While Julian Assange and the party he started are constantly harangued, no one else seems to be taking seriously the recent revelations about internet and telecommunication surveillance, writes Alison Broinowski.

One thing politicians, journalists, and academics can agree on: most of them hate Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and the WikiLeaks Party.

At a university forum in Sydney on October 11, Peter Fray, a former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald who is now an academic, warned students about WikiLeaks.

'Data journalism' needs proper content analysis and verification, he said, implying that this should be carried out by professional journalists, not by 'hackers and anarchists' like WikiLeaks. He claimed that WikiLeaks publications have dried up, even though its recent publications include 'Spy Files 3' - 249 documents from 92 global intelligence contractors, revealing that the US is spending millions on mass surveillance technology. The French and Germans claim to be outraged: but Australia says nothing.

Academics often get unusually vehement about Assange and WikiLeaks. Professor John Keane told the Sydney University gathering he had been convinced, after meeting Assange in London in January 2013, that he could attract 25 per cent of the vote. Now, Professor Keane claimed, Assange's mother had cut off all contact with the WikiLeaks Party, it had done a deal in Sydney with Glen Druery (the 'Preference Whisperer') over preferencing minor parties, and in Perth it had reneged on a deal with the Greens. The Party, Keane said, ended up with 'less than 1 per cent of the vote' because of a 'public scandal of its own making', over which a third of the committee members resigned. The national inquiry promised by the party into this, he predicted, was unlikely to happen, and Assange should have stayed out of politics.

Some of Keane's allegations are trivial while others are false: no deal was done with Druery (although we might have fared better if it was), and only one of seven candidates resigned. The Committee members who left, like Leslie Cannold, were all Victorians with Greens connections. An incalculable number of voters defected, but the volunteers who resigned were replaced by others before the election, and the WikiLeaks Party in fact received 1.24 per cent of the vote. After the Melbourne defection, membership support actually increased in NSW. The inquiry into WikiLeaks Party preference will soon be completed. If any administrative error was made in NSW, it had no effect on the result. No right-wing parties owed their election to WikiLeaks Party preferences, although the Greens may live to regret their support of Clive Palmer.

Assange polarises film-makers as well as journalists and academics. French and German documentaries about WikiLeaks were generally positive, as was Robert Connolly's Underground: the Julian Assange story (2012). Assange, who doesn't suffer in silence, objected to the title of Alex Gibney's We Steal Secrets (2013), pointing out that it could prejudice trials. The words were actually used in the film by an American intelligence official about his own organisation. The film also suggested that it was Assange who persuaded Bradley Manning to pass hundreds of thousands of classified US documents to WikiLeaks, which could bring a charge of espionage. Interviewees add that Assange is "not an easy person to work with", claiming this has tarnished his achievements and destroyed WikiLeaks.

By refusing to collaborate with Gibney, Assange of course left the microphone open for others to say as they liked. He did the same with a feature film, Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate (2013), which he labelled opportunistic and hostile, a 'geriatric snooze fest doomed for failure'. A month before its October launch, WikiLeaks published the film script, with a commentary saying the story is fictitious, one-sided, and gives undue authority to two books by people with a grudge. Assange denies that he was ever a member of a cult, that American surveillance of him is merely imaginary, that WikiLeaks was finished as an operating organisation by 2010, that WikiLeaks did nothing about harm minimisation to individuals in its release of the Afghanistan and Iraq warlogs and State Department cables, and that he advocates 'wanton publication' of everything governments do. At least, Assange and Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays him, have exchanged civilised letters, and have published them online. Box office in the US is not large.

The number of Americans and others who can't fly for fear of rendition to the US is growing. Meanwhile, Assange waits for the statute of limitations in Sweden to expire in 2020, or for something else to change. Not that you'd know it from Peter Costello, who watched the Sydney forum only because he couldn't get the football. His claim that Assange "is on the run from sex charges laid against him" is untrue, prejudicial, and potentially libellous. In the meantime, revelations about internet surveillance are proliferating. But no-one associated with the major parties is being asked to say how Australia and its allies invigilate our telecommunications or what they do with what they know.

Alison Broinowski, formerly an Australian diplomat, stood in NSW as a candidate for the WikiLeaks Party in September 2013. View her full profile here.