Wherein we bear witness to various tendencies in Australian politics suggestive of an authoritarian (revealed) preference in our polity In terms of the legislation we enact in Australia, there is not much support for freedom, generally construed, in Australia. This is not to say that Australia is an authoritarian state, but we are not deeply invested in staying free either, and I know which state is harder to get out of.
1 Aesthetics of Australian authority
I feel that Australian authority has had a particular branding historically Figure 1. Lech Blaine, Top Blokes:
What makes a top bloke? Does the myth of the larrikin still hold sway? And whatever happened to class in Australia?
Blaine shows how first Howard, then Morrison, brought a cohort of voters over to the Coalition side, “flipping” what was once working-class Labor culture. He weaves in his own experiences as he explores the persona of the Aussie larrikin. What are its hidden contradictions – can a larrikin be female, Indigenous or Muslim, say? – and how has it been transformed by an age of affluence? He makes the case that the time has come to bury a myth and for the nation to seize a new reality.
“Anti-authoritarianism doesn’t need the vocabulary of the bush poets, the accent of Mick Dundee or the imprimatur of the shock jocks and media tycoons to inspire social change. It sounds like Grace Tame, and acts like Behrouz Boochani, and looks like Adam Goodes.”
See also An obedient nation of larrikins: why Victorians are not revolting quoting John Hirst
The Australian people despise politicians, but the politicians can extract an amazing degree of obedience from the people, while the people themselves believe they are anti-authority.
Australians are suspicious of persons in authority, but towards impersonal authority they are very obedient.
I’m not sure the Australian larrikin is any longer so prime, TBH. This country is decreasingly white and decreasingly descended from the British working class thanks to our high immigration rates, and the boomers who grew up in that world are dying off. White nationalist parties prop the idea up, but they have been polling generally poorly of late. Looking forward to the emergence of the next archetype of power.
“Where the bloody hell are ya?” “No way to know with erosion of habeas corpus protections, mate.”
2 Whistleblower persecution
Speaking up about government wrongdoing is a dangerous business in Australia, and people go to prison for exposing crimes.
3 The defence force
I haven’t read about this yet, but here is a provocative headline for you: Soldiers shouldn’t be guided by public interest, commonwealth says:
[…] the crown, represented by Patricia McDonald SC, said on Tuesday that McBride swore an oath to render service to the [Australian Defence Forces] according to law. The oath and its notion of service, the crown argued, said nothing about acting in the public interest.
“We don’t want those in the military to be able to act by reference as something as nebulous as the public interest,” McDonald said.
“Nowhere in the oath does it refer to the public interest or say that members of the ADF have to serve in the public interest,” she said. “Had that been what was intended, it could have said that.”
Fascinating.
4 Resistance to anti-corruption reform
Various community groups, e.g. WTFUAustralia highlight the continued resistance to an anti-corruption watchdog. A case has been made that business-as-usual in Australia contains many opportunities for politicians to distribute public assets as payments to their supporters. This is not corrupt, in the sense that the appropriate legal protections are in place to enable and protect government figures in such use of public assets. Whether the Australian taxpayer would regard it as moral and just that ministers can give public value away without recompensing the public is another question; the issue is not regularly discussed.
Some of the recent behaviour of the government has seemed more suspect, in that investigations have been dropped into government ministers who appeared to be doing actual illegal things. At the same time, erosion of the effectiveness of existing corruption watchdogs proceeds.
Australian National Audit Office (2020) is one intriguing case study.
5 Public servants are barred from speaking out about politics
Well, fair enough in some sense. We probably don’t want to platform public servants to speak out about politics willy-nilly for various reasons of separation of roles. However, the way that this has played out in Australia has been remarkably strict..
6 Decaying press freedom
There has been enough recent movement on this front that some analysts have suggested1 Australia is on a trajectory, regarding the legal protections for journalists and researchers which will suppress public criticism. Some coverage of recent incidents in this vein are the following
Keiran Hardy, Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, and Nicola McGarrity, the Democracy Dossier (Hardy, Ananian-Welsh, and McGarrity 2021) is an NGO-backed summary of recent stuff. This report is not itself peer-reviewed, but its bibliography is and is worth using as a source of further references.
