killers on March 5, 2009 and indifference by the rest of the world.

Like their brutal executions, the report The Cry of Blood – Report on Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances – and there were thousands of killings attributed to the Kenyan police – was largely ignored by Western and mainstream media. Still is. But Julian Assange and WikiLeaks grasped the significance of the Report and published it and were damned, earning Amnesty International’s New Media Award for 2009.

So, a kangaroo hop and a carjacking skip from Kenya back to South Africa. Both Interpol members. We shan’t bother joining any dots.

On July 2, 2010, after being subjected to a scathing dressing down by the Judge in South Africa’s High Court, Selebi was found guilty of corruption. He was subsequently sentenced to 15 years imprisonment and has since been given leave to appeal.

From the evidence submitted to the Court, it was obvious that Selebi abused his privileged position – like alerting people that they were under police surveillance—not a good look for a President of Interpol – and made preposterous assertions that he was unaware of the criminal activities of his longstanding decidedly criminal civilian associates. This from a man who was his country’s Police Commissioner and the head of Interpol. Our Interpol. The World’s Interpol.

And let us not forget that while holding dual office, Selebi was the dude who first suggested legalising prostitution—but only for the duration of the 2010 World Soccer Cup, mind you.

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Nice one Jackie. Your heart was in the right place – right behind your trouser zip. You can see why he was elected head of Interpol.

Now let’s be fair about this. Just because a President of Interpol turns out to be corrupt does not mean we should condemn the whole organisation. After all, excreta (it’s the lapsed Catholic in me) happens, to misquote Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.

Interpol’s Nazi Past

And nor can you blame today’s Interpolsters for what happened years ago either. There is the Hitler connection of course. Yep. SS Excreta happened there. The organization that was the forerunner of Interpol, the International Criminal Police Commission, had a succession of four Nazi Presidents because of Germany’s annexing of Austria in 1938, though we must remember that for two of the gang of four SS Generals who headed the ICPC the Fates intervened. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a lawyer and war criminal who replaced Richard Heydrich after he was assassinated by Patriots, was actually executed after the Nuremberg Trials for war crimes.

Not sure if this is all on the Interpol website; maybe it is, but then again, if the Assange Red Notice is anything to go by, Interpol is capable of a bit of revisionist history.

The Singaporean Connection

My sources confirm that the Lyon-based organisation is not a happy place to work in these days.

Here are just a few reasons why so, according to informants:

• There continues to be great disquiet within Interpol about the Assange Red Notice.
• The Assange Red Notice was distributed to all 188 Interpol member countries on November 20, 2010 – a mere 10 days after a remarkably short speech was delivered to the 79th Interpol General Assembly in Doha, Qatar by the current President of Interpol and Singapore’s former Commissioner of Police, Khoo Boon Hui. (Interpol’s bio on Khoo yet to be updated). Mr Khoo is also an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia and has a number of other international gongs, including from Thailand, Indonesia, Brunei and Malaysia.
• In December last year, Fairfax Media (and others) published sections of a WikiLeaks US State Department cable relating to former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim under the explosive headline in The Sunday Age: ‘Sodomy charges were a set-up’.

In an exclusive, journalists Philip Dorling and Nick McKenzie wrote:

A leaked US State Department cable reveals that Singaporean intelligence officials told their Australian counterparts that Mr Anwar engaged in the conduct of which he is accused, a claim he has steadfastly denied.

The journalists also wrote that “Australia’s Office of National Assessments (ONA) also states the conduct was the result of apparent entrapment by Mr Anwar’s enemies” and that the “…document says the Singaporeans told ONA they made this assessment on the basis of ‘technical intelligence’, which is likely to relate to intercepted communications”.

According to Dorling and McKenzie, the cable that “deals with Mr Anwar’s sodomy case” is dated November 2008 (a month after Mr Khoo formerly replaced the disgraced Jackie Selebi as President of Interpol) and “released to The Sunday Age by WikiLeaks”.

At the time, Mr Khoo was also Singapore’s Police Commissioner.

Many of the players in this complicated and ongoing saga, including Interpol, would have scores to settle with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Join your own dots.

• But wait, there’s more. At last year’s General Assembly, in what Interpol Secretary General Ron Noble described as an “investment” but what Sheikh Abdullah Bin Nasser bin Khalifa al Thani, Qatar’s Minister of State for Internal Affairs pointedly described as a “donation” on behalf of the Emir and his Heir Apparent (who said there was no succession planning in the Middle East!) it was announced that Singapore would be the happy recipient of US$2 million towards the fund set up to establish the Interpol Global Complex, housed in Singapore. That’s a bit of a coup for Singapore AND Singaporean born Interpol President Hui. (In truth, Qatar seems to have shouldered the financial and practical responsibilities for a number of Interpol-related initiatives.)
• Incidentally, Australia’s Federal Police Chief, Tony Negus also attended the General Assembly and gave a short speech, quite rightly complaining that he was given only 10 minutes of airtime.

Interpol and Assange’s Red Notice

• It should be noted that in the mere 11 paragraphs of Mr Hui’s closing speech, a precious singular paragraph was devoted to extolling the virtue of the Red Notices. Interpol insiders say President Hui’s reference was a primer for the Assange Red Notice bombshell and that in preparation Sweden withheld permission for the Assange Red Notice to be immediately posted online and ordered it to be held over.
• Inexplicably it was not posted on Interpol’s website until December 1, 2010. Sort of defeats the whole purpose of the urgency of a Red Notice, dunnit? Unless it wasn’t really urgent…
• I was told:
• … there were several reasons for this. Firstly, there was an internal dispute about the posting of the Red Notice for Assange. Secondly, Sweden kept revising their requests; and, thirdly, our bosses wanted to do a bit of showing off. Julian Assange was a star chamber pin-up for us and the Red Notice program and the Pres wanted to highlight that at the Assembly.
• The paperwork for the Assange Red Notice failed to comply with Interpol’s own regulations.
• Sweden revised its requests on several more occasions.
• The documents were incorrectly filed.
• The Assange Red Notice was designed to compromise and damage the personal reputation of Julian Assange and cause him to be held in disrepute.
• That there was a serious internal dispute between Interpol staff and Interpol Executives over the posting of the Assange Red Notice.
• That the Assange Red Notice may, in fact, be defamatory because it breaches Interpol’s guidelines.
• Further, that the tenuous and spurious requests made by Sweden to Interpol could be used as supportive evidence that Sweden and Interpol (and others) deliberately colluded to inhibit Assange’s chances of a fair trial and diminish his international public standing.
• That Interpol has email correspondence, text and communication notes/recordings that confirm such discussion and collusion between Sweden, Australia, the United States and Interpol Executives and these materials attest to political interference by these countries and their representatives, in contravention and violation of Interpol’s own regulations.
• That the current Secretary-General of Interpol, Ronald K. Noble is “too close” to US intelligence and remains partisan to preserving and protecting the legacy of the George W. Bush administration and that, despite his formidable qualifications, he has been in the position too long – he is now in his 11th year as Secretary General and his third term. Some of the other 188 member nations understandably want a stint in the high chair.
• Interpol’s own rules and regulations allow for Julian Assange and his representatives to access and have copies of his Interpol files. These rules are available in a document entitled Operating Rules of the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files.
• Informants within Interpol are fearful of being exposed but say they will be prepared to speak with an investigatory body such as Transparency International. They do not trust any of Interpol’s internal mechanisms or dispute resolution procedures.

