Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was working in the “most effective way possible” to secure the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but declined an invitation on Monday to meet the Australian citizen’s wife. Independent lawmaker Andrew Wilkie asked Albanese if he would meet Assange’s wife Stella Assange, who was watching Parliament from the public gallery.
Albanese said a meeting with Stella Assange wouldn’t help her 51-year-old husband who is in a London prison fighting extradition to the United States.
“A priority for us isn’t doing something that is a demonstration, it’s actually doing something that produces an outcome,” Albanese told Parliament. “And that’s my focus, not grandstanding.”
Albanese was with US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in Japan over the weekend for the Group of Seven leading industrial nations summit.Albanese did not say whether he had raised with either leader Australia’s position that Assange had been incarcerated for too long.
Albanese said he appreciated opposition leader Peter Dutton’s recent comments that he agreed with the government that Assange should be released.
“Nothing is served from the ongoing incarceration of Julian Assange. What I have done … is to act in the most effective way possible,” he said. “What I have done is act diplomatically in order to maximize the opportunity that is there of breaking through an issue which has gone on for far too long.”
But Albanese said the issue was not simple.Assange has spent four years in Britain’s Belmarsh Prison fighting extradition. Before that, Assange had taken asylum for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.Stella Assange used her first visit to Australia to address the National Press Club on Monday with her husband’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson.
The wife said her husband had spent 1,502 days behind bars under threat of extradition to the United States, where he faces a 175-year sentence on espionage charges.
“If Julian is extradited, he will be buried in the deepest, darkest hole of the US prison system, isolated forever,” she said. “We must do everything we can to ensure that Julian never, ever sets foot in a US prison.”