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Disclaimer - I'm Australian. There's something really weird about the contemporary Australian culture that's seems to be permitting increasingly authoritarian g

Disclaimer - I'm Australian. There's something really weird about the contemporary Australian culture that's seems to be permitting increasingly authoritarian governance. If think if you asked my grandparents what defined 'being Australian' it would be been belief in freedom, mateship and irreverence of authority.

tjpnz 5y ago
As a Kiwi I've frequently interacted with Australians and must've taken close to a dozen trips across the ditch. I've tended to view Australians as being somewhat similar which makes reading headlines like this rather jarring. What have I been missing here?
- stephen_g 5y ago
  Very few people know about most of these laws. I’m actually really surprised to see this from a mainstream news source. In general, the Government and the media increasingly hand in hand to control the narratives, keep people distracted from things they don’t want them to know about, and focused on what they want them focused on. I do get it, people have lives, they’re busy, it’s “out of sight, out of mind”. None of this is in the news. But it’s really quite distressing to see the manipulation working so well and society unknowingly being taken the direction it is.
bloqs 5y ago
At risk of sounding corny, could the sole contrubution of Murchochs dynasty be cited accurately as a cause?
- revscat 5y ago
  This seeks accurate. The rise of totalitarianism and fascism worldwide seems to largely be the responsibility of Murdoch, Putin, and some American billionaires (among others, I’m sure). For Australia, though, it seems that Murdoch’s fascist influence outweighs all others.
- roflc0ptic 5y ago
  I mean, it's definitely not reasonable to say that Fox etc are solely responsible, but I do think Fox has an under-investigated causal role in national/global politics. I also really like Matt Taibbi's "Hate Inc" hypothesis, which is basically that consensual reality is no longer the business model employed by news organizations to get viewers, its more like contempt and fear of the other. It does strike me that Fox pioneered that, although it seems like the rest of the media apparatus has hopped on board.
- namelessoracle 5y ago
  No, I think it's deeper than that. Structures like churches and local communities have crumbled away, and parents and family have to work so much that the state via schools do a lot of child raising these days. (there are tons of kids who are with the state from 9am to 5 to 6pm, however late after school will take them), then there parent has to give them to grandma or babysitter on the weekend to work some more. People's guiding authority in their life has become the state.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Very interesting to contrast which political parties in the west are pushing for these things against where fingers are being pointed in much of this thread.
- stephen_g 5y ago
  It’s a big part of the way information is “managed”. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (who was on the receiving end of character assassination campaigns for years from them) talks very well on this nowadays, describing it as a “protection racket for the LNP”. But it’s not just News Ltd anymore. Fairfax has devolved since Nine bought them out, and the ABC is a shell of what it once was. Just look at what happened to Nick Ross for reporting the truth about the NBN, or Emma Albericie for reporting on tax cuts in a way the Government didn’t like. They were basically forced out. Then all the budget cuts leading to redundancies of many of the good voices. There are still a few gems, but the ABC is mostly in a “report in a way we like or it’s more budget cuts” position and are mostly toeing the line.
f0e4c2f7 5y ago
I find in America too I run into people who are casually ok with authoritarian ideas. I don't know why that is, or if it's more or less common now. I suspect this issue extends far outside Australia and the US though.
- goatcode 5y ago
  I suspect it's a combination of fear and normalization of acceptance of absolute authority in government.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Not that I agree with this but we have a massive problem with trolls, shills, agitators, and foreign intelligence running hog wild because they are anonymous online. Freedom of speech and anonymity is being weaponized and used against the west.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Is that a real problem? Foreign intelligence services are certainly doing a lot of crap online but it's not clear whether they've actually accomplished anything. Maybe they're just wasting resources?
    - rini17 5y ago
      Trump? Brexit? Antivax hysteria? Homophobia? Of course it isn't direct accomplishment of any one actor, but each case there was traced undeniable contribution of foreign agencies. And in all cases, freedom of speech was abused to spread lies easily.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
        It's been shown that foreign intelligence adds fuel to already divisive topics. https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-Russia%E2%80%99s-Disinformation-and-Propaganda-Ecosystem_08-04-20.pdf https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-... > The media multiplier effect can, at times, create disinformation storms with potentially dangerous effects for those Russia perceives as adversaries at the international, national, and local level. In the past, Russia has leveraged this dynamic to shield itself from criticism for its involvement in malign activity. This approach also allows Russia to be opportunistic, such as with COVID-19, where it has used the global pandemic as a hook to push longstanding disinformation and propaganda narratives.
inglor_cz 5y ago
Doesn't Canada have the same problem, only centering around freedom of speech and its suppression? In my country, Canadians used to be a stereotype for tough, independent minded people.
- defaultname 5y ago
  The "common good" is one of the most fundamental elements of the Canadian perspective and there has never been such a focus on "freedom of speech". Gun rights, speech rights, etc, all are weighed against the common good at every juncture. Hate speech has never been considered a personal right in Canada.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    "hate speech". Lol
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Common good strikes me as even more nebulous than most other political concepts, especially in absence of direct democracy which could at least shed some light on what the population really prefers. Not to insult anyone and much less Canadians, but I can see Ghaddafi or Khmer Rouge using this expression to justify whatever they decided to do.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - bsksi 5y ago
    Hate speech does not exist.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    All those rights are weighed against a non specific nebulous common good that can mean whatever it needs to mean at that moment to allow activist judges or the government of the day to get what they want. Freedom of speech would serve Canada better in the long run than censorship and government control of speech
refurb 5y ago
This was always my perception of Australia. Not to the same extent as the US but a decent amount of frontiersman-ship - independence, questioning authority, etc. Not doubt those folks still exist they are just a small minority now.
endgame 5y ago
The larrikins died and the wowsers won. I don't know how it happened.
1ncorrect 5y ago
We’re a nation of convicts that grew up to be wardens.
- ratsforhorses 5y ago
