Australia is a disaster when it comes to electronic freedoms. It might just be a lost cause at this point.
A classic example of why you really shouldn't be giving the government too much power, because even so-called "modern democracies" can and will go bad.
Backdoors in encryption, free for all to hack citizens, etc. What a mess. Hope some people fight back.
Political parties that edge closer to political power tend to slowly get invaded by careerist politicians put forth by lobby groups intent on maintaining the status quo.
This is how most Labor parties end up meek allies of capital - career politicians injected into the parties are funded by, promoted by and supported by institutions that owe their allegiance to capital. It's very much the safe route into politics that ends with a cushy job (which is critical coz most political careers end in failure). These people are often the best at co-opting political machinery (e.g. getting on the right committees, swinging important but less visible votes, figuring out how to get "difficult" members ejected based upon trumped up accusations of racism).
For anyone else taking a political career route you risk ending up unsupported, overworked, villified and subsequently ejected into unemployment.
If attempts to co-opt political groups edging closer to power using internal party political machinery fail, there's always a media under the full control of the upper classes that can villify individual politicians that are a threat, which a good 1/2-2/3 of the population will usually believe. Sometimes this works hand in hand (e.g. creating a facade of "unelectability" via the media and then using that internally to nix career progression).
None of this happens in parties with zero chance of getting into power (e.g. most green parties) so ironically they often end up with the best platforms.
It's never happened because Australians would never vote Green. Aside from having the public image as a bunch of hippies and crackpots, a huge chunk of our voter base just want to sit on their nest eggs, which the Libs (current govt.) promise to help with. Another huge chunk just vote how their parents vote.
The only reason Australians (generalising) vote at all, is because we'd get fined if we didn't. With donkey votes (vandalised ballots) counted as votes for the current government, this country exists to hold the status quo.
That's odd. In the UK spoiled ballots are quite definitely counted.
"The number of Blank Votes and Spoiled Ballots are read out at the count, along with the results and are also included in subsequent reports. Your apathy towards the political parties will be heard not just forgotten."
A "donkey vote" isn't a vandalised ballot. It's one where you vote by not considering the candidate, but voting by a simple order, usually numbering from top to bottom of the ballot.
Usually it is highlighted when an unlikely candidate gets a better than expected result, and the pundits would attribute it to the "donkey vote"
Of course they'll share it. First, non-citizens are usually even less protected than citizens. Second, secret services are also extralegal services as long as they can get away with it. Third, if they get caught, they won't be punished.
German example: The BND has been caught spying on all Germans' communication (most probably still does so), as well as connections to foreign countries. They are only supposed to watch foreign countries. So they came up with a legal theory, called "Weltraumtheorie", where satellites are in space, so outside the jurisdiction of any state. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weltraumtheorie
Later on, when this got out, it was just legalized and extended to fibre connections, because, well, that just replaces space, doesn't it?...
Theoretically. Practically, that legal theory is just a smokescreen for the willingness of the government to overlook any misdeeds by the secret services. Prosecutors and courts got the hint and didn't investigate any further. However, if you are a non-state-sponsored criminal, of course you will be prosecuted. "Qvod licet iovi, non licet bovi" is a very important legal principle ;)
Also, later on, the government just legalized what the BND was doing, thereby invalidating any future attempt at prosecution for that past crime against the BND. Yet still maintaining the illegality for everyone else.
Oh, it is definitely common for other countries to go through Australia to bypass laws or legal hurdles locally. This has been used to catch many cyber criminals.
I wrote to my local federal "representative", just as I did with the Assistance and Access Act. I convinced others to contact theirs too. But even if we convince one politician that they should vote no, I strongly suspect they would vote with their party anyway. It just doesn't feel like representative democracy any more.
> A classic example of why you really shouldn't be giving the government too much power, because even so-called "modern democracies" can and will go bad.
I'm not an expert, but I'm under the impression that Australia uses a "first past the post" / "simple majority" voting system. If that is true, calling it a "modern democracy" seems deeply misguided, democracy yes, modern no.
Not true at all. Australian federal election House of Representatives uses a preferential voting system where you have to number every candidate in your order of preference 1..N. Also voting (or at least attending) is compulsory.
Kinda, but that "almost the same" occasionally counts for some significant differences.
Australian politics is dominated by the two major parties, but the minor parties form a reasonable percentage of held seats, and occasionally neither major party holds a majority, which leads to a hung parliament where the balance of power is open to negotiation.