Interpol’s Notice System is Compromised

Moreover, they are concerned that the Travel Document program – designed to fast track travel for Interpol operatives and preclude the need for Visas – can be easily abused by rogue member states and despotic regimes and their familial groupings and coterie, especially when trying to flee their countries and safeguard loot.

They cite the irony of the Orange Notice postings of Muammar Gadaffi and members of his family and close associates.

Said one operative on condition of anonymity:

Typically, these close family members and associates are nearly always in charge of security and intelligence. They are the last people in the world who should have unbridled access to international travel. But that places us in a diplomatic cleft. We need to revisit the eligibility criteria of the Travel Documents – and we need to subject card holders to more stringent security and character checks.

The Australian Government’s Shabby Treatment of Julian Assange

Despite Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s assertions that she will not be discussing the Julian Assange matter with US President Barack Obama, the word is that the Prime Minister will instead be discussing the matter with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

It may be a long plane journey from the Opal Office in Australia to Washington’s Oval Office, but hopefully it gave our PM time to contemplate her unimpressive political performance thus far.

Gillard has to undertake some serious reparation work to restore her credibility both at home – and equally with supporters of The First Amendment and America’s many supporters of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Not everyone is baying for Assange’s blood. And let us not forget poor Bradley Manning.

Gillard’s preposterous and legally prejudicial inept remarks last year, condemning Assange’s activities as “illegal” will forever staple her to the marginalia of Australia’s political history. It immediately signalled to all Australia’s sons and daughters that at the first sign of any ‘trouble’ we are to be immediately abandoned by our Prime Minister and also by her obsequious and flaccid Attorney General, Robert McClelland.

Still, we should be getting used to it by now from our Governments. Think Hicks. Think Habib.

Think Van Nguyen. Think pensioners. Think indigenous. Think disabled. Think refugees and asylum seekers. Think little kids who watch their family members drown. Think elderly. Think homeless. Think unemployed. Think mentally distressed. Think defence personnel. Think parliamentary super packages. You’d think that the results of the last Federal election would have taught them that we, the people, have had the proverbial gutful. But they’ve already reverted to type.

It is time we learned from the children of the revolution.

Healthy Futures Media Release

A group of health professionals from Healthy Futures and NSW Doctors for Environment (DEA) today announced plans to issue an open letter to the NSW Minister for Health and the NSW Energy, Climate Change and Environment Minister calling for a phase-out of gas in homes and public buildings.

Healthy Futures is a health advocacy organisation that works to protect public health from the impacts of pollution and climate change. NSW Doctors for Environment is a group of doctors who are working to promote environmental sustainability and protect public health.

The open letter, which has already been signed by key health organisations, nationally and state-based, and by dozens of leading NSW health professionals, warns that gas poses a serious risk to human health. 

Gas burning releases pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, benzene, and radon, which can cause respiratory problems, cancer, and other health problems. Gas also contributes to climate change, which is the greatest threat to public health.

“We are calling on the NSW Government to phase out gas as soon as possible,” said Bronwyn McDonald, NSW Campaigner at Healthy Futures. “Gas is a dirty and dangerous fuel that is harming our health and our climate. We must switch to clean, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power.”

The letter will call on the NSW Government to take the following actions:

• Phase out gas in all new homes and buildings by 2025.
• Provide financial assistance to households on low incomes to switch to clean energy.

Retrofit public buildings, including hospitals and schools, to be gas-free.

“We need to act now to protect our health and our environment,” said Ms McDonald. “The time to phase out gas is now.”

NSW based nurse, Sarah Ellyard explained, “I signed onto the letter because gas is a health hazard in our homes, increasing the risk of asthma and exposure to toxic benzene and carbon monoxide.”

“Furthermore, the extraction and burning of gas poses unacceptable risks to communities and is driving the climate crisis, which is a health emergency” Ms Ellyard said. 

The open letter will soon be delivered to the NSW Minister for Health and Environment. In the meantime, Healthy Futures and NSW Doctors for Environment call on health professionals and the public to sign the letter supporting a gas-free future.

To sign the letter, please visit Healthy Futures. 

At every stage of its proceedings against Julian Assange, the US Imperium has shown little by way of tempering its vengeful impulses. The WikiLeaks publisher, in uncovering the sordid, operational details of a global military power, would always have to pay. Given the 18 charges he faces, 17 fashioned from that most repressive of instruments, the US Espionage Act of 1917, any sentence is bound to be hefty. Were he to be extradited from the United Kingdom to the US, Assange will disappear into a carceral, life-ending dystopia.

In this saga of relentless mugging and persecution, the country that has featured regularly in commentary, yet done the least, is Australia. Assange may well be an Australian national, but this has generally counted for naught. Successive governments have tended to cower before the bullying disposition of Washington’s power. With the signing of the AUKUS pact and the inexorable surrender of Canberra’s military and diplomatic functions to Washington, any exertion of independent counsel and fair advice will be treated with sneering qualification.

The Albanese government has claimed, at various stages, to be pursuing the matter with its US counterparts with firm insistence. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has even publicly expressed his frustration at the lack of progress in finding a “diplomatic solution” to Assange’s plight. But such frustrations have been tempered by an acceptance that legal processes must first run their course. 

The substance of any such diplomatic solution remains vague. But on August 14, the Sydney Morning Herald, citing US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy as its chief source, reported that a “resolution” to Assange’s plight might be in the offing. “There is a way to resolve it,” the ambassador told the paper. This could involve a reduction of any charges in favour of a guilty plea, with the details sketched out by the US Department of Justice. In making her remarks, Kennedy clarified that this was more a matter for the DOJ than the State Department or any other department. “So it’s not really a diplomatic issue, but I think there absolutely could be a resolution.” 

In May, Kennedy met members of the Parliamentary Friends of Julian Assange Group to hear their concerns. The previous month, 48 Australian MPs and Senators, including 13 from the governing Labor Party, wrote an open letter to the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, warning that the prosecution “would set a dangerous precedent for all global citizens, journalists, publishers, media organizations and the freedom of the press. It would also be needlessly damaging for the US as a world leader on freedom of expression and the rule of law.”

In a discussion with The Intercept, Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, had his own analysis of the latest developments. “The [Biden] administration appears to be searching for an off-ramp ahead of [Albanese’s] first state visit to DC in October.” In the event one wasn’t found, “we could see a repeat of a very public rebuff delivered by [US Secretary of State] Tony Blinken to the Australian Foreign Minister two weeks ago in Brisbane.”

That rebuff was particularly brutal, taking place on the occasion of the AUSMIN talks between the foreign and defence ministers of both Australia and the United States. On that occasion, Foreign Minister Penny Wong remarked that Australia had made its position clear to their US counterparts “that Mr Assange’s case has dragged for too long, and our desire it be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve said that publicly and you would anticipate that that reflects also the positive we articulate in private.” 

In his response, Secretary of State Blinken claimed to “understand” such views and admitted that the matter had been raised with himself and various offices of the US. With such polite formalities acknowledged, Blinken proceeded to tell “our friends” what, exactly, Washington wished to do. Assange had been “charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country. The actions that he has alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention.”