  I always got the impression, that a majority of last century's earlier immigrants were WASP's (white Anglo Saxon protestants) with a strong current of underlying racism to other (non English) nationalities... also remember in the school where I lived over 30 odd years ago a strong conformist current...
cblconfederate 5y ago
It doesnt sound like people in australia are particularly oppressed though. Do you feel like it's affecting you? People often trade some freedoms for some others. WRT the coronavirus restrictions, australians arguably had a free-er life than most of western europe this past year. Personally i d prefer to sacrifice international travel if it meant that we can still freely go to work/entertainment/gym etc
- chana_masala 5y ago
  If that's your perspective then you haven't been keeping up with the news
dalbasal 5y ago
I lived in Australia 10 years ago. It wasn't like that then. What it meant to be Australian did seem to be troubling the national psyche moreso than in most places, but the authoritarian streak absolutely was not there. Young and old, irreverence was strong and frequently demonstrated, even towards people's own groups and circles. On a good day, you could earn an approving glance from an old ANZAC in uniform with a fart joke, if the ceremony wass going overtime.
trainsplanes 5y ago
Not just Australia. It seems to be everywhere in the anglosphere.
noja 5y ago
Could it be the ageing population? People's political views become more right-wing as they age.
- thepasswordis 5y ago
  Do you think it's the right wing who is asking for pervasive surveillance, de-anonymization of the internet, permanent lock downs, etc.?
  - hnbad 5y ago
    Were you alive during the time after 9/11? Have you even listened to conservatives talking about "Big Tech" recently (or "election fraud" and the measures they want taken to combat it)? Mass surveillance was and the erosion of civil liberties were literally the biggest parts of post-9/11 legislation to the point where drone striking a US citizen became socially acceptable among conservatives. Conservatives also called for the deaths of Snowden and Assange for "treason". You can at least admit this isn't a partisan issue even if US politicians love to frame it as one.
    - thepasswordis 5y ago
      >Drone striking a us citizen I can’t tell if your joking. Obama definitely was not a conservative, and he actually called a drone strike on a US citizen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki However the people right now calling for Orwellian surveillance and restriction of travel are not right wingers.
      - hnbad 5y ago
        Oh, right, I remember the uproar from conservatives protesting the drone striking of a US citizen by the far-left Obama. Remember the PATRIOT Act? Remember the NSA mass surveillance program (which is btw still ongoing)? Remember black sites? Remember Guantanamo Bay? Remember No Fly Lists? Remember the 60 Words? Remember the militarization of the police force? Remember dragnet phone surveillance? ... Remember the PATRIOT Act? I didn't say it's only right-wingers. I said it's not a partisan phenomenon.
CountDrewku 5y ago
It's happening in all western countries right now. It's particularly terrifying to read some of the comments on social media. A lot people are just a small push away from becoming genocidal maniacs wanting to eliminate sections of society they disagree with. I'm an "old" millennial but there's certainly a trend among young millennials and gen Z to put government mandates in place to stop all sorts of things they find "distasteful".
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Their kids will fight the police state their parents put them under.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  I've personally noticed two big schools of though take root in Millennial and Gen-Z folks. The first is that the idea of inaction is unacceptable. "We have to do something, we can't just do nothing". This manifests itself in ever increasing intervention in problems that seem really minuscule. Removing a statue of Robert E Lee.... well I can understand that. Removing a boulder because it was once given a name with a racist slur nearly a hundred years ago.... come on. The second is the idea that if you aren't actively helping, you are actively hurting progress. This takes various forms such as "silence is violence" and "it's not enough to just be not racist, you must be actively anti-racist". The confluence of these two schools of thought is what I think is leading so such rabid polarization and vitriol. I, of course, have no way to actually prove any of this, but I think it is a model with good face-validity.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    Good comment. I think I’ve seen it written concisely as: “We must do something, even if it’s the wrong thing” And I’ve never considered that to be more apt. “You have to pick a side” seems to be a product of the increased polarization.
  - CountDrewku 5y ago
    >I've personally noticed two big schools of though take root in Millennial and Gen-Z folks. Personally I think this is due to the fact that in westernized nations they are VERY well off all things considered. The downside of this is that life is so easy they're lost and have no purpose. So, they make a purpose by creating issues where they do not exist or turning what are very small problems into gigantic ones. I'm starting to think that after a few generations people are unable to relate to actual atrocities and they start to pursue things that inevitably lead down bad roads as proven by history. We may be doomed to constantly repeat these authoritarian moments. I guess people have to experience it to understand it unfortunately. As you can see in my above comment they never respond, they just downvote when I bring this up because they know it's true. They do not want to read things that upset them so they trend towards censorship and having government create laws to remove any chance they might get upset.
quotemstr 5y ago
> something really weird about the contemporary Australian culture One problem is that countries around the world are increasingly being run by Twitter and social media. We're not looking at a blip near the end of history. We're in the middle of a tectonic disruption similar in scale to the introduction of agriculture or the printing press. "Extremely online" people have found an endless spring of resentment, fear, and totalitarian thinking welling up from some place inside themselves, an ancient and primal source that you can read about in sociology or cultural anthropology textbooks. Regular people don't think like this, but the "extremely online" dominate online conversation through sheer weight of the hours they spend on it. Politicians, journalists, and other decision-makers internalize this online environment as their view of the real world --- consciously or not --- due to availability bias [1]. Regular people have become progressively disenfranchised by the extreme skew of participation in public discussion. (Censorship isn't helping either.) Yes, policymakers poll the public --- but polls provide only intellectual information. A policymaker might know, at some level, from the polls, that the people as a whole prefer policy X --- but when his experience, online, day to day, is seeing nothing but volume-11 support for policy Y instead and vicious attacks on policy X, the primate part of his brain guides him towards finding a reason to support policy X instead. Motivated reasoning is extremely powerful. You might think that elections would make policymakers accountable, but that's not really how it works. Elections are infrequent and subject to thousands of confounding factors that make it difficult for them to act as