Not just "electronic" freedoms anymore. They're currently locked down with the lockdown enforced by their own military from what I have seen. Serves them right, too, for giving up the last backstop on the government power: guns.
You're conflating two very different things. The lockdowns are instituted at the state level, are different in every state, and are with the specific aim of (and in response to) preventing covid transmission. Adhering to a public health lockdown has nothing to do with Freedom, or lack of guns.
By making a false comparison between the two, you are muddying any argument made against the electronic freedom restrictions.
I apologize for my lack of clarity. I intended my capitalization of "Freedom" to stand in for a particular philosophy, which I did not clearly explicate.
To restate: I think the COVID lockdowns are a very different case from these electronic restrictions, in scope, duration, reason, and advisability. A critique which cites both as similar examples of government overreach is missing its mark.
I say this as a fellow Aussie who thinks both gun control and COVID lockdowns are good, sensible policies (although I'm starting to get sick of the latter): both of those things are absolutely limitations on freedom, even in the libertarian philosophical sense, and at least partly explains why Americans are so strongly against them.
Freedom is about being able to do whatever the hell you want, so long as you don't restrict the freedom of others.
It's not about being good or wise or socially responsible or even sane - it's just about nobody being able to stop you from doing whatever it is you want.
Even Libertarians understand that the situation is nuanced. For example, blackouts during wartime are the proper jurisdiction of governments. You can argue that pandemic lockdowns fall into the same category. (I’m not saying whether or not that argument is correct, but it can be made in good faith.)
But they don't. Lockdowns longer than the vaccination interval make absolutely zero sense if there exists a vaccine and the virus is endemic. Get used to the idea that you'll be getting COVID several times a year from here on out, and because you'll have antibodies, it'll be no big deal, much like with other coronaviruses today.
Importantly, there is NO PLAUSIBLE WAY to "stop COVID" by lockdowns or any other measures. Eventually you'll have to end the lockdowns, and it'll be waiting for you. COVID is the Taliban of diseases - it can't be defeated, but we can kinda sorta peacefully coexist.
In hindsight, that argument makes some sense, but back in early 2020 when we didn't know what we were fighting, there was no reason to believe it was endemic and there was no vaccine.
But we did know what we were fighting. It was clear right from the start COVID would become endemic, epidemiologists were literally saying so. It is true that there was no vaccine and nobody knew how to treat the moderate cases, but we've now had the vaccine for 9 months. In the US at least it's available to anyone who wants it (and forced upon those who don't, sometimes), and it's been that way for 4+ months.
And yet, in Australia you can be forcibly detained and quarantined (in a camp, no less), forced to disclose health information, authorities can also use whatever force necessary to enter your dwelling (this would be a perilous affair in the US in particular), and so on. That is as far from "freedom" as anything I've seen. And it's also utterly and completely pointless and counterproductive as well.
You have some weird definition of freedom with which I am not familiar. To me, freedom would mean I could, at a minimum, go wherever I want to go, and meet whoever I want to meet, without government interference.
And if there are any epidemiological recommednations, _voluntary_ compliance would too mean freedom, but _only_ voluntary.
By your definition people in prisons are "free" too - most of them are locked up for a reason. And yet they can't go anywhere, and are most definitely non-free.
This is apparently your first comment on HN. HN has a consistent value system called the guidelines. Your comment breaks many of them. Please read them and don't write like this on HN again. Thanks. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If the guns pose no threat to would-be tyrants, why would they need to take them away?
We expect our government to protect our individual rights and allowing citizens to maintain some degree of dangerousness is a nod to that effect. Even basic arms are great equalizers allowing anyone to protect themselves fairly well in practice.
>If the guns pose no threat to would-be tyrants, why would they need to take them away?
because they pose plenty of threat to each other, which was in fact one of the reasons for the biggest change in modern Australian history, the Port Arthur massacre[1]
Australia, like many other nations does not have the same tolerance that the US has when it comes to violence.
Do the new restrictions make Aussies think someone hellbent of murdering people like this wouldn't be able to do so? I see stories of people committing mass murders by driving vans through crowded streets, for example.
It is interesting that these restrictions pre-date the country's more authoritarian move. Disarming the populace occurred prior to communist takeovers, eg. Russia early 20th
Of course if someone wanted to inflict harm there are other ways to do it, but banning guns removes one very effective way of doing it. The claim that guns protect against the tyranny of government is dubious, since it seems to imply that civilians shooting at police or soldiers would improve an already dire situation - that seems unlikely.