Such an assessment, lazily assumed, repeatedly rebutted, and persistently disproved, went unchallenged by all the parties present, including the Australian ministers. Nor did any members of the press deem it appropriate to challenge the account. The unstated assumption here is that Assange is already guilty for absurd charges, a man condemned. 

At this stage, such deals are the stuff of manipulation and fantasy. The espionage charges have been drafted to inflate, rather than diminish any sentence. Suggestions that the DOJ will somehow go soft must be treated with abundant scepticism. The pursuit of Assange is laced by sentiments of revenge, intended to both inflict harm upon the publisher while deterring those wishing to publish US national security information. As the Australian international law academic Don Rothwell observes, the plea deal may well take into account the four years spent in UK captivity, but is unlikely to either feature a complete scrapping of the charges, or exempt Assange from travelling to the US to admit his guilt. “It’s not possible to strike a plea deal outside the relevant jurisdiction except in the most exceptional circumstances.”

Should any plea deal be successfully reached and implemented, thereby making Assange admit guilt, the terms of his return to Australia, assuming he survives any stint on US soil, will be onerous. In effect, the US would merely be changing the prison warden while adjusting the terms of observation. In place of British prison wardens will be Australian overseers unlikely to ever take kindly to the publication of national security information.

By frances goold  

In light of recent conversations about ‘art monsters’, ‘fallen idols’, and nasty geniuses, and the recent release of Brooke Shields’ two-part memoir of her sexually objectified life, it seems germane to mark the fifteenth anniversary of our own town’s moment of spurious glory, when the art trade in soft child porn was officially pronounced de rigeur. And perhaps timely because, despite the plethora of criminal offenders and rockstar libertines retrofitted into in this new pop chic category, our own art monster (AM) never made the cut and remains magisterially and nostalgically at large.

Perhaps the kangaroo court-style exoneration back in the day explains the omission; certainly recent writerly self-flagellation for the complicity of fandom suggests that much remains to be understood (by women too) about the ravages of sexual offending against children – certainly the angst of an intellectual pales in comparison to the agonies of a sexual abuse survivor. So this small post-#MeToo buzz is an opportunity to contribute to the conversation, if only to shed light on why our own art monster overwhelmed intellects, caused liberals to abandon ethics, and stymied the department of justice.

1 The genius artist

Despite the historical record, Western visual art has never claimed to be a special source of truth about the world; the individual artist has eternally mediated between subject and object – ritualising, creating idealised versions, grovelling to patronage, interpreting, obeying, or avoiding the rules of the Academy. The greatest of the Renaissance artists achieved fame long before the modern idea of genius emerged in the eighteenth century, when it was reduced to psychometry (albeit scoring high) before finding refuge in eugenics.

Certainly, matters regarding his or her genius would not have occurred to struggling artists focussed on acquiring tools and materials, supporting a family, and surviving from one day to the next – the concept more likely gained traction during early twentieth century European conversations between cashed-up collectors competing to acquire the best of the new Moderns, and popping up among auction house provenances during the early art booms.

After the turmoil of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘art for art’s sake’ became emblematic, challenging the viewer to refrain from looking at a work of art as if it were a faithful mirror of the world, emphasising the significance of an artwork’s intrinsic qualities and expressive dimensions. Cubism, Dada’s “anything goes”, the concept of aesthetic ‘transgression’, the philosophical elevation of the ‘found object’, Surrealism, abstract and conceptual art, and Modernism generally, assisted in the liberalising of traditional forms of representation towards the autonomy of the artwork and new ways of seeing.

Postmodernism (springing from mid-twentieth century French philosophy via ‘appropriation’ and the relativist rejection of absolute truths) restored representation to contemporary art. The movement has embraced a vast array of industrial materials, techniques and media in the creation of novel forms of visual expression, and has sought to blur distinctions between what is perceived as fine, or high art and what is generally seen as low, or kitsch art. Photography in turn, has not merely capitalised on the  digital revolution and its final liberation from veridicality, but has gained inspiration from the relativism of post-modernism and its philosophical rejection of empirical truth and objective reality. Transgression has become the new catch cry, whilst at the same time, postmodernism’s epistemological relativism has undermined the philosophical foundations of an art aesthetics once capable of discerning the aesthetically ‘good’ from the ‘bad’.

Primitive notions of genius permeate our museum culture and our ways of looking but are also a function of our primitive tendency to idealise, resulting partly from an aspect of our psyches that leave us perpetually awed and moved by the sight of a new or dazzling bit of nature or the beauty of another, or a unique artistic vision that can depict the world and ourselves in novel and marvellous ways. Yet as human beings living in the world we depend for our very survival on the truth of what we see – its veridicality: we instinctively trust what we see.

For some visual artists and photographers, a knowledge of our human dependence on the perceptual apparatus inspires visual trickery of a positive, sometimes playful character. For others, image creation and manipulation may be given over to non-aesthetic purposes. In this way, the shibboleths of postmodernism and the tricks of contemporary photography may be yoked to work in various artful combinations in order to deceive.

2 The artful dodger

AM began his career in Melbourne in the mid-‘seventies when the Australian art photography market, along with the cult of celebrity, was taking off internationally. His student-year art bookshop job and small literary magazine publishing connections introduced him to Melbourne/Sydney literary networks. Hailed as something of a prodigy (or even genius), he was quickly taken up by the state gallery’s inaugural curator of photography, and shortly afterwards his Hamiltonian, furtively voyeuristic, exquisitely rendered images of ballet students and schoolgirls became sought after by investor/collectors and others with more prurient tastes in soft-focus child erotica and – progressively – more patently violent child themes.

AM’s child-oriented oeuvre continued unhampered during the decades prior to the internet and digital photography. His regular shows at his dealer galleries and acquisitions by state museums not only ensured a steady market and increased bankability over the decades but sequestered his oeuvre from the sensibilities of the broader community until eventually trundled out of the closet for a museum retrospective to broaden and consolidate his market. Few blinked at his increasingly borderline tableaux depicting clandestine teen sex of various degrees of explicitness, scenes of child abduction, rape, abuse and orgiastic degradation, framed within a farrago of postmodernist high (Baroque) and low (pornography) references, with their aesthetic qualities inoculating content from deeper scrutiny.

3 RISK and panic

In mid-May, 2008 AM and his gallerists sent an email invitation to a vernissage (‘Private View’) to a mailing list that featured a full-frontal child nude. The private/public reaction was instant and politically unified (there is surely nothing like a child abuse image of a child to bring left and right together, if only for a moment), but the irony of subsequent artworld claims for the integrity of the artist and his oeuvre had an ultimately divisive impact on public opinion and debate.

While not a new direction for AM – being merely a more blatant, less knocked-up series from his signature profferings over the decades – and despite the furtive creep of the work towards greater (non-aesthetic) ‘transgression’ – its risqué confidence was new this time, as if a kaleidoscope of preternatural conditions had been shifting into place for decades merely to grant him such a deliciously perilous occasion. Alas for all concerned, AM miscalculated his destiny and overestimated his industry-guaranteed immunities; he had crossed one last taboo where community tolerance was at its limits. And ultimately, his meticulously planned arrogant misfire not only shed unflattering light on the elite networks and market-oriented sleaze of the artworld, but also on the overreach of libertarians who sought to justify setting aside just about every legal and ethical constraint to save him from prosecution.