an accountability mechanism for day-by-day decisions. Policymakers have always relied on public feedback for that, and now the "public" (as least the part visible to policymakers) consists of those with some personality tic or mood disorder or whatever that prompts them to spend eight billion hours per day dunking on everyone else on social media. For a while now, I've had doubts about the fundamental compatibility of the internet with liberal democracy. Social media takes the whole world and puts it into one village, one city-state, one tight ball of low-friction engagement-optimized information flow. It moves actual governance closer to a direct democracy --- but a direct democracy of the dysfunctional and aggrieved. Thing is, direct democracies tend to be quite unstable. Look at the histories of the Greek and Italian city-states: they end up, via the their beloved democracies, enacting boggingly stupid policy [2], perpetrating grave injustices [3] [4], and ultimately getting destroyed by tyrants [5]. In a community with low-friction, low-latency information sharing (like a tiny ancient city-state or a modern country with Twitter), there's no impediment to memetic propagation. You see wave after wave of resentment, gossip, fear, and anger bounce around the meme-sphere, interacting with each other, intensifying under conformity pressure. Memetic pressure spikes rapidly, and bad decisions get made under incredible passions without proper reflection. It's like a washing machine with a brick in it. It gets worse and worse until --- without the damping effect of high-latency communication latency and indirect representation --- the whole thing explodes into a cloud of outrage. (That might be a mushroom cloud in our age.) The printing press led to sweeping structural reforms in society that took centuries to play out, and so will the internet, and I don't think the old forms of governance are viable in the new technological environment. What's happening in Australia is this disruption playing out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Expedition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Expedition [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos [5] https://www.historynet.com/the-end-of-athens.htm https://www.historynet.com/the-end-of-athens.htm
teekert 5y ago
We all know what it means to be Australia(e)n, you have an excellent bureau of homeland PR ;) [0] Warning, if you start watching, it's difficult to stop haha, love this gem (on EV fear campaigns in Australia) as well: [1], ok... they're all gems. And whatever sh*tf*ckery your government pulls, I'll just always love Aussies because of this channel. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqNdKtahx58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqNdKtahx58 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLflYkgnNBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLflYkgnNBY
justbored123 5y ago
> being Australian' it would be been belief in freedom, mateship and irreverence of authority "freedom, mathesip" lol, you need to lean your own history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenous_Australians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenou... "The conflict has been described as a genocide resulting in the elimination of the full-blood Tasmanian Aboriginal population" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detention_facilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detenti... "The Migration Act 1958 allowed discretionary detention of unauthorised arrivals until 1992." https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2017/10/20/australian-government-criticised-on-lesbian-gay-bisexual-trans-and-intersex-rights-at-un https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2017/10/20/australian-governmen... "... questions remain unanswered on Australia’s commitment to human rights for all when it comes to marriage equality, transgender people accessing birth certificates and protecting intersex people from harmful medical procedures," Australia's support for the invasion of Timor in the 70' causing 300.000 deaths to steal their oil and gas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqegTsi6SiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqegTsi6SiE Support for human right terrible abuses in West Papua to steal resources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjU8R8oj328 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjU8R8oj328 The only thing new about this can be summarized by the famous Thucydides quote: "the tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself"
heywherelogingo 5y ago
I've known tourists to Australia who have been calling it a police state since the 90s.
truthwhisperer 5y ago
reason is the historical background. English "deported" criminals to Australia. So it is your cultural background that you "need" observation
calvinmorrison 5y ago
Based on my experience working with Australians - I have to agree. It was quite the adjustment to talk to people who wholly seemed not have a problem with lacking fundamental rights and freedoms. "For the greater good!" It's easy to see why they all have Stockholm Syndrome in relation to the absolute draconian lockdowns. The issue is always - by the time they get around to YOU it's too late to complain that the law doesn't protect individual rights.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pessimizer 5y ago
People like to see themselves as something other than they really are. If your grandparents were indigenous Australians, would they see it in the same way? Or the relevant question: is this a significant break from previous regimes of censorship and surveillance that Australia has implemented, with popular support?
stephen_g 5y ago
I think there’s a huge complacency. For the most part you really need to look hard to know this is at all going on - most of these laws over the last few years have been rushed through in record time to avoid scrutiny, and the media is increasingly captured by the Liberal National Party - it used to just be the News Corp, Sky News side, but over the last couple of years they’ve completely cowed the ABC into compliance by forcing out many of the better journalists, and Fairfax has diminished greatly since being bought by Nine (Peter Costello is the chairman and they literally run LNP fundraising events at Nine studios…).
rscho 5y ago
> something really weird about the contemporary Australian culture that's seems to be permitting increasingly authoritarian governance. Netflix and Uber Eats. Long, long ago that used to be called 'panem et circenses'... Oh, and Facebook/Twitter. Let's not forget circuses imply cheering from the crowd.
teddyh 5y ago
I think the specific case of Australia can be explained like this: If, for example, an arbitrary country in Europe (EU or non-EU) would do things like this, people would consider moving to another country. There would be pressure from neighboring countries, since inter-country trade and commuters would be affected. (Also, the whole EU thing makes it harder for any one country to change too much.) Australia, on the other hand, can do whatever they feel like, and people who live there have no real recourse. They have, if you will, a monopoly on government.
andix 5y ago
Just out of curiosity: is New Zealand on a similar way?
- rgoulter 5y ago
  Somewhat related, https://twitter.com/Thoughtfulnz/status/1122079666745954304 https://twitter.com/Thoughtfulnz/status/1122079666745954304 This tweet from a couple of years ago claims NZers have been getting less polarised (even as Australians were becoming more polarised).
hammock 5y ago
Think. What is the largest (billions and trillion$ large) and most proximal influencing force that did not exist when your grandparents were growing up?
gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
As a Canadian I hope this doesn’t come here, though it seems to be creeping in year by year, and as you said it could be entrenched in two generations. I always thought of Aussies as flippant and carefree, but rugged and hardworking. It seems like there is a new streak of nanny-statism and parochial mindedness similar to ‘Little Englanders’ in the UK; but knowing a little bit about your political history, maybe it was always there among the affluent colonial class vs the farmers and herders.
cryptonector 5y ago
This isn't really new though, and if you asked your great grandparents instead of your grandparents you might find it's not new at all. If you look at what happened during the Spanish Flu pandemic, you'll find a lot of similarities to today. There's a reason we have a fair bit of U.S. Supreme Court case-law from the 20s about vaccine mandates and what-not: those matters were very relevant in the 1918-mid20s time frame mainly because of the Spanish Flu. You might notice that people generally obey rules regardless of whether the rules are reasonable and/or justified. When rules are not reasonable or justified we might say that we have "authoritarian governance", as you put it. If you ever wonder how people tolerated atrocities in, say, 1930s Germany, the answer is mainly two-fold, that they accepted their government's authority, and/or more importantly that anyways there wasn't anything they could do about it. It's the same today, except that our current governments aren't committing atrocities, though are being heavy-handed (and getting more so every day). The fact that it is practically impossible for most individuals to do anything impactful about unreasonable rules in a reasonable amount of time is probably the most important factor in acceptance of authoritarian governance. I.e., it may not be acceptance of authoritarian governance as such as much as it is acceptance of one's inability to resist authoritarian governance. The latter looks a lot like the former, especially in cynical or apathetic populations, where the reasoning might go like this: Q: Why didn't you oppose X 20 years ago? A: Well, there wasn't anything I could do, so I did that, nothing. Q: OK, but why not protest? A: And lose my job?! Elections are too infrequent, and the courts move even slower. As well, when it comes to elections, people don't have decent options regarding these issues, so they may continue to vote as they would usually (e.g., partisan ideology). In other words, I would say it's necessarily that people willingly accept authoritarian governance, but that we can't really tell how much willing acceptance there is versus how much unwilling acceptance there is, and it doesn't really matter what the breakdown is. Once a government decides to be authoritarian, it's very hard to stop it. Usually in the West we get to vote them out. In the worst case scenario they'll rig elections or simply assume total power, and then it can be decades before a country can return to a normal state. Like Franco's Spain: he had to die before Spain could return to the Estado del Derecho. FYI, "Estado del Derecho" is a wonderful Spanish legal term of art that refers to all that which we take for granted in the West, and which translates literally to "State of Laws" ("a law" translates to "ley", while "the law" translates to "derecho", but "derecho" is also a translation of "right" as in "rights"). I wish English had such a pithy phrase in common daily use for the same concept. "State of Laws" doesn't quite capture all that "Estado del Derecho" does, as "Estado del Derecho" means, mainly (among other things), Habeas Corpus and Due Process.
HeroOfAges 5y ago
I'm in my 40s, so based on the American depictions of Australian culture in the 80's and early 90's, that "belief in freedom, mateship and irreverence of authority" matches the impression of the average Australian I've held ever since. Of course you can't believe everything you see on TV and in movies. Still, this acceptance of authoritarian governance is a shocking turn.
bitwize 5y ago
There's a very Australian concept of "being a larrikin". The US equivalent might be "brat", "having an attitude", etc. It's a mental stance of giving the middle finger to authority. It seems the Australian government has found a way to neutralize the spirit of larrikinism in its people. Maybe it has something to do with the friendly voice the government has adopted. As an example, while on vacation in Oz, at a train station in Zillmere I saw a sign that read something like the following: Cross the tracks only at the footbridges in an orderly fashion! Or cop a $100 fine. Don't say we didn't warn you, mate! The equivalent sign in the USA might read: DANGER -- KEEP OFF TRACKS -- VIOLATORS WILL BE FINED $100 It's easier to sneak authoritarianism in the back door when the authoritarians seem like your mates, who would never use their power against you, only to keep you and your community safe.
akomtu 5y ago
I heard China has been buying Australian land in bulk, so it's not a stretch to assume that the Australian gov has been thoroughly infiltrated by now (bribes from CCP, blackmailing and so on).
bjowen 5y ago
Same. The consolidation of departments and powers into the new Department of Homeland Affairs under the current incumbency has been an ominous kind of creep towards it too. It feels inevitable that there will be support for this move from the talking-heads who are currently inciting freedumb protests, because either Terrorism or Think Of The Children. On online identities linked to passports - the US already asks this kind of in visa / ESTA applications [0]. It’s not currently mandatory to answer, but I get the impression that’ll change. It’s hard to believe the line that any of this is directed to reducing online bullying, if anything it makes doxxing trivial. Law enforcement already has powers by warrant to do much of what this contemplates, and the rest is not somewhere I want Peter Dutton et al to be able to see. [0] https://www.esta-online.com/blogs/esta-social-media-question https://www.esta-online.com/blogs/esta-social-media-question
feketegy 5y ago
History tells us that after every major tragic event like wars or pandemics society pulls to a hard leftist belief. They elect leftist parties, have more of an authotarian ideology and so on. Source: The Dictator's Handbook - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s-handbook https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s-...
rstuart4133 5y ago
"The Australian Government is planning" is possibly a wee exaggeration. It was one of 88 recommendations from a federal government committee investigating "federal parliament inquiry into family, domestic and sexual violence" [0] According to the chairman of the committee, the reasoning behind it is https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/technology/57f90da1085b5b85cca3d80d5cee6353 https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/technology/57f90da1085b5b8... : > prevent people from setting up anonymous accounts, and make them liable for defamation suits or even criminal prosecution for menacing messages or harassment. It's true this could be yet another authoritarian push from a committee chaired by the LNP (oh, what irony: a party founded on the principles of John Stuart Mill championing authoritarianism). However, in the circumstances a mixture political opportunism and gross subject matter incompetence in a cross party committee seems a far more likely explanation. [0] https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House/Social_Policy_and_Legal_Affairs/Familyviolence/Report https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Hou...

