WikiLeaks founder and Australian Senate candidate Julian Assange says he is proud of the level of support he enjoys in his home country and has pledged to enforce transparency in Parliament if he wins a seat in elections in September. “When you turn a bright light on, the cockroaches scuttle away, and that’s what we need to do to Canberra,” the Australian capital, Assange told Nine Network television in an interview filmed in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and broadcast in Australia on Sunday. In a separate interview at the embassy, where he has taken refuge for more than a year, the 42-year-old fugitive told Ten Network that his popularity demonstrated by a recent opinion poll reflected poorly on the ruling Labor Party. The center-left government staunchly supports the U.S. condemnation of WikiLeaks’ disclosure of hundreds of thousands of classified documents.
A national survey by Sydney-based UMR Research, a company that Labor relies on for its own internal polling, found in April that 26 percent of Australian voters said they were likely to vote for Assange or other candidates running for his WikiLeaks Party in national elections, which Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced Sunday would be held Sept. 7.
… Assange has been campaigning by Skype from a room in the embassy, where he was granted asylum in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on sex crime allegations.
Full Article: WikiLeaks founder, Australian Senate candidate Assange says he’s proud of support in homeland – Washington Post.