Gun control has broad support in Australia - in a poll, 40% of respondents think the laws are fine as they are, 45% said they should be even stronger, and 6% said they were too strong.
Regular guns are sufficiently potent weapons to give the government trouble. Whatever else you might think of him and his stunt, Ammon Bundy proved that.
The various stunts that the Bundy family has pulled off prove less about guns being
> sufficiently potent weapons to give the government trouble
and prove far more about how the US federal government has and continues to be reluctant to pursue anyone that has support from "small-government" right-wing groups, even if they continuously ignore or break federal laws.
You shouldn't let the politics of the situation cloud the obvious. If they didn't have guns, it would not have played out the way it did. That doesn't mean that what they did was good, or that how the government handled it was right. It just means that the availability of guns was a critical determinative factor. That also doesn't mean they were the sole factor, either. It can also be true that the government treated them with kid gloves. But it's pretty clear that they would not have done that if they weren't armed.
True, but this is in the context of abject authoritarianism right? Under tyranny?
The US in Afghanistan, for all its successes and failures was on a nation building adventure, hoping to win hearts and minds. It was following rules of engagement, not operating an outright slaughterhouse.
In the context of abject authoritarianism, the government will just straight up execute you, or crush you with a tank like the PRC at Tiananmen Square.
This feels like a romanticized Lone Ranger against Big Brother kind of thing. The Fantasy of the Good Guy with a Gun™. I don't think it plays out that way in real life.
The worst the government can do in a country with 300M+ guns in circulation is "boil the frog", and hope to dear god the pot does not boil over at any point. It's not a fantasy. It's literally how the US was founded in the first place.
Well, yes, that's how it was founded in the 1700s with slaves, flintlock rifles, no suffrage, and most people had syphilis. A lot has changed since then. Like, well, tanks.
A counter narrative would be the Cultural Revolution as I pointed out. China's population in 1966 at the start of the Cultural Revolution was about 750mm people. By the time Tiananmen Square happened, it was 1.1b people. I'm looking for the numbers but I believe guns were pretty common.
Government might try to go house to house in red states. They'd encounter resistance everywhere, in innumerable forms. The government would be fighting with people defending their homes and their way of life. It would go very badly for the government.
US citizenry is certainly much better armed than the Taliban, which has proven to be more than enough. 2nd amendment is so high on the list for this exact reason.
Chronology correlates with importance here. IIRC, however, the Bill of Rights was passed as a whole, though, not piecemeal. So it could be that it's 2nd because the Founding Fathers thought it was important. "Security of a free State" and all that. Seems pretty important to me.
I mean that's kind of interpretrative. I could similarly say that it wasn't in the Constitution to begin with so it can't have been that important to them. Or that it came before they thought about giving basic rights to anyone who isn't a white man so maybe we shouldn't read too closely into the order or rely on someone from the 18th century to inform our priorities.
Oh, they have thought about it, and very early on at that. When Jefferson was drafting the Declaration of Independence, it had this bit in it:
"He [king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce."
This was removed from the final version during committee review. Much later, Jefferson explained what he believed the reason for this was:
"The clause...reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under these censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."
The supreme irony here, of course, is that Jefferson himself was a slave owner until his death. And he had something to say on that, as well; written in 1820, on the occasion of the Missouri Compromise:
"... as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."
the constitution, as written, recognized the same rights for all men. The institution of slavery/discrimination was at odds with what was written from the very beginning
Not women, though. Multi-century statecraft is a long, iterative process. The founding fathers were hardly perfect, and that doesn't detract from the scope of achievement.
I agree, the characters behind the writing and their faults are irrelevant. The ideas are what matter, and they should be timeless or they need to be updated, eg. for women
In general, it's perfectly legal for US residents to own RPGs, artillery, tanks etc. If operational, they're classified as "destructive devices", so they have to be registered with the feds, and every transfer happens with their approval as well. It's also very expensive, obviously. But still possible.
It's a good thing we don't all have guns like folks in the States. Not too many mass murders here. And if you think you're protected from your government, you're talking about guys with small arms vs other guys with tanks.
Why compare to the States specifically, though? There are several countries in Europe that have much more liberal gun laws than you guys do (although also much more stringent than American ones), and similarly don't have a problem with mass murders.
A classic example of why you really shouldn't be giving the government too much power, because even so-called "modern democracies" can and will go bad.
Backdoors in encryption, free for all to hack citizens, etc. What a mess. Hope some people fight back.