tjpnz 5y ago

As a Kiwi I've frequently interacted with Australians and must've taken close to a dozen trips across the ditch. I've tended to view Australians as being somewhat similar which makes reading headlines like this rather jarring. What have I been missing here?

stephen_g 5y ago
Very few people know about most of these laws. I’m actually really surprised to see this from a mainstream news source. In general, the Government and the media increasingly hand in hand to control the narratives, keep people distracted from things they don’t want them to know about, and focused on what they want them focused on. I do get it, people have lives, they’re busy, it’s “out of sight, out of mind”. None of this is in the news. But it’s really quite distressing to see the manipulation working so well and society unknowingly being taken the direction it is.

bloqs 5y ago

At risk of sounding corny, could the sole contrubution of Murchochs dynasty be cited accurately as a cause?

revscat 5y ago
This seeks accurate. The rise of totalitarianism and fascism worldwide seems to largely be the responsibility of Murdoch, Putin, and some American billionaires (among others, I’m sure). For Australia, though, it seems that Murdoch’s fascist influence outweighs all others.
roflc0ptic 5y ago
I mean, it's definitely not reasonable to say that Fox etc are solely responsible, but I do think Fox has an under-investigated causal role in national/global politics. I also really like Matt Taibbi's "Hate Inc" hypothesis, which is basically that consensual reality is no longer the business model employed by news organizations to get viewers, its more like contempt and fear of the other. It does strike me that Fox pioneered that, although it seems like the rest of the media apparatus has hopped on board.
namelessoracle 5y ago
No, I think it's deeper than that. Structures like churches and local communities have crumbled away, and parents and family have to work so much that the state via schools do a lot of child raising these days. (there are tons of kids who are with the state from 9am to 5 to 6pm, however late after school will take them), then there parent has to give them to grandma or babysitter on the weekend to work some more. People's guiding authority in their life has become the state.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Very interesting to contrast which political parties in the west are pushing for these things against where fingers are being pointed in much of this thread.
stephen_g 5y ago
It’s a big part of the way information is “managed”. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (who was on the receiving end of character assassination campaigns for years from them) talks very well on this nowadays, describing it as a “protection racket for the LNP”. But it’s not just News Ltd anymore. Fairfax has devolved since Nine bought them out, and the ABC is a shell of what it once was. Just look at what happened to Nick Ross for reporting the truth about the NBN, or Emma Albericie for reporting on tax cuts in a way the Government didn’t like. They were basically forced out. Then all the budget cuts leading to redundancies of many of the good voices. There are still a few gems, but the ABC is mostly in a “report in a way we like or it’s more budget cuts” position and are mostly toeing the line.

f0e4c2f7 5y ago

I find in America too I run into people who are casually ok with authoritarian ideas. I don't know why that is, or if it's more or less common now. I suspect this issue extends far outside Australia and the US though.

goatcode 5y ago
I suspect it's a combination of fear and normalization of acceptance of absolute authority in government.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Not that I agree with this but we have a massive problem with trolls, shills, agitators, and foreign intelligence running hog wild because they are anonymous online. Freedom of speech and anonymity is being weaponized and used against the west.
- nradov 5y ago
  Is that a real problem? Foreign intelligence services are certainly doing a lot of crap online but it's not clear whether they've actually accomplished anything. Maybe they're just wasting resources?
  - rini17 5y ago
    Trump? Brexit? Antivax hysteria? Homophobia? Of course it isn't direct accomplishment of any one actor, but each case there was traced undeniable contribution of foreign agencies. And in all cases, freedom of speech was abused to spread lies easily.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
      It's been shown that foreign intelligence adds fuel to already divisive topics. https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-Russia%E2%80%99s-Disinformation-and-Propaganda-Ecosystem_08-04-20.pdf https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-... > The media multiplier effect can, at times, create disinformation storms with potentially dangerous effects for those Russia perceives as adversaries at the international, national, and local level. In the past, Russia has leveraged this dynamic to shield itself from criticism for its involvement in malign activity. This approach also allows Russia to be opportunistic, such as with COVID-19, where it has used the global pandemic as a hook to push longstanding disinformation and propaganda narratives.

inglor_cz 5y ago

Doesn't Canada have the same problem, only centering around freedom of speech and its suppression? In my country, Canadians used to be a stereotype for tough, independent minded people.

defaultname 5y ago
The "common good" is one of the most fundamental elements of the Canadian perspective and there has never been such a focus on "freedom of speech". Gun rights, speech rights, etc, all are weighed against the common good at every juncture. Hate speech has never been considered a personal right in Canada.
- swayvil 5y ago
  "hate speech". Lol
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Common good strikes me as even more nebulous than most other political concepts, especially in absence of direct democracy which could at least shed some light on what the population really prefers. Not to insult anyone and much less Canadians, but I can see Ghaddafi or Khmer Rouge using this expression to justify whatever they decided to do.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- bsksi 5y ago
  Hate speech does not exist.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  All those rights are weighed against a non specific nebulous common good that can mean whatever it needs to mean at that moment to allow activist judges or the government of the day to get what they want. Freedom of speech would serve Canada better in the long run than censorship and government control of speech

refurb 5y ago

This was always my perception of Australia. Not to the same extent as the US but a decent amount of frontiersman-ship - independence, questioning authority, etc. Not doubt those folks still exist they are just a small minority now.

endgame 5y ago

The larrikins died and the wowsers won. I don't know how it happened.

