The plain facts of the ill-advised and naive decision by some WikiLeaks Party members to meet with Bashar al-Assad speak for themselves. Therefore, there is no excuse for the hyperbole and misrepresentation of the event in The Australian’s editorial (“Assad’s WikiLeaks fan club”, 1/1).

As was almost universally reported elsewhere, the group’s explicit aim, however clumsily executed, was to express solidarity with the Syrian people, not the regime as the editorial repeatedly asserts. In fact, they were highly critical of the regime, and made it clear that their opposition to Western military intervention is not out of sympathy for the regime but out of fear of the consequences for the country’s people. For those with short memories, this was a hotly debated issue in the shadow of Iraq and is still far from clear-cut.

WikiLeaks itself did not know or approve of the meeting, also contrary to the editorial’s implication.

Traditional journalism’s hostility towards WikiLeaks is no secret, despite or perhaps because of the fact that they have exposed some of governments’ darkest secrets. Whatever the merits of that view, this type of self-serving, dishonest analysis is exactly what drives the public to seek out new forms of media.

Andrew Phillips (The Australian, 31/12) applies the word “hypocrisy” to Malcolm Fraser because, along with the rest of the world 35 years ago, he preferred Robert Mugabe’s popular party to Ian Smith’s white minority regime in Rhodesia, and like most other people, now criticises Mugabe’s despotism. In my dictionary, that is no more nor less than a consistent opposition to tyranny.

Of course both parties make political appointments, but some are more political than others. In terms of extremity, putting a first-order public ideologue like Tim Wilson in charge of the Human Rights Commission is equivalent to, say, handing the reins of the ABC to John Pilger.

Yet George Brandis (The Australian, 23/13) blithely tries to persuade us of Wilson’s independence, citing disagreements they have had over social and law-and-order issues. These are no more than a manifestation of the ongoing schism in the Liberal Party between its libertarian and conservative wings.

If Brandis expects the electorate to swallow this flimsy argument, then either he has been breathing his own exhaust for too long, else he takes us for fools.

Former Human Rights Commissioner Brian Burdekin (The Australian, 21/12) reminds Wilson that human rights are “not a matter of competing philosophies”. Unfortunately, in the neo-conservative world in which Mr Wilson has hitherto made his living, including the oil and tobacco funded IPA, they are just that: rights which bolster that ideology, such as private property or freedom of trade, are given special priority and are accorded a status of “natural” rights which precede social organisation. Others, such as education or health, are seen as social fictions and therefore dispensable.

The neocon aphorism that “rights are not what the government gives but what it cannot take away” has a nice ring to it, but it is mystical nonsense. There are no rights in the jungle. In reality, all rights are social constructions that have social value but come with a social cost of enforcement. We choose them according to our values and they are universal if we say they are. This is validly expressed through international law, however “perverted” Mr Wilson may find it.

I join Mr Burdekin in wishing Mr Wilson well in his new job, but my advice is blunter: when you go to work, leave your talk of “positive rights and negative rights”, and the rest of your ideology, at the door.