No, China if anything is making us take a second look at this creeping authoritarianism and maybe push back on it. Their authoritarian influence on our politics

No, China if anything is making us take a second look at this creeping authoritarianism and maybe push back on it. Their authoritarian influence on our politics and in other spheres (e.g. universities) is a hot-button politician topic currently. The main cause, as far as I’m concerned, is the overwhelming apathy of the common voter. People simply don’t care. We’ve had it way too good for way too long, so as long as it isn’t an immediate threat to Barry’s ability to buy a case of booze and watch Friday night footy with the boys then he doesn’t care. We avoided the GFC largely with minimal pain. Housing has been a sustained boom that has made generations really wealthy. Our economy has basically not undergone recession in 13 years, and has only twice in the last two decades. The social security nets we have in place, whilst being eroded, have yet to really show obvious signs of strain unless you actively look for them. It’s really hard to adequately describe just how easy Australia has had it in general for the last several decades. As a result of all of this, both major parties have had to do little to continue these good times, so politics becomes very samey to most people. For the large majority of the population, it doesn’t really matter which party is in with respect to their day-to-day lives. All this means that Joe Average voter has it really easy. They become apathetic as fuck, and unless an issue directly impacts them they basically do not even register it. Creeping erosion of free speech/privacy either slides under the table or becomes a “well I’ve got nothing to hide” argument. I mean for god’s sake, our current government proposed the idea of using Webcams to facially recognise porn viewers to confirm their age. It sounds so ridiculous that most people just scoff at the idea rather than consider the attitude of ‘fuck your privacy’ behind it. It’s really frustrating because it’s so wide-spread. The depressing part is that I don’t see that apathy changing before many of our hard-fought freedoms, or carefully-built systems that give us such high quality-of-life get destroyed. There will be a substantial lag time between them being ruined and it finally impacting the voting public enough that they actually stop, consider it, and maybe do something about it.