1ncorrect 5y ago

We’re a nation of convicts that grew up to be wardens.

ratsforhorses 5y ago
I always got the impression, that a majority of last century's earlier immigrants were WASP's (white Anglo Saxon protestants) with a strong current of underlying racism to other (non English) nationalities... also remember in the school where I lived over 30 odd years ago a strong conformist current...

cblconfederate 5y ago

It doesnt sound like people in australia are particularly oppressed though. Do you feel like it's affecting you? People often trade some freedoms for some others. WRT the coronavirus restrictions, australians arguably had a free-er life than most of western europe this past year. Personally i d prefer to sacrifice international travel if it meant that we can still freely go to work/entertainment/gym etc

chana_masala 5y ago
If that's your perspective then you haven't been keeping up with the news

dalbasal 5y ago

I lived in Australia 10 years ago. It wasn't like that then. What it meant to be Australian did seem to be troubling the national psyche moreso than in most places, but the authoritarian streak absolutely was not there. Young and old, irreverence was strong and frequently demonstrated, even towards people's own groups and circles. On a good day, you could earn an approving glance from an old ANZAC in uniform with a fart joke, if the ceremony wass going overtime.

trainsplanes 5y ago

Not just Australia. It seems to be everywhere in the anglosphere.

noja 5y ago

Could it be the ageing population? People's political views become more right-wing as they age.

thepasswordis 5y ago
Do you think it's the right wing who is asking for pervasive surveillance, de-anonymization of the internet, permanent lock downs, etc.?
- hnbad 5y ago
  Were you alive during the time after 9/11? Have you even listened to conservatives talking about "Big Tech" recently (or "election fraud" and the measures they want taken to combat it)? Mass surveillance was and the erosion of civil liberties were literally the biggest parts of post-9/11 legislation to the point where drone striking a US citizen became socially acceptable among conservatives. Conservatives also called for the deaths of Snowden and Assange for "treason". You can at least admit this isn't a partisan issue even if US politicians love to frame it as one.
  - thepasswordis 5y ago
    >Drone striking a us citizen I can’t tell if your joking. Obama definitely was not a conservative, and he actually called a drone strike on a US citizen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki However the people right now calling for Orwellian surveillance and restriction of travel are not right wingers.
    - hnbad 5y ago
      Oh, right, I remember the uproar from conservatives protesting the drone striking of a US citizen by the far-left Obama. Remember the PATRIOT Act? Remember the NSA mass surveillance program (which is btw still ongoing)? Remember black sites? Remember Guantanamo Bay? Remember No Fly Lists? Remember the 60 Words? Remember the militarization of the police force? Remember dragnet phone surveillance? ... Remember the PATRIOT Act? I didn't say it's only right-wingers. I said it's not a partisan phenomenon.

CountDrewku 5y ago

It's happening in all western countries right now. It's particularly terrifying to read some of the comments on social media. A lot people are just a small push away from becoming genocidal maniacs wanting to eliminate sections of society they disagree with. I'm an "old" millennial but there's certainly a trend among young millennials and gen Z to put government mandates in place to stop all sorts of things they find "distasteful".

ipaddr 5y ago
Their kids will fight the police state their parents put them under.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I've personally noticed two big schools of though take root in Millennial and Gen-Z folks. The first is that the idea of inaction is unacceptable. "We have to do something, we can't just do nothing". This manifests itself in ever increasing intervention in problems that seem really minuscule. Removing a statue of Robert E Lee.... well I can understand that. Removing a boulder because it was once given a name with a racist slur nearly a hundred years ago.... come on. The second is the idea that if you aren't actively helping, you are actively hurting progress. This takes various forms such as "silence is violence" and "it's not enough to just be not racist, you must be actively anti-racist". The confluence of these two schools of thought is what I think is leading so such rabid polarization and vitriol. I, of course, have no way to actually prove any of this, but I think it is a model with good face-validity.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  Good comment. I think I’ve seen it written concisely as: “We must do something, even if it’s the wrong thing” And I’ve never considered that to be more apt. “You have to pick a side” seems to be a product of the increased polarization.
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  >I've personally noticed two big schools of though take root in Millennial and Gen-Z folks. Personally I think this is due to the fact that in westernized nations they are VERY well off all things considered. The downside of this is that life is so easy they're lost and have no purpose. So, they make a purpose by creating issues where they do not exist or turning what are very small problems into gigantic ones. I'm starting to think that after a few generations people are unable to relate to actual atrocities and they start to pursue things that inevitably lead down bad roads as proven by history. We may be doomed to constantly repeat these authoritarian moments. I guess people have to experience it to understand it unfortunately. As you can see in my above comment they never respond, they just downvote when I bring this up because they know it's true. They do not want to read things that upset them so they trend towards censorship and having government create laws to remove any chance they might get upset.