At the crisis meeting at AM’s dealer’s harbourside mansion, the legal team hammered out damage control strategies, influential friends networked, and AM was advised to flee the jurisdiction to the safety of his Melbourne studio. Here was secure and ample space for his extensive archives (now needing attention), the scene of his legendary ‘movie sets’, his mythical isolation, of his autocratic control over the selection and hanging of his shows, his ‘private collector viewings’, and his child photography. Back in his grand crypt, he could lie low and get his zombies in a row. Meanwhile in Sydney, the arts and letters establishment would spearhead their own brand of ‘moral panic’ over the imminent return of the bad old censorship days when great books were banned as obscene in Australia. Libertarians and ethicists weighed in on the side of free speech and the agency of the child, and psychologists, psychiatrists, and child advocates weighed in on the side of child protection. The arts sector railed against censorship, child protectionists, and a ‘reactionary’ conservative media, deriding all and sundry as narrow-minded philistines ignorant of the high art status of the artist’s child photography and the international esteem in which he was held. AM was now hyped in absentia as contemporary art’s freedom poster-boy by fellow-travellers eager to sacrifice their ethics – or just tweak them a little – for the greater good.  Considerable effort was expended by well-connected libertarians to secure control of the narrative, with one assurance in the form of a semi-biographical vindication of the artist commissioned by a publisher friend of the artist.

In the meantime, the community was excoriated for its wowserism, a strategy that extended to the then PM’s response to a ‘gotcha’ moment when suddenly shown some exhibition photos by a journalist. His shocked response was interpreted as prudery and more importantly – scorned as a demonstration of his political conservativism. The disingenuousness of the attempt to invalidate a PM’s authentic response to the sexualised photograph of a naked child – however unstatesmanlike the PM’s response may have been – closed off a real and fair question as to the actual nature of the photograph and how it got to be made. Its blatant politicisation was also a casus bello, if indeed there was a single cause for the raft of influence-peddling that saw off the prosecution.

Similarly, artist/survivors, child protection activists, and allied health professionals were derided – some publicly (such as at an Open forum on censorship at the, MCA on June 12) – for questioning the legitimacy of the enterprise and raising issues of sexual abuse, exploitation, and the issue of parental consent. Meanwhile various highly conflicted behaviours engaged in by libertarians, exemplified by the dubious, conspiratorial ethics of the 2020 Summit’s Creative Stream’s ‘Open Letter’ to the PM drafted under the direct supervision of the artist (who approved the final draft submitted under 2020 Summit letterhead while his own investigation was pending), were never questioned or publicly challenged.

Ultimately, the urgency of restoring the artist’s reputation and market value meant consolidating his status as an icon of free speech, an exigency which found common purpose in the collaboration between various art world stakeholders and organised libertarian elements. The campaign took on proving aesthetic merit, the international stature of the artist and his status as Australia’s greatest photographer, the transcendent values of artistic freedom, the philistinism of the community, the genius of the photographer. In the meantime the AM camp took care of the legalities, political networks, captive journalists, and literary scribes; repackaging the child porn vs art issue into a libertarian issue of free speech vs art censorship was a strategic masterstroke, to which a libertarian groundswell of support would provide imprimatur. Eventually various legal sleights of hand ensured that the prosecution was dropped within a matter of weeks.*

(* Crown prosecutors did not believe a case could be made out under Section 91G of the NSW Crimes Act (which prohibits the use of children for pornographic purposes), and further, that charges against the artist and/or the gallery for the “production, dissemination or possession of child pornography” under Section 91H would be too difficult to prove.)

Still, no one was exonerated and nothing was resolved. Community debate raged throughout the last half of 2008 and into 2009. The published ‘vindication,’ qua whitewash, scored a few klutzy own goals, throwing up some clearly unintended profile-confirming facts and incriminating details of the artist’s modus operandi (such as the artist’s long-term relationship with the family of the child subject, his school playground trawls, his studio methods, the direct collaboration between the artist and the 2020 Summit ‘creatives’ to influence the outcome of the investigation, and so on). Despite rekindling brushfires requiring considerable art world efforts to douse, institutional support for AM continued as if he were a cause celebre.

4 Blindsided

In hindsight it seems perversely naïve for the literati to fail to consider an alternative hypothesis around the making of the photographs, that is, that somehow ‘freedom from’ exploitation and abuse did not apply in the creative ‘freedom to’ context of a twelve-year-old being photographed nude, and that this artistic instance somehow constituted a moral and ideological exception.

How was it possible to miss the obvious fact that the exhibition subseries under investigation were truthful documents per se? Surely it could be inferred from the photograph itself that it was a veridical record? A middle-aged man is photographing a twelve-year-old girl he has posed naked under industrial-strength studio lights. Any amateur photographer would have twigged that to calibrate the particular photograph destined for the show many photographs may have been needed, probably requiring the child to be subjected to dazzling rapid-fire photography over many photoshoots – a fact later confirmed by the Text Publishing “vindication” published in October.

Whether money changed hands on that occasion remains an open question; the commercial realities of the show were unambiguous with a single photograph from an edition of five going for $25K. Its stretched credulity that so many observers seemed untroubled by the likelihood of commercial arrangements between AM’s dealer galleries, museum networks, models’ families, and the publisher of the ‘vindication’. Nor was the possibility raised that the exhibited photographs might be a small selection from a much larger batch – a drop in the ocean at it were – or even that the commercial/industrial nature of the various processes surrounding the production of the child nudes might be morally questionable or even constitute a crime.

These oversights were likely not solely a function of blind ideology, but would have been assisted by the ambiguity of the ’transgressive’ status of the photograph, its alluring aesthetic qualities, the distracting beauty of the child model, the brash, intimidating scale of the photograph, and the moral certainties surrounding a photograph which had received the imprimatur of an entire artworld – a photo that was designed to discombobulate the adult viewer, just as the years of grooming and the photography process itself were designed to discombobulate a child.

Because that is how it works.

AM had groomed a community.

5 Appropriations and transgressions

And so, fifteen years ago almost to the day, a celebrity art photographer with decades of form in flying under the radar received plaudits for grooming a pretty artworld kid from seven years of age until she was twelve; for scheduling several unchaperoned photoshoots to capture the precise moment of pubescence for the child collectors’ market; for affixing the pick of the crop onto a wall (as butterfly  specimens might be arranged in a trophy cabinet), and for shooting the pleasing results into cyberspace.

This was a truly Nabokovian triumph for AM after a warm-up of four decades of photographing pre-teens and adolescents, and several years of grooming a little Brooke Shields look-alike especially for the occasion: now up there with the legendary US transgressors, AM is having his very own trophy moment, his expropriation of the Richard Prince expropriation of the Gary Gross ‘nymphet’.

As a young aspiring photographer already warming to paedophilic themes in the ‘seventies, the artist would have been familiar with the work of photographer Gary Gross from time working in an art bookshop. He may have even experienced a sense of identification with his older American counterpart, whose father was also a furrier (this being one of the few available biographical details of AM’s early life). A more sinister commonality between the two photographers, however, is AM’s penchant for (caution image) sexually sadistic and degrading representations of child/teen subjects, occasionally extemporising on virgin rape as instantiated in the Gary Gross images of Brooke Shields and appropriated by him in 2008, and who extended and concealed the theme of violation by splitting the narrative sequences across time and space (discussed below).

