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Rockstar Roger Waters outside Belmarsh Prison

Mark Dreyfus on X (Twitter):

Mark Dreyfus [@]MarkDreyfusKCMP 22h

Open access to information is essential for good decision-making, genuine engagement in democratic government, and combatting corruption.

I would like to acknowledge today is International Access to Information Day and share why this year's theme is so important.

This year's theme highlights the importance of online spaces for access to information.

We all spend more time online. Ensuring equity of access to information in an accessible format is critical.

The Albanese Government is firmly committed to transparency and accountability, to ensure we have better government for all Australians.

A multi-party delegation of federal MPs and senators will travel to Washington DC this month as part of the campaign to release WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The United States is seeking to extradite Mr Assange from the United Kingdom on 18 charges related to the publication of thousands of military and diplomatic documents.

He has been detained in the Belmarsh Prison in London for more than four years, and is currently appealing the UK's decision to agree to his extradition.

The parliamentary delegation will include former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, Labor MP Tony Zappia, Liberal senator Alex Antic, independent MP Monique Ryan, and Greens senators David Shoebridge and Peter Whish-Wilson.

Australian MPs from across the political spectrum will travel to Washington this month in a bid to recruit American politicians to the campaign to pressure the Biden administration to drop its pursuit of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

In a letter sent to Albanese last week, [nine] former attorneys-general contrasted the treatment of Australian journalists who have been lauded for their work exposing alleged war crimes by Australian Defence Force personnel to Assange, who exposed wrongdoing by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“... the United States is applying extra-territorial reach by charging Assange, who is not a US citizen and did not commit alleged crimes in the US, under its Espionage Act.

“We believe that this sets a very dangerous precedent and has the potential to put at risk anyone, anywhere in the world, who publishes information that the US unilaterally deems to be classified for security reasons.

Due more to the courts than politicians, native forest logging may be nearing an end. Recent court judgements in Victorian Supreme and and Federal courts don’t augur well for the logging industry. Sue Arnold reports.

Legal battles waged by Victorian grassroots conservation organisations have brought the Precautionary Principle (PP) out of the political closet. It is a principle that has long been ignored by governments as it gets in the way of forestry and development projects.

Put simply, the PP means that if logging is likely to cause serious or irreversible harm then it should not happen. Any harvest planning has to take the PP into account. They haven’t to date but the courts are forcing their hand, at least in Victoria, and federally, if not in NSW as yet.