quotemstr 5y ago

> something really weird about the contemporary Australian culture One problem is that countries around the world are increasingly being run by Twitter and social media. We're not looking at a blip near the end of history. We're in the middle of a tectonic disruption similar in scale to the introduction of agriculture or the printing press. "Extremely online" people have found an endless spring of resentment, fear, and totalitarian thinking welling up from some place inside themselves, an ancient and primal source that you can read about in sociology or cultural anthropology textbooks. Regular people don't think like this, but the "extremely online" dominate online conversation through sheer weight of the hours they spend on it. Politicians, journalists, and other decision-makers internalize this online environment as their view of the real world --- consciously or not --- due to availability bias [1]. Regular people have become progressively disenfranchised by the extreme skew of participation in public discussion. (Censorship isn't helping either.) Yes, policymakers poll the public --- but polls provide only intellectual information. A policymaker might know, at some level, from the polls, that the people as a whole prefer policy X --- but when his experience, online, day to day, is seeing nothing but volume-11 support for policy Y instead and vicious attacks on policy X, the primate part of his brain guides him towards finding a reason to support policy X instead. Motivated reasoning is extremely powerful. You might think that elections would make policymakers accountable, but that's not really how it works. Elections are infrequent and subject to thousands of confounding factors that make it difficult for them to act as an accountability mechanism for day-by-day decisions. Policymakers have always relied on public feedback for that, and now the "public" (as least the part visible to policymakers) consists of those with some personality tic or mood disorder or whatever that prompts them to spend eight billion hours per day dunking on everyone else on social media. For a while now, I've had doubts about the fundamental compatibility of the internet with liberal democracy. Social media takes the whole world and puts it into one village, one city-state, one tight ball of low-friction engagement-optimized information flow. It moves actual governance closer to a direct democracy --- but a direct democracy of the dysfunctional and aggrieved. Thing is, direct democracies tend to be quite unstable. Look at the histories of the Greek and Italian city-states: they end up, via the their beloved democracies, enacting boggingly stupid policy [2], perpetrating grave injustices [3] [4], and ultimately getting destroyed by tyrants [5]. In a community with low-friction, low-latency information sharing (like a tiny ancient city-state or a modern country with Twitter), there's no impediment to memetic propagation. You see wave after wave of resentment, gossip, fear, and anger bounce around the meme-sphere, interacting with each other, intensifying under conformity pressure. Memetic pressure spikes rapidly, and bad decisions get made under incredible passions without proper reflection. It's like a washing machine with a brick in it. It gets worse and worse until --- without the damping effect of high-latency communication latency and indirect representation --- the whole thing explodes into a cloud of outrage. (That might be a mushroom cloud in our age.) The printing press led to sweeping structural reforms in society that took centuries to play out, and so will the internet, and I don't think the old forms of governance are viable in the new technological environment. What's happening in Australia is this disruption playing out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Expedition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Expedition [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos [5] https://www.historynet.com/the-end-of-athens.htm https://www.historynet.com/the-end-of-athens.htm

teekert 5y ago

We all know what it means to be Australia(e)n, you have an excellent bureau of homeland PR ;) [0] Warning, if you start watching, it's difficult to stop haha, love this gem (on EV fear campaigns in Australia) as well: [1], ok... they're all gems. And whatever sh*tf*ckery your government pulls, I'll just always love Aussies because of this channel. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqNdKtahx58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqNdKtahx58 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLflYkgnNBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLflYkgnNBY

justbored123 5y ago

> being Australian' it would be been belief in freedom, mateship and irreverence of authority "freedom, mathesip" lol, you need to lean your own history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenous_Australians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenou... "The conflict has been described as a genocide resulting in the elimination of the full-blood Tasmanian Aboriginal population" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detention_facilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detenti... "The Migration Act 1958 allowed discretionary detention of unauthorised arrivals until 1992." https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2017/10/20/australian-government-criticised-on-lesbian-gay-bisexual-trans-and-intersex-rights-at-un https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2017/10/20/australian-governmen... "... questions remain unanswered on Australia’s commitment to human rights for all when it comes to marriage equality, transgender people accessing birth certificates and protecting intersex people from harmful medical procedures," Australia's support for the invasion of Timor in the 70' causing 300.000 deaths to steal their oil and gas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqegTsi6SiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqegTsi6SiE Support for human right terrible abuses in West Papua to steal resources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjU8R8oj328 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjU8R8oj328 The only thing new about this can be summarized by the famous Thucydides quote: "the tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself"

heywherelogingo 5y ago

I've known tourists to Australia who have been calling it a police state since the 90s.

truthwhisperer 5y ago

reason is the historical background. English "deported" criminals to Australia. So it is your cultural background that you "need" observation

calvinmorrison 5y ago

Based on my experience working with Australians - I have to agree. It was quite the adjustment to talk to people who wholly seemed not have a problem with lacking fundamental rights and freedoms. "For the greater good!" It's easy to see why they all have Stockholm Syndrome in relation to the absolute draconian lockdowns. The issue is always - by the time they get around to YOU it's too late to complain that the law doesn't protect individual rights.

deleted 5y ago
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pessimizer 5y ago

People like to see themselves as something other than they really are. If your grandparents were indigenous Australians, would they see it in the same way? Or the relevant question: is this a significant break from previous regimes of censorship and surveillance that Australia has implemented, with popular support?

stephen_g 5y ago

I think there’s a huge complacency. For the most part you really need to look hard to know this is at all going on - most of these laws over the last few years have been rushed through in record time to avoid scrutiny, and the media is increasingly captured by the Liberal National Party - it used to just be the News Corp, Sky News side, but over the last couple of years they’ve completely cowed the ABC into compliance by forcing out many of the better journalists, and Fairfax has diminished greatly since being bought by Nine (Peter Costello is the chairman and they literally run LNP fundraising events at Nine studios…).

rscho 5y ago

> something really weird about the contemporary Australian culture that's seems to be permitting increasingly authoritarian governance. Netflix and Uber Eats. Long, long ago that used to be called 'panem et circenses'... Oh, and Facebook/Twitter. Let's not forget circuses imply cheering from the crowd.

teddyh 5y ago

I think the specific case of Australia can be explained like this: If, for example, an arbitrary country in Europe (EU or non-EU) would do things like this, people would consider moving to another country. There would be pressure from neighboring countries, since inter-country trade and commuters would be affected. (Also, the whole EU thing makes it harder for any one country to change too much.) Australia, on the other hand, can do whatever they feel like, and people who live there have no real recourse. They have, if you will, a monopoly on government.

andix 5y ago

Just out of curiosity: is New Zealand on a similar way?

rgoulter 5y ago
Somewhat related, https://twitter.com/Thoughtfulnz/status/1122079666745954304 https://twitter.com/Thoughtfulnz/status/1122079666745954304 This tweet from a couple of years ago claims NZers have been getting less polarised (even as Australians were becoming more polarised).

hammock 5y ago

Think. What is the largest (billions and trillion$ large) and most proximal influencing force that did not exist when your grandparents were growing up?

gunfighthacksaw 5y ago

As a Canadian I hope this doesn’t come here, though it seems to be creeping in year by year, and as you said it could be entrenched in two generations. I always thought of Aussies as flippant and carefree, but rugged and hardworking. It seems like there is a new streak of nanny-statism and parochial mindedness similar to ‘Little Englanders’ in the UK; but knowing a little bit about your political history, maybe it was always there among the affluent colonial class vs the farmers and herders.