6 The child as seducer

A superordinate dimension of violation infrequently alluded to – and yet articulated movingly by Brook Shields in her Pretty Baby documentary – is the sexually exploitative, deceptive artistic process that visually infuses sexual themes into a portrait of an unwitting child, then attributes these characteristics as intrinsic to the child and sexually emergent rather than a simple function of the photographer’s choreographed and manipulative projections. The groupthink that follows reveals its degree of enculturation:

Image from High Times

An admirer of Nabokov, AM characterises his mutely violent child pornography as a sensitive insider-artist’s ‘ethnographic’ observations of the secret lives of children and teens. This is, of course, the purest drivel along with the various critical literatures and popular culture views that depict ‘Lolita’ as seductress. Sex between equals it is not. The inversion of adult and child, of projecting predator into prey and perpetrator into victim, is precisely the signification inherent in many of AM’s narrative themes (Bernard Levin suggests that in Lolita, “the narrator, by the most brilliant stroke in the book, is made the innocent, his nymphet the seducer”). AM’s generic studio portraits of girls depicted in sultry, seductive poses belie his depictions of himself as a ‘disinterested’ observer, and have as much credibility as Nabokov’s self-quarantining ‘autonomous aesthetics’ has had for the philosophy of art.

7 Ritorno sulla scena del crimine

In 2010, after a respectable hiatus, AM returned unscathed to what he does best. His ‘nympet’ also reappeared, evidently still underage, in a contemptuous, staged continuation of a subseries embedded in two successive shows in 2010 (Sydney) and 2011 (Melbourne), across which her demure, bare-shouldered depictions will – like the Gary Gross paedophile project – morph into images suggestive of less innocent, more violent themes.

By my reckoning (i.e. a difference of approximatey three years between 2007/2008 and 2010/2010), his 2008 model would not have been much older than fifteen (and not yet sixteen) at her last photoshoot, which yielded the photographs exhibited in Melbourne in 2011 – a flagrant display of sexualised children and teens in which AM’s goddaughter also duets in her new role as nude model for calisthenic departures on symbolic violation themes achieved through image distortion post-production (see also below).

Perhaps in homage to Gary Gross’s bathtub sequence for Playboy AM completes and ‘bookends’ the 2008 subseries by transmogrifying his demure virginal ‘nympet’ into a ‘sluttish’, degraded version of her young self:

To ensure there is no misapprehension of AM’s symbolic intentions (by the child fandom with eyes to see), the artist has – per a ‘Richard Prince expropriation’ – incorporated into the show a photograph of Rembrandt’s ‘Danae’:

Photograph of Rembrand’s (rape of) ‘danae’ – 2011

This photographic appropriation of a Rembrandt painting of Danae (referring to the mythological Rape of Danae by Zeus, a popular subject for High Renaissance painters), serves a non-aesthetic purpose for the 2011 show; its inclusion by the artist among his child ‘erotica’ exhibited alongside images of a virginal and violated 2008 ‘nymphet’ is as a rape signifier, and as such blatantly reveals the paedophilic character of this project, with implications for his entire art photographic enterprise. It may therefore be validly argued that the 2008-2012 virgin/violation subseries as extended across those exhibitions is apprehensible only by the connoisseur/collector in pursuit of a specific interest; so shrouded are these images in aesthetic subterfuge that they are indiscernible to most anyone else.   

This violation ‘narrative’ (instantiated above and elsewhere in his oeuvre) is a grossly objectifying trope pertaining to the ‘defilement’ or ‘ruination’ of children, having many literary precursors such as Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Lolita, which tell of a virgin groomed and ultimately ‘possessed’ by a sociopathic libertine assured of the entitlements and impunity afforded by his power over a helpless and dependent child. It probably unsurprising that Richard Prince’s collegial appropriation of commercial photographer, Gary Gross’s temporary appropriation of a real child drew comment from one of AM’s biggest US fans, critic Richard Schjeldahl, that Prince’s show “made him wish he were dead”.  It is a shame that the eminent critic failed to identify similar morbid qualities in AM’s oeuvre before he too passed on.

8 Power

As reiterated by Brooke Shields in her recent documentary, the abuse of power is not just enacted in the real world, but is narrativized in her photographs. Pornographic themes of ripe pubescence and virgin rape abound in AM’s oeuvre, and irrespective of so-called ‘limited editions’, his child/adolescent images from previous exhibitions are endlessly recycled for the child market. To reach this stage, however, the subjects of those images must be first appropriated/possessed by AM – in reality and symbolically – in the studio, or en plein air, where he selects from his noir repertoire various violation narratives for star-struck models to play at, bedazzled by his power and fame. These choreographed tableaux are scattered throughout a photographic oeuvre characterized by depictions of teen sex in mute, occasionally orgiastic couplings replete with despoliation symbols of ravishment, mutilation and defilement. Even Man/Boy Love gets a guernsey.

AM’s final photographs of his 2008 ‘nymphet’ exhibited in Melbourne in 2011 were a thumbs-up for ‘business as usual’ after successfully dodging prosecution. Although the 2010 and 2011 photographs do not reveal the child’s genitalia (as in the 2008 series), there is a compensatory sufficiency of legal-age genitalia elsewhere on display. AM’s MO was clearly demonstrated by these new shows, which included ‘nymphet’ images from 2008 not previously exhibited, in accordance with his modus operandi of extending his child narratives across exhibitions. In light of this praxis, one might reasonably conclude that other photographs exist yet to see the light of day, and that the connoisseurship could gain comfort in the thought that somewhere there exists a veritable treasure trove of child art awaiting slow release.

9 Archives de cyberspace

And so it transpired. Recent online evidence indicates that the artist retained more explicit images from his 2008 ‘nymphet’ series, which are now being recycled in various formats online. Had these photos been exhibited in 2008, they’d have crossed the Hamilton line (Clive, that is), oddly arbitrary though it may be. In these online merchandise the image of the then twelve year-old is subjected to traditional violation themes in the kind of post-production brutal tortures as might be inflicted on the rack or under the knife. One can only guess at the prices being asked for these editions, but the world being what it is, one can only surmise that the success de scandale has significantly enhanced AM’s market cachet.

Again, a recent online auction turned up a photograph from an exhibition mounted over a decade ago. The nude female model was of legal age at the time she posed nude for the artist; she is also the daughter of the publisher who commissioned his ‘vindication’ while the investigation into his (and his gallerists) activities was pending. Aside from the abundance of ghoulishly distorted flesh, its provenance reveals some scarily cosy and conflicted relationships. Extreme child themes are an intermittent, usually embedded exhibition element, and when scheduled at AM’s dealer galleries, are alternated between various regional outings of anodyne landscapes and recycled early works as a balancing corrective.

Despite changes to the laws regarding child abuse material, the removal of the defence of artistic merit, and the provision of new working protocols for artists in Australia – positive outcomes of the scandal – the artist presses on with exhibiting, publishing and distributing his boundary-riding child oeuvre online and offshore in expensive limited editions – some with signed inserts that appropriate salacious Victorian postcards of yore.