Annika Smethurst a national political editor at the Daily Telegraph had her home raided for revealing the state’s plans to grant itself increased surveillance powers.
Police have raided the state media agency for reporting on alleged murder by government employees Prison terms as possible for the whistleblowers in this case.
Public servants have been prosecuted for trying to bring scrutiny to alleged tax power abuse.
Citizens have been threatened with prison for revealing state spying in the aid of commercial advantage over Australia’s neighbours. See also.
Andrew Lowenthal is big on this at the moment
- Josh Szeps and Andrew Lowenthal on “Free Speech” On Twitter
- Australia Censored Episode 3: Free Speech And Civil Liberties Online With Andrew Lowenthal
Rebecca Ananian-Welsh at the University of Queensland asserts, that raids on the free press are a threat to democracy.
In addition to the rapid erosion of privacy Australians face criminalisation of failure to turn state informer, or even counseling resistance, and attacks on the free press, all without oversight by the public.
7 Suppression of dissent
There has been a slew of anti-protest laws across the country. Now the federal government can call out the army with shoot-to-kill powers to deal with protest. It is interesting to consider if the PR cost of using that move. Is it sufficient protection?
8 Banning fun
We also quite like banning things, especially fun ones. Perhaps check out the property market is pollution for some of that.
9 Creeping surveillance without oversight
I am not an extreme tinfoil-hat libertarian who thinks that state power is a priori bad. I think there is a role for police and security services. Indeed, I’m not a fan of acts of terrorism, which are one of the phenomena that can benefit from secrecy.
At the same time, when a state starts granting itself power to intercept communications without oversight, and in particular criminalizes oversight, what reason do we have to suppose that they are in fact using their powers to fight terrorism, or that the terrorism they mean is the one the rest of us mean? Any power, state or commercial, can accumulate, and needs to be balanced by checks and oversights. In an in-principle democratic state like Australia, that means democratic oversight. After a series of apparent uses of the Federal Police for partisan political ends, the government responded by granting itself increased power to seize information while criminalizing public oversight of that power, and consolidating power in the hands of fewer people.
On one hand I agree that making it too easy for anyone to go dark is bad in the age of Moore’s Law of Mad Science. The trouble is that making it hard for dangerous people to go dark is itself hard, and making it hard for normal people to maintain confidentiality is easy. Making it too easy for the state to backdoor incredibly pervasive spy technology with no oversight during the great democratic malaise is a fragile way to run a society.
In Australia it is illegal for companies to sell encryption without spyware, and where it is illegal to confess to the spyware. Private information in Australia is accessed by an unaccountable surveillance apparatus thanks to the Ass Access Bill. Police visit the home of workers at encryption-based tech firms without warrants.
No worries, mate she’ll be right, fingers crossed.
In Australia we must break your encryption, then turn around and lie to your face about it. You can read opinions about that from various commentators, e.g. ProtonVPN, Mark Nottingham, South China Morning Post.
Also of interest: new bills empowering the state to use tracking devices without a warrant, and to interrogate children.
The state may intercept information without a warrant, in a bill that has been passed without briefing to the crossbench and particularly singled out for its chilling effects on journalists.
At the same time, dedicated specialists can still have encryption. The current regime seems focussed on making sure that it has oversight over the tools used by the masses. This is more about taking it out of non-specialist usage.
10 Democratic oversight organisations
There are a number of organisations and projects which aim to make Australian politics less corrupt, more transparent and/or less authoritarian.
I will not itemise the pros and cons of each, nor endorse any in particular, but if you are interested, you could put yourself on their mailing lists. I would love some feedback on which of these are worthy and which have genuine potential to make a difference; let me know in the comments?
- Human Rights Law Centre, Democratic Freedoms program
- Australian Democracy Network
- Our Democracy
- Australia’s National Integrity System: The Blueprint for Action
- The Centre for Public Integrity
- Crikey: Corruption is pervasive in Australia — it’s time to stop the rot
- The Guardian transparency project
- WTFUAustralia
- Electronic Frontiers Australia – Promoting and protecting digital rights in Australia since 1994.
See also
11 Incoming
12 References
Footnotes
NB I do not endorse wholesale the analysis in this link, but the collection of resources it points to is an informative starting point.↩︎