cryptonector 5y ago

This isn't really new though, and if you asked your great grandparents instead of your grandparents you might find it's not new at all. If you look at what happened during the Spanish Flu pandemic, you'll find a lot of similarities to today. There's a reason we have a fair bit of U.S. Supreme Court case-law from the 20s about vaccine mandates and what-not: those matters were very relevant in the 1918-mid20s time frame mainly because of the Spanish Flu. You might notice that people generally obey rules regardless of whether the rules are reasonable and/or justified. When rules are not reasonable or justified we might say that we have "authoritarian governance", as you put it. If you ever wonder how people tolerated atrocities in, say, 1930s Germany, the answer is mainly two-fold, that they accepted their government's authority, and/or more importantly that anyways there wasn't anything they could do about it. It's the same today, except that our current governments aren't committing atrocities, though are being heavy-handed (and getting more so every day). The fact that it is practically impossible for most individuals to do anything impactful about unreasonable rules in a reasonable amount of time is probably the most important factor in acceptance of authoritarian governance. I.e., it may not be acceptance of authoritarian governance as such as much as it is acceptance of one's inability to resist authoritarian governance. The latter looks a lot like the former, especially in cynical or apathetic populations, where the reasoning might go like this: Q: Why didn't you oppose X 20 years ago? A: Well, there wasn't anything I could do, so I did that, nothing. Q: OK, but why not protest? A: And lose my job?! Elections are too infrequent, and the courts move even slower. As well, when it comes to elections, people don't have decent options regarding these issues, so they may continue to vote as they would usually (e.g., partisan ideology). In other words, I would say it's necessarily that people willingly accept authoritarian governance, but that we can't really tell how much willing acceptance there is versus how much unwilling acceptance there is, and it doesn't really matter what the breakdown is. Once a government decides to be authoritarian, it's very hard to stop it. Usually in the West we get to vote them out. In the worst case scenario they'll rig elections or simply assume total power, and then it can be decades before a country can return to a normal state. Like Franco's Spain: he had to die before Spain could return to the Estado del Derecho. FYI, "Estado del Derecho" is a wonderful Spanish legal term of art that refers to all that which we take for granted in the West, and which translates literally to "State of Laws" ("a law" translates to "ley", while "the law" translates to "derecho", but "derecho" is also a translation of "right" as in "rights"). I wish English had such a pithy phrase in common daily use for the same concept. "State of Laws" doesn't quite capture all that "Estado del Derecho" does, as "Estado del Derecho" means, mainly (among other things), Habeas Corpus and Due Process.

HeroOfAges 5y ago

I'm in my 40s, so based on the American depictions of Australian culture in the 80's and early 90's, that "belief in freedom, mateship and irreverence of authority" matches the impression of the average Australian I've held ever since. Of course you can't believe everything you see on TV and in movies. Still, this acceptance of authoritarian governance is a shocking turn.

bitwize 5y ago

There's a very Australian concept of "being a larrikin". The US equivalent might be "brat", "having an attitude", etc. It's a mental stance of giving the middle finger to authority. It seems the Australian government has found a way to neutralize the spirit of larrikinism in its people. Maybe it has something to do with the friendly voice the government has adopted. As an example, while on vacation in Oz, at a train station in Zillmere I saw a sign that read something like the following: Cross the tracks only at the footbridges in an orderly fashion! Or cop a $100 fine. Don't say we didn't warn you, mate! The equivalent sign in the USA might read: DANGER -- KEEP OFF TRACKS -- VIOLATORS WILL BE FINED $100 It's easier to sneak authoritarianism in the back door when the authoritarians seem like your mates, who would never use their power against you, only to keep you and your community safe.

akomtu 5y ago

I heard China has been buying Australian land in bulk, so it's not a stretch to assume that the Australian gov has been thoroughly infiltrated by now (bribes from CCP, blackmailing and so on).

bjowen 5y ago

Same. The consolidation of departments and powers into the new Department of Homeland Affairs under the current incumbency has been an ominous kind of creep towards it too. It feels inevitable that there will be support for this move from the talking-heads who are currently inciting freedumb protests, because either Terrorism or Think Of The Children. On online identities linked to passports - the US already asks this kind of in visa / ESTA applications [0]. It’s not currently mandatory to answer, but I get the impression that’ll change. It’s hard to believe the line that any of this is directed to reducing online bullying, if anything it makes doxxing trivial. Law enforcement already has powers by warrant to do much of what this contemplates, and the rest is not somewhere I want Peter Dutton et al to be able to see. [0] https://www.esta-online.com/blogs/esta-social-media-question https://www.esta-online.com/blogs/esta-social-media-question

feketegy 5y ago

History tells us that after every major tragic event like wars or pandemics society pulls to a hard leftist belief. They elect leftist parties, have more of an authotarian ideology and so on. Source: The Dictator's Handbook - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s-handbook https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s-...

rstuart4133 5y ago

"The Australian Government is planning" is possibly a wee exaggeration. It was one of 88 recommendations from a federal government committee investigating "federal parliament inquiry into family, domestic and sexual violence" [0] According to the chairman of the committee, the reasoning behind it is https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/technology/57f90da1085b5b85cca3d80d5cee6353 https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/technology/57f90da1085b5b8... : > prevent people from setting up anonymous accounts, and make them liable for defamation suits or even criminal prosecution for menacing messages or harassment. It's true this could be yet another authoritarian push from a committee chaired by the LNP (oh, what irony: a party founded on the principles of John Stuart Mill championing authoritarianism). However, in the circumstances a mixture political opportunism and gross subject matter incompetence in a cross party committee seems a far more likely explanation. [0] https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House/Social_Policy_and_Legal_Affairs/Familyviolence/Report https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Hou...