10 Beyond censorship

Secular temples of art can be as cult-like and conspiratorial as the churches. In assuming the role of freedom watchdog back in the day, arts and letters libertarians campaigned on a single issue in collective denial of its responsibilities to the community and of its own moral susceptibilities and weaknesses. Righteous intentions and ideological polemic without pause for reflection usually leads to hypocrisy, manifesting the same arrogant politics and double standards for which conservatives and the right are lampooned. This was a display of group think and deference to bullies in the playground. Anyone who assumes special knowledge, pleads ethical exemptions, and assumes the right to play judge and jury over complex, shifting issues of relative liberties leaves him- or herself open to manipulation by powerful stakeholders with a great deal to lose.

Plus ça change.

The 2008 art debacle occurred because nobody held themselves back – not AM or the family, not the gallerists or the publisher, and certainly not the libertarians who thought little of setting aside their ethics to engage in a righteous anti-censorship campaign to save a fellow-traveller from the due processes of the law.

Not much to celebrate, really.

Talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence, actual or imagined, has become feverish, much of it induced by the growing world of generative chat bots. When scrutinising the critics, attention should be paid to their motivations. What do they stand to gain from adopting a particular stance? In the case of Geoffrey Hinton, immodestly seen as the “Godfather of AI”, the scrutiny levelled should be sharper than most.

Hinton hails from the “connectionist” school of thinking in AI, the once discredited field that envisages neural networks which mimic the human brain and, more broadly, human behaviour. Such a view is at odds with the “symbolists”, who focus on AI as machine-governed, the preserve of specific symbols and rules.

John Thornhill, writing for the Financial Times, notes Hinton’s rise, along with other members of the connectionist tribe: “As computers became more powerful, data sets exploded in size, and algorithms became more sophisticated, deep learning researchers, such as Hinton, were able to produce ever more impressive results that could no longer be ignored by the mainstream AI community.”

In time, deep learning systems became all the rage, and the world of big tech sought out such names as Hinton’s. He, along with his colleagues, came to command absurd salaries at the summits of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. At Google, Hinton served as vice president and engineering fellow. 

Hinton’s departure from Google, and more specifically his role as head of the Google Brain team, got the wheel of speculation whirring. One line of thinking was that it took place so that he could criticise the very company whose very achievements he has aided over the years. It was certainly a bit rich, given Hinton’s own role in pushing the cart of generative AI. In 2012, he pioneered a self-training neural network capable of identifying common objects in pictures with considerable accuracy.

The timing is also of interest. Just over a month prior, an open letter was published by the Future of Life Institute warning of the terrible effects of AI beyond the wickedness of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and other cognate systems. A number of questions were posed: “Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?  

In calling for a six-month pause on developing such large-scale AI projects, the letter attracted a number of names that somewhat diminished the value of the warnings; many signatories had, after all, played a far from negligible role in creating automation, obsolescence and the encouraging the “loss of control of our civilization”. To that end, when the likes of Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak append their signatures to a project calling for a pause in technological developments, bullshit detectors the world over should stir.

The same principles should apply to Hinton. He is obviously seeking other pastures, and in so doing, preening himself with some heavy self-promotion. This takes the form of mild condemnation of the very thing he was responsible for creating. “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people – a few people believed that. But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. […] Obviously, I no longer think that.” He, you would think, should know better than most.

On Twitter, Hinton put to bed any suggestions that he was leaving Google on a sour note, or that he had any intention of dumping on its operations. “In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.” 

This somewhat bizarre form of reasoning suggests that any criticism of AI will exist independently of the very companies that develop and profit from such projects, all the while leaving the developers – like Hinton – immune from any accusations of complicity. The fact that he seemed incapable of developing critiques of AI or suggest regulatory frameworks within Google itself, undercuts the sincerity of the move. 

In reacting to his long-time colleague’s departure, Jeff Dean, chief scientist and head of Google DeepMind, also revealed that the waters remained calm, much to everyone’s satisfaction. “Geoff has made foundational breakthroughs in AI, and we appreciate his decade of contributions to Google […] As one of the first companies to publish AI Principles, we remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”

A number in the AI community did sense that something else was afoot.  Computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy, in responding to Hinton’s remarks, pertinently observed that concerns for AI Safety were not mutually exclusive to research within the organisation – nor should they be. “We should normalize being concerned with AI Safety without having to quit your [sic] job as an AI researcher.”   

Google certainly has what might be called an ethics problem when it comes to AI development. The organisation has been rather keen to muzzle internal discussions on the subject. Margaret Mitchell, formerly of Google’s Ethical AI team, which she co-founded in 2017, was given the heave-ho after conducting an internal inquiry into the dismissal of Timnit Gebru, who had been a member of the same team. 

Gebru was scalped in December 2020 after co-authoring work that took issue with the dangers arising from using AI trained and gorged on huge amounts of data. Both Gebru and Mitchell have also been critical about the conspicuous lack of diversity in the field, described by the latter as a “sea of dudes.”

As for Hinton’s own philosophical dilemmas, they are far from sophisticated and unlikely to trouble his sleep. Whatever Frankenstein role he played in the creation of the very monster he now warns of, his sleep is unlikely to be troubled. “I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton explained to the New York Times. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”

Welcome the canons of pseudoscience. Open your arms to the dribbling, sponsored charlatans. According to a growing number of India’s top officialdom, teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to children in their ninth and 10^th grades is simply not on. 

Last month, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), a purportedly autonomous government organisation responsible for curricula content and textbook publishing for India’s 256 million primary and secondary students, continued its hostility against Darwin as part of its “content rationalisation” process. NCERT had taken the scrub to evolution during the COVID-19 pandemic, implausibly arguing that it was necessary to drop its teaching in moving classes online. (Darwin would have been most bemused.) 

A closer look at the list of dropped and excluded subjects in the NCERT publication of “rationalised content in textbooks” from May last year is impressive in its philistinism. In addition to dropping teaching on Darwin, the origin of life on earth, evolution, fossils and molecular phylogeny, we also see the scrapping of such subjects as electricity, the magnetic effects of electric current and the “sustainable management of natural resources”.

Evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research was less than impressed, calling the measure “a travesty of the notion of a well-rounded secondary education.”

On April 20, the non-profit Breakthrough Science Society launched an open letter demanding a reversal of the decision. “Knowledge and understanding of evolutionary biology is important not just to any subfield of biology, but is also key to understanding the world around us.” Though not evident at first glance, “the principles of natural selection help us understand how any pandemic progresses or why certain species go extinct, among many other critical issues.”

A sense of despondency reigns on whether NCERT will change course, even in the face of protest. In the view of biologist Satyajit Rath, “Given the recent trajectories of such decisions of the government of India, probably not, at least over the short term. Sustained progressive efforts will be required to influence the long-term outcomes.”

The anti-evolutionary streak in Indian politics, spearheaded by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been present for some time, always threatening to spill over with acid implications into the education syllabus. In 2018, India’s then Minister for Higher Education, Satyapal Singh, urged the removal of evolution from school curricula, remarking that no one had ever seen “an ape turning into a human being.” Before a university gathering at a university in Assam, he claimed to “have a list of around 10 to 15 great scientists of the world who have said there is no evidence to prove that the theory of evolution is correct.” He even threw poor Albert Einstein into the mix to justify the stance, claiming that the physicist had thought the theory “unscientific”.

