Perhaps understandably, reaction to Julian Assange's recent appearance in a spoof video filmed partly at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been holed up for more than a year, has focused mainly on the terrible blond mullet wig the WikiLeaks founder and free-speech warrior dons to lip-sync a rehash of the 1980s John Farnham soft-rock hit You're the Voice (sample lyrics: "We have the chance to turn the pages over./ We can write what we want to write./ We gotta make things leak/ so we can get much bolder …")

But the video – which also features eye-wateringly crude caricatures of leading Australian politicians Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard – is part of the campaign for a perfectly serious Senate run by Assange's WikiLeaks party, which is fielding six candidates, including Assange, in Australia's 7 September federal elections. So what do they stand for, and how might they fare?

According to its website, the WikiLeaks party believes that "truthful, accurate and factual information are [sic] the foundations of life and democracy". Quite how that will translate into concrete policies on, for example, the economy, is harder to say; the party promises only that its positions will always be driven by its "core values and guided by our objectives: the free flow of information and transparency to achieve true accountability".

Assange, who has been granted asylum by Ecuador but refused safe passage by the UK government, which wants him extradited to Sweden to answer questions about alleged sexual assault, is running in Victoria. The party says he satisfies all relevant electoral criteria, and that if he is elected but unable to take up his seat – he fears that if he does go to Sweden he will end up in the US, facing espionage charges – the vacancy will be filled by a party nominee.

Some polls have suggested support for his party might be as high as 26%. Many doubt it is that high, but some also point out it doesn't have to be: in the 2010 federal election, a Democratic Liberal party candidate ended up in the Senate with just 2.3% of the primary vote. Assange could easily do better than that, prompting one commentator to observe that the WikiLeaks party "might well end up holding the balance of power" between a resurgent centre-right Coalition, Labor and the Greens. Perhaps we shouldn't be sniggering at Assange's hair-do.