I've lived to see this kind of thing enacted in a good portion of the Anglosphere and my visceral reaction is to engage in a combination of civil disobedience and a determination to undermine every overstep made.
With regards to things like the Aussie requirement for phone check-ins every 15 minutes or they will deploy police to follow up and confirm your location, turn off the phone and make them eat the cost of having to deploy all available police resources just to see if people are submitting to the whim of the government every 15 minutes. Bonus if you opt to answer the door naked and claim you were busy showering/having sex/aligning your chakras/whatever.
Any bureaucracy will naturally follow the path of least resistance. It is your job to make it more painful for them to pursue their goals than it is to leave you alone.
You seem to be referring to the South Australia Home Quarantine app [1]. There has been a lot of misinformation circulating about this app recently. I'd just like to clear up some things:
The app only applies to people that need to quarantine, not the general population.
The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being forced to use the app.
It is a way for authorities to make sure people are quarantining correctly, and to follow up cases of contact if people break their isolation bubble. Police are not arresting people for failing to check in. (My guess is that they would reset your isolation duration, follow up contacts and/or move you into a managed quarantine).
>> rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being forced to use the app.
Download the app or we send you to a camp? That isn't much of a choice. I'd say it is about as non-choice as possible while still meeting the literal definition.
If you want to present an argument against quarantine being needed or warranted, please go ahead. Checking in on the app is the least intrusive of the three options - quarantine under guard (usually in a hotel, like the one I'm in right now), quarantine at home with police visits tio ensure compliance, or quarantine at home checking in to the app once or twice a day.
In this context, getting hysterical about the least intrusive option is weird.
Not from Australia, but as a citizen the precaution I would take is not to get tested while such a quarantine policy is in effect.
Don't know, my country does some checks like calling people on the phone, the rest relies on trust. Seems to work just as well.
So I see a lot of room to criticise "the least intrusive" option as well. This is security done wrong. Not slightly wrong, detrimental towards the goal of security. If people get uncompliant, no such measures will be efficient.
Curious what country this is where things are working "just as well" as Australia?
The only major places I can think of in the "developed" world faring similarly* to Australia statistically (deaths per capita) are South Korea & Taiwan; both have had similar citizen monitoring.
* leaving out NZ here obvs which is faring significantly better
I live in NZ, and after a recent exposure to Covid, I experienced said daily check in calls from the government that really relied on trust (honesty) more than anything, as far as I’m aware — I suppose it’s possible they were tracking my phone in some way to ensure my location stayed contained/consistent? Seems highly unlikely though.
I will add that if I’d been caught leaving the house, outside of a short daily workout, I’d have been liable for a fine and/or jail time.
Japan for example. Also an island, South Korea is too for all practical purposes. Australia isn't even half an Italy, although the population is admittedly mostly concentrated. Still, you have to compare it to countries which can only be reached by ship or plane.
There is merit for harsh policies if you can prevent any case, what NZ did relatively successfully. But admitting that it failed is hard to convey politically.
> There is merit for harsh policies if you can prevent any case
This seems quite absolutist; why the all or nothing binary of "any case"?
There is merit for harsh policies, to a degree, if you can reduce fallout, to any relatively significant degree.
This may be subjective, but fwiw if Australia were actually monitoring the population via app, requiring check-in every 15 mins & deploying authorities otherwise (a conclusion some commenting here did seem to jump to at first, despite the otherworldly logistics that would entail), then of course questions would need to be asked about authoritarian escalation.
But enforced mandatory quarantine explicitly for those choosing to travel (something that's even been done in some European countries too), given the stakes at hand, really doesn't seem like an overstep relatively speaking.
It's also worth noting that travel in Australia is extremely restricted anyway, so the number of people who are subject to this is pretty tiny.
> There is merit for harsh policies if you can prevent any case, what NZ did relatively successfully. But admitting that it failed is hard to convey politically.
Note that the South Australia app under discussion is in an Australian state which, like NZ, is relatively successful at preventing “any case”. It seems like the last case necessitating a 7-day lockdown in SA was almost 2 months ago and before then they hadn’t instituted a lockdown since Nov 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_South_Aus...
In terms of vaccination coverage, they're doing poorly (just a few ranks below Brazil). They're also currently in lockdown, dealing with their first true spike of cases and struggling to contain it.
That's true. But it is also true that, in some of those countries, people fail to follow those rules. For a worst-case example, the Delta variant in Argentina was traced down to a man [1] who ignored the self-isolation rules and visited shopping malls and a restaurant.
I can be probably persuaded that some specific regions can do well with voluntary quarantine. But I'd rather trust the local authorities to know what the best approach for their people is.
Even Norway had lots of cases tracked to people breaking quarantine, after which police started checking up on them. I’d say an argument for not enforcing the quarantine in the hottest phase of a pandemic is in effect allowing such events to compromize things. Maybe you can argue for that, but we need to at least be clear on this detail.