As ever with such characters, ignorance is garlanded with claims of expertise.  Singh was speaking as a “man of science”. As a man of science, “Darwin’s theory is scientifically wrong”. Man, he claimed, “has always been a man.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tenure has been characterised by a coupling of mythologisation and anti-scientific inquiry, grouped under the notion of Hindutva – that India was, and is, the sacred homeland of Hindus, with all other religious groups foreign aberrations. By blending the two, outrageous claims purportedly scientific can be drawn from ancient folklore and texts. Myth is rendered victorious.

In 2014, Modi gave a most extravagant example of this exercise by claiming that “plastic surgery” and “genetic science” explained the creation of Lord Ganesh’s elephantine head and Karna’s birth respectively. Given that the latter, an epic figure of the Mahabharata, “was not born from his mother’s womb”, Modi could confidently state that “genetic science was present at that time.” 

Such astonishing, crude literalism is tantamount to stubborn claims that Indians were the first to discover the means of flying, given Arjuna’s ride in a chariot piloted by Lord Krishna at the Battle of Kurukshetra. And sure enough, the 102^nd session of the India Science Congress, hosted in January 2015, featured a panel led by a number of BJP government members claiming that Indians had pioneered aviation that could fly not only across planet Earth but between planets.

Other instances of this abound, some blatantly, and dangerously irresponsible. In April 2019, BJP parliamentary member Pragya Singh Thakur told the television network India Today that a heady “mixture of gau mutra” (cow urine), along with “other cow products”, including dung and milk, cured her breast cancer. Oncologists mocked the conclusions, but the damaging claim caught on.

With such instances far from infrequent, academics and researchers feel beleaguered in a landscape saturated by the credo of Hindutva. In 2016, number theorist Rajat Tandon observed that the Modi approach to knowledge was “really dangerous”. Along with more than 100 scientists, including many heads of institutions, he signed a statement protesting “the ways in which science and reason are being eroded in the country.” 

A number trying to buck the trend, notably those numbered among rationalists and the anti-superstition activists, have been threatened and, in some cases, murdered. The scholar and writer M. M. Kalburgi paid with his life in North Karnataka in August 2015 for a remark made quoting Jnanpith awardee U. R. Ananthamurthy that urinating on idols was not a transgression that would necessarily attract divine retribution.

In September 2017, the progressive journalist and publisher Gauri Lankesh was gunned down returning to her home from work. She had become yet another victim of what the police in India euphemistically call “encounters”, drawing attention to herself for her stand against the Hindutva stampede and her sympathetic stance towards the Maoist Naxalites.

The recent bureaucratic assault on Darwin and the continued elevation of mythology above sceptical scientific inquiry, bode ill for India’s rationalists. But despite being browbeaten and threatened, many continue to do battle, defiantly and proudly.

Rumours and streaks of hysteria are running rife about what such artificial intelligence (AI) systems as ChatGPT are meant to do. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy recently showed himself to be ignorant with terror about the search bot created by OpenAI. “ChatGPT taught itself to do advanced chemistry. It wasn’t built into the model. Nobody programmed it to learn complicated chemistry. It decided to teach itself, then made its knowledge available to anyone who asked. Something is coming. We aren’t ready.”

Melanie Mitchell, an academic who knows a thing or two about the field, was bemused and tweeted as much. “Senator, I’m an AI researcher. Your description of ChatGPT is dangerously misinformed. Every sentence is incorrect. I hope you will learn more about how this system actually works, how it was trained, and what its limitations are.”

Murphy retorted indignantly that he had not meant what he said. Of course I know that AI doesn’t ‘learn’ or ‘teach itself’ like a human. I’m using shorthand.” Those criticisms, he argued, had the intention of bullying “policymakers away from regulating new technology by ridiculing us when we don’t use the terms the industry uses.”

Like birds of a feather, Murphy’s intervention came along with the Future of Life Institute’s own contribution in the form of an open letter (the Letter). The document makes a number of assertions expected from an institute that has warned about the risks of supremely intelligent AI systems. Literally thousands digitally flocked to lend their names to it, including tech luminaries such as Elon Musk (a warning there), and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. (Currently, the number of signatures lies at 27,567.)

The letter makes the plea that a six-month moratorium is necessary for humanity to take stock about the implications of AI. “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization. Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.” Emphatically, it continues: “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”

The Letter is unimpressive, clumsy, and clear in its effort to manufacture anxiety. While there is much to be said about having considered debates on the way AI is developing, one must ask where this plea is coming from. When billionaires demand a halt in technological practice, scepticism should start tickling the conscience. Suddenly, such voices demand transparency, accountability and openness, the very things they have shunned through their money-making endeavours. And who are the unelected tech leaders in any case?

As for the level of anxiety, the powerful and wealthy will always have bundles of it. If there is one commodity they truly want to share with the rest of us – call it anxiety as socialism – it’s their own fears writ large and disseminated as our fears. AI is that perfect conduit, a case of both promise and terror, therefore needing strict control. “The only things that can oppress US billionaires,” muses the Indian journalist and writer Manu Joseph, “are disease, insurrection, aliens and paranormal machines, the reason they tend to develop exaggeration [sic] notions of their dangers.”

For Mitchell, the authors and backers had embraced an all too gloomy predicament of humanity in the face of AI. “Humans,” she wrote earlier this month, “are continually at risk of over-anthropomorphizing over-trusting these systems, attributing agency to them when none is there.”

The useful premise for the unnerved fearmongers yields two corollaries: the attempt to try to halt the changing nature of such systems in the face of innovation; and the selling factor. “Public fear of AI is actually useful for the tech companies selling it, since the flip-side of the fear is the belief that these systems are truly powerful and big companies would be foolish not to adopt them.”

Moratoria in the field of technology tend to be doomed ventures. The human desire to invent even the most cataclysmically foolish of devices, is the stuff of Promethean legend. Consider, for instance, the debate on whether the US should develop a weapon even more destructive than the atomic bomb. The fear, then, was that the godless Soviets might acquire a superbomb, a muscular monster based on fusion, rather than fission.

In the seminal document received by US President Harry Truman on April 14, 1950, fears of such a discovery are rife. Written by Paul Nitze of the US State Department’s Policy Planning Office, it warned “that the probable fission bomb capability and the possible thermonuclear bomb capability of the Soviet Union have greatly intensified the Soviet threat to the security of the United States.” The result of such a fear became the hydrogen bomb.

The more level-headed pragmatists in the field acknowledge, as do the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots (they include Mitchell) published on the website of the DAIR Institute, that there are “real and present dangers” associated with harms arising from AI, but this is qualified by the “acts of people and corporations deploying automated systems. Regulatory efforts should focus on transparency, accountability and preventing exploitative labor practices.”

Perhaps, suggests Mitchell, we should aim for something akin to a “Manhattan Project of intense research” that would cover “AI’s abilities, limitations, trustworthiness, and interpretability, where the investigation and results are open to anyone.” A far from insensible suggestion, bar the fact that the original Manhattan Project, dedicated to creating the first atomic bomb during the Second World War, was itself a competition to ensure that Nazi Germany did not get there first.

ACOSS (Australian Council of Social Service) Media Release

Politicians from across the aisle, academics, business leaders, community advocates and other prominent Australians have joined in a rare display of unity to urge the Prime Minister to implement the first priority recommendation of the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee and deliver a substantial increase to JobSeeker and related payments in the May Budget.

