Australian authoritarianism

Beneath the beach, the barbed wire

2019-08-20 — 2026-03-17

Wherein press raids, gagged servants, and whistleblowers are noted, and the encryption trade is required to carry state access, whilst Senate document compliance is seen to fall.

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Here we look at a few tendencies in Australian politics that point to an authoritarian (often only revealed in practice) preference in our politics. Things like freedom of speech, digital rights, government transparency, and so on.

In Australia, we aren’t especially excited about preserving privacy or political freedoms from state interference. That doesn’t mean Australia is an authoritarian state; it just means we’re not deeply invested in classic liberal freedoms and checks.

1 Aesthetics of Australian authority

Figure 1: The Swagmen would be a good name for a Revolutionary Guard for an authoritarian Australian nationalist state, and this, I tell you, should be their uniform. Can’t you just see it in your mind’s eye? Strewth cobber, I reckon that your managed-democracy sausage didn’t go down too well, eh? It seems she will be insufficiently right. Be a champ and step into the van with this tucker bag on your head while we waltz you off to a forced yakka camp. Alright, avva good one.

I feel Australian attitudes to authority and anti-authoritarianism have developed a distinct, local branding historically — Figure 1 In Frank Bongiorno’s essay, he quotes John Hirst on larrikins:

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.

If we haven’t heard this word before, Larrikin is a historical Australian misrule tradition.

I’m not sure the Australian larrikin is still such a primary archetype (I’m not the first to say so: Larrikins or lapdogs?). In any case, the Anglo-Australians who created the archetype are a shrinking share of the population, so maybe something else comes next?

Lech Blaine, in Top Blokes, cheekily argues:

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.

As a former prime minister might have put it…

“Where the bloody hell are ya?” “No way to know with erosion of habeas corpus protections, mate.”

I imprinted on the cypherpunk movement at an early age, so I value personal freedom, personal privacy, and government transparency. Call me an anti-authoritarian technocrat by instinct. It makes me uncomfortable to discover that those values have recently become a right-coded value in Australia, which puts me at odds with my tribe.

The minor party Fusion makes personal liberties and government transparency major policy positions (1, 2, 3).

2 Whistleblower persecution

Speaking up about government wrongdoing is dangerous in Australia; people go to prison for exposing crimes.

3 Resistance to anti-corruption reform

Various community groups, like WTFUAustralia, highlighted the continued resistance to a federal anti-corruption watchdog. People have argued that business-as-usual in Australia creates many opportunities for politicians to distribute public assets as payments to their supporters. This isn’t considered corrupt in a legal sense, because legal protections enable and protect government figures who use public assets this way. Whether Australian taxpayers would see it as moral and just that ministers can give public value away without compensating the public is another question; the issue isn’t regularly discussed, as far as I can tell.

Figure 2: Ministerial interference in sports grants was an interesting case study in clientelism in the Australian government (Australian National Audit Office 2020). To Australia’s credit this report came from our own government. To the public’s discredit, we didn’t seem to care that much about it.

Some recent behaviour from the government has seemed more suspect, in that investigations have been launched into government ministers who appeared to be doing genuinely illegal things. At the same time, the effectiveness of existing corruption watchdogs continues to erode.

4 Public servants are barred from speaking out about politics

Well, fair enough in some sense. We probably don’t want to give public servants a platform to speak out about politics willy-nilly, for various separation-of-roles reasons. However, the way this has played out in Australia has been remarkably strict.

5 Freedom of Information legislation seems not to function especially well

  • Still Shrouded in Secrecy - The Centre for Public Integrity

    Transparency is the cornerstone of democratic governance, yet Australia’s federal executive continues to undermine it through increasing non-compliance with Senate orders for documents.

    New data reveals a precipitous fall in compliance from 92% in the 1993-96 Parliament to a mere 33% currently. This decline coincides with a troubling rise in unilateral claims of Public Interest Immunity (PII), where the executive withholds information without independent oversight, potentially obscuring misconduct or politically sensitive issues.

6 Decaying press freedom

There has been enough recent development on this front that some analysts have suggested1 Australia is on a trajectory where legal protections for journalists and researchers are being weakened, which will suppress public criticism. Some coverage of recent incidents in this vein includes the following:

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 failing to become state informers, or even counselling resistance, and attacks on the free press, all without oversight by the public.

7 Suppression of dissent

We’ve seen 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’s interesting to consider whether the PR cost of using that power would stop them. Is that enough of a safeguard?

8 Banning fun

Figure 3: credit: Wowser Nation

We also quite like banning things — especially fun ones. Perhaps check out the property market is pollution for more of that.

9 Creeping surveillance without oversight

I’m not an extreme tinfoil-hat libertarian who thinks state power is a priori bad. I think there is a role for police and security services. Indeed, I’m not a fan of terrorism; it’s one of the phenomena that can benefit from secrecy.

At the same time, when a state grants itself the power to intercept communications without oversight, and even criminalizes oversight, why should we assume it’s using those powers to fight terrorism — or that its definition of terrorism matches ours? Any power, state or commercial, can accumulate power and needs to be balanced by checks and oversight. 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 the 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 difficult, while making it hard for ordinary people to keep their communications private 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 it’s even illegal to admit the spyware exists. Private information in Australia is accessed by an unaccountable surveillance apparatus thanks to the Ass Access Bill. Police visit the homes of workers at encryption-based tech firms without warrants.

No worries, mate — she’ll be right, fingers crossed.

In Australia, authorities will break our encryption, then turn around and lie to our faces about it. We can read opinions about that from various commentators, e.g. ProtonVPN, Mark Nottingham, South China Morning Post and my favourite, Bruce Schneier: Australia Threatens to Force Companies to Break Encryption.

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, under a bill that was passed without briefing the crossbench and has been particularly singled out for its chilling effects on journalists.

At the same time, dedicated specialists can still use encryption. The current regime seems focused on ensuring it has oversight of the tools used by the masses. This is more about taking encryption out of non-specialist use.

10 The defence force

I haven’t read much about this, but here’s a provocative headline for us: 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.

11 Democratic oversight organizations

There are a number of organizations and projects that aim to make Australian politics less corrupt, more transparent and/or less authoritarian.

I won’t itemize the pros and cons of each, or endorse any in particular, but if we’re interested, we could add ourselves to their mailing lists. I’d love some feedback on which of these are worthwhile and which have genuine potential to make a difference — let me know in the comments.

See also

12 Incoming

13 References

Australian National Audit Office. 2020. Award of Funding Under the Community Sport Infrastructure Program: Australian Sports Commission.
Gray. 2021. “Public Servants and the Implied Freedom of Political Communication.” Federal Law Review.
Hardy, Ananian-Welsh, and McGarrity. 2021. “Secrecy and Power in Australia’s National Security State.”
Hartley. n.d. “Still Shrouded in Secrecy.”
Jonah Aragon (text), and Firestorm Books (layout). 2025. The Protesters’ Guide To Smartphone Security Zine.
Morris, and Sorial. 2023. “Balancing Public Servants’ Responsibilities with The Implied Freedom of Political Communication: What Can We Learn from Banerji?” Political Communication.

Footnotes

  1. NB I do not endorse wholesale the analysis in this link, but the collection of resources it points to is an informative starting point.↩︎