Shortcut: Julian Assange, Human Rights and the Rule of Law

**Meshel Laurie** (0:03)
This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie.
Greg Barns' career has taken him from running Malcolm Turnbull's 1999 Republican referendum campaign to becoming a longtime advisor to Julian Assange and a prominent voice in criminal justice and human rights. Greg joins us to talk about his career, his work on some of Australia's biggest legal and political issues, and his new podcast with former Supreme Court Judge Lex Lasry, Law the Podcast. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.
What do you notice in offenders? You've been seeing offenders working with offenders of all kinds for decades. What are the common denominators that you see in offenders in Australia in terms of background?

**Greg Barns** (1:00)
Disadvantage.
I've acted, Meshel, over the years for kids from wealthy families or middle-class families, but it's rare. So social disadvantage often come from backgrounds where there's been violence. Often it's intergenerational crime. So mum or dad or uncle or brother is in the crime game. They tend to drop out of school early. They disengage.
Mental health issues. And so by the time they get into the jail system, which takes a bit of getting into in the sense that it might start off small offending and then it gets greater. There are very few support services. And the other big problem that I see is people coming back into the jail system because we don't have what you would call through care. So in other words, John Brosnan, who was the famous prison chaplain at Pentridge in Melbourne years ago, I think used to have this expression that said, what a prisoner needs is a house, a job and a friend. And a lot of I chair the Prisoners' Legal Service in Tasmania. And what we see is people returning back into the community with unstable housing, they don't have a GP even.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:18)
Yeah.

**Greg Barns** (2:19)
So they need strong support. Now people say, oh well, who cares? What I say to people about it is that, leave aside the human rights aspect, leave aside humanity.
If you want a safer society, yeah, you got to look after people on the way out. Because otherwise, it's where are they going to go? They're going to go back to their mates.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:40)
Tell us about the Assange connection.
How do you run into, how do you meet Julian Assange? How do you get involved? I was a nice chap like you, Greg, in WikiLeaks.

**Greg Barns** (2:49)
His dad rang me John Shipton, who's a real character, because Julian, you might remember, ran for the Senate in Victoria in 2013
That's how I got involved. I stayed involved with the Australian campaign and with Gabriel Shipton, who we've had on Law the Podcast, who's his brother.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:10)
What is it about Julian, about his politics and perspective?

**Greg Barns** (3:14)
We've got to remember, what did he do? He revealed war crimes committed by the United States, and yet he was facing life in prison. Julian, I think, grew up both in Queensland and Melbourne, and he was a hacker.
He also helped police devise some software to better track child abuse users.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:37)
Did he?

**Greg Barns** (3:39)
But I didn't know a lot about him, but I was very sympathetic to his case, and because the Australian government, Gillard said, he's a criminal, etc.
We worked on the campaign for best part of 10 years, doing a lot of media. Gabriel Shipton was a great organizer, and so we set up a Meet Your MP campaign. We got very strong support from Melbourne Easy. We set up Andrew Wilkie, the Federal Independent MP, set up a Friends of Assange support group, which was a great group and really influential. They went to Washington. Going after someone who's not an American citizen, who had not set foot in the United States to publish it, and that's a dangerous precedent. We criticized China for laws where they say they can just grab someone off the street in Collins Street and take them back to China to charge them. That's what the Americans wanted to do here.
But it took a huge toll on his health. His resilience, I think, is incredible. Many of us, he was in Belmarsh Prison, which is the toughest prison in the UK. He was in solitary confinement for a lot of it.

**Meshel Laurie** (4:40)
So he was there and the United States were fighting to extradite back to America to face rape charges.