Labor MPs Alicia Payne, Louise Miller-Frost, Michelle Ananda-Raja and Kate Thwaites, Liberal MP Bridget Archer, the Greens, and a wide range of independents and cross-bench politicians including Kate Chaney, Zoe Daniel, Helen Haines, Zali Steggall, Jacqui Lambie, David Pocock, Monique Ryan, Kylea Tink, Sophie Scamps, Lidia Thorpe and Andrew Wilkie, have all signed an Open Letter urging Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to lift Jobseeker and related payments to help address “structural injustice” and “increased deprivation”.

Sitting members of the Federal Parliament are joined by former senior politicians and bureaucrats, First Nations leaders, leading economists, community sector leaders and prominent Australians detailed below.

The Open Letter to the Prime Minister comes after the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, which was established as part of an historic agreement between the Government and Senator Pocock, recommended the government deliver a substantial increase to JobSeeker, Youth Allowance and related payments as a “first priority”. The Committee found that the payments are inadequate against all existing benchmarks and that increasing their rate to 90% of the Age Pension would improve adequacy and return them to payment relativities of 1999.

The Open Letter, coordinated by the Australian Council of Social Service, says: “We all want the security of knowing that we’ll be supported during tough times.

“But right now, the rate of JobSeeker is so low that people are being forced to choose between paying their rent or buying enough food and medicine.”

Currently, for a single person, JobSeeker is $49.50 per day and Youth Allowance is $40.20 per day.

ACOSS research last year found that six in ten people on income support were eating less or reporting difficulty getting medicine or care because their incomes are totally inadequate. This figure increased to seven in ten in March 2023.

Former politicians and bureaucrats to have signed include Brian Howe AO, Kathryn Greiner AO, Cathy McGowan AO, Robert Tickner AO, Doug Cameron, Jenny Macklin, John Hewson AM, Fred Chaney AO, Verity Firth AM, Renée Leon PSM, Andrew Podger AO and Marie Coleman AO.

Economists, philanthropists and business and union leaders include Ken Henry AC, Jeff Borland, Danielle Wood, Chris Richardson, David Thodey AO, Emma Dawson, Nicki Hutley, Angela Jackson, Sally McManus, Michele O’Neil, Simon Holmes à Court, Richard Denniss, Melinda Cilento, Paul Zahra, Jill Reichstein AM and Diane Smith-Gander AO.

First Nations leaders including Professor Megan Davis, Pat Turner, Antoinette Braybrook, Dr Hannah McGlade, Mick Gooda, June Oscar AO and Thomas Mayor have signed, along with prominent Australians including Patrick McGorry AO, Fiona Stanley AO, Tim Costello AO, Tony Nicholson, Dr Nicole Higgins, Craig Foster, Jane Caro AM and Julie McCrossin AM.

Academics including Professor Kay Cook, Professor Nareen Young, Professor Miranda Stewart, Professor Peter Whiteford, Professor Eileen Baldry AO, Assoc Professor Ben Phillips, Eva Cox AO, and Professor Julian Disney AO have also signed.

Community sector leaders across the country have signed, including:

• Hang Vo, ACOSS President
• CEOs of State and Territory Councils of Social Services
• Mohammad Al-Kafaji, FECCA CEO
• Sandra Elhelw-Wright, Settlement Council of Australia CEO
• Ram Neupane, Settlement Services International, Acting CEO
• Kon Karapanagiotidis OAM, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre CEO
• Brad Chilcott, Welcoming Australia Founder
• Rebecca Glenn, Centre for Womens Economic Safety CEO
• Tanya Corrie, Juno CEO
• Yumi Lee, Older Women’s Network NSW CEO
• Hayley Foster, Full Stop Australia CEO
• Terese Edwards, Single Mother Families Australia CEO
• Bishop Philip Huggins, Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture Director of Centre for Ecumenical Studies and President of the National Council of Churches in Australia
• Mohamed Mohideen, OAM JP MASM, Islamic Council of Victoria Vice-President and Victorian Multicultural Commissioner
• Bishop Vincent Long Van Nguyen OFM Conv, Bishop of Parramatta and Bishops Commission for Social Justice, Mission and Service Chair
• Alan Kirkland, CHOICE CEO
• Nicole Higgins, Royal Australian College of General Practice President
• Nicole Bartholomeusz, cohealth Chief Executive
• Elizabeth Deveny, Consumers Health Forum of Australia CEO
• Kylie Ward, Australian College of Nursing CEO
• Dr Zena Burgess, Australian Psychological Society CEO
• Tish Sivagnanan, Australian Medical Students’ Association (AMSA) National President
• Terry Slevin, Public Health Association of Australia CEO
• Robert Hunt, Dietitians Australia CEO
• Michelle Greenwood, Invisible Illnessses Inc Founder
• Liz Jacka, Dying With Dignity NSW Director
• Gill Callister, Mind Australia CEO
• Luke Rycken, Australian Youth Affairs Coalition CEO
• Jason Trethowan, headspace National Youth Mental Health Foundation CEO
• Jackie Brady, Family & Relationship Services Australia Executive Director
• Nick Tebbey, Relationships Australia National Executive Officer
• Georgie Dent, The Parenthood Executive Director
• Skye Kakoschke-Moore, Children and Young People with Disability Australia CEO
• Sebastian Zagarella, People with Disability Australia CEO
• Carolyn Frohmader, Women With Disabilities Australia CEO
• Leanne Ho, Economic Justice Australia CEO
• Tim Leach, Community Legal Centres Australia CEO
• Anna Brown, Equality Australia CEO
• Fiona Guthrie, Financial Counselling Australia CEO
• Karen Cox, Financial Rights Legal Centre CEO
• Chris Povey, Justice Connect CEO
• Jonathon Hunyor, Public Interest Advocacy Centre CEO
• Stella Avramopoulos, Good Shepherd CEO
• Kasy Chambers, Anglicare Australia CEO
• Claerwen Little, UnitingCare Australia National Director
• Travers McLeod, Brotherhood of St Laurence Executive Director
• Lin Hatfield Dodds, The Benevolent Society CEO
• Toby O’Connor, St Vincent de Paul National Council of Australia CEO
• Nicole Hornsby, Baptist Care Australia Executive Director
• Lucy Manne, 350.org CEO
• Glen Klatovsky, Climate Action Network Australia CEO
• Kelly O’Shanassy Australian Conservation Foundation CEO
• Lyn Morgain, Oxfam Australia Chief Executive
• Matt Gardiner, 54 Reasons CEO
• Toni Wren, Anti-Poverty Week Executive Director
• Bill Mithen, Give Where You Live Foundation CEO
• Julie Edwards, Jesuit Social Services CEO
• Claire Robbs, Life Without Barriers CEO
• Justine Colyer, Rise Network CEO
• Mark Pearce, Volunteering Australia CEO
• Kate Colvin, Homelessness Australia CEO
• Emma Greenhalgh, National Shelter CEO
• Joel Dignam, Better Renting Executive Director
• Lorraine Dupree, Queensland Youth Housing Coalition Executive Director
• Fiona York, Housing for the Aged Action Group Executive Officer

The full list of community sector leaders is in the Open Letter to the Prime Minister.

The letter concludes by saying: “We call on the Federal Government to substantially increase JobSeeker, Youth Allowance and related income support payments in the 2023 budget so as to not leave people in need behind.”

So far, more than 380 people have signed the letter.