Indeed, there are countries that have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with their policies. But I can't think of a country off the top of my head that has applied laissez-faire Covid controls but also recorded very low numbers of deaths.
Japan, with a population of around 126 million, only had 16,471 deaths so far from covid, a death rate of 0.013%. As a point of reference, there are around 20k suicide deaths annually in Japan. Japan didn't use harsh/legally enforced lockdowns; almost all their measures have been voluntary: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/covid-19-cases-su....
The New Deal occurred before WW2 as a way to simulate things out of the Great Depression. Turns out war is even a bigger economic stimulus package than social programs.
I think you're possibly confused about what we're talking about here - those weren't restrictions on personal freedoms. A better analogy is blackout laws, which people railed against in the exactly the same way as lockdown laws. But obviously those powers went as soon as possible - literally the day Hitler died in fact.
a blackout law keeps an enemy bomber from dropping a bomb on my house. IMO, if you say to a rational person "keep your blinds down or else the nazi's will drop a bomb on your house" they'll say "gee that sounds like a good idea."
While in modern times, if you say "shut down the economy, increase alcoholism, suicides, mental health issues, homelessness, poverty, and inflation to defeat a virus with over a 99% recovery rate that really only effects old and unhealthy people" a rational person would raise their eye brow and say "that sounds suspicious and a great way to cover the fact that the last 12 years of money printing is about to implode"
> IMO, if you say to a rational person "keep your blinds down or else the nazi's will drop a bomb on your house" they'll say "gee that sounds like a good idea."
Your opinion is not factually supported. A million people were prosecuted for breaking lockdown laws in the UK.
> Your opinion is not factually supported. A million people were prosecuted for breaking lockdown laws in the UK.
That's his point. He's drawing a contrast to blackout laws,by claiming that an individual sees direct benefit from compliance (not getting bombed) while breaking lockdown doesn't create a lot of risk for the vast majority of offenders.
Ie, if a hypothetical person was 100% optimizing for self-interest, they would not break blackout laws but would break lockdown laws. This is a dramatic difference in dynamics when seeking to understand differences in compliance.
> Ie, if a hypothetical person was 100% optimizing for self-interest, they would not break blackout laws but would break lockdown laws.
Yes… except that’s the other way around from what happened in reality. People did break blackout lockdown rules but they generally didn’t break COVID lockdown rules.
You said "breaking lockdown rules", not "breaking blackout rules", specifically when contrasting policies that heretofore in the conversation were described as "blackout" and "lockdown".
Though it sounds like you're saying you misspoke, and intended to say that people broke the blackout rules. That makes a lot more sense, thanks for clarifying
In the first six months of lockdown in the UK 6500 prosecutions were undertaken by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). These included non-lockdown flouting crimes which were simply flagged as 'Corona Virus related', such as threatening to cough on somebody whilst 'infected' and stealing items deemed essential for dealing with the pandemic.[1]
Your assertion that a million people were prosecuted seems far fetched.
This is a tangential interesting point, not a disagreement with your comment. But despite the mental health costs of the pandemic and associated policy, there's a growing body of evidence indicating that suicides do not appear to have risen, across many countries. Eg https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n834
Honestly, that was mostly our government being incompetent. If our PM wasn't bumbling from one disaster to another, he probably would have tried to implement something similar to what Australia has proposed.
When it all started in February 2020 that's exactly what Australia was doing, but a minority could not be trusted and broke quarantine and consequently COVID started spreading. At that point the model changed to mandatory quarantine in a government facility. There was broad community support for that change. In an ideal world people would have liked to have stuck with the voluntary approach, but most were realistic enough to see that an untrustworthy minority were wrecking it for everyone.
This comment is revealing and truthful. It's almost been 2 years and most people have suffered. They blame and identify a minority for their suffering.
It's one way that if you look at history minorities have also been identified.
Scapegoat behaviour from the crowd is a response to senseless suffering and pain. It actually makes those who scapegoat others feel better and people want to feel better. Why would anyone volunteer to feel worse? Most people don't have empathy for those who scapegoat others but the pandemic is a great way to see this happening at various stages in real time across the world. Some countries don't have any, others more, some loads, some vary according to lockdown severity, others don't.
How can one blame an invisible virus or an abstract political decision when humans traditionally blame each other?
What's the end result if you buy into scapegoating as a personal psychological tactic? We will find out.
The important take away from these sorts of restrictions, though, are such state powers set to end when the pandemic is controlled or terminated? I'm not from Australia, so I can't speak to their power systems, but almost every time our federal institutions take a more broader domestic power towards spying, restricting speech, restricting movement, etc. etc. those powers don't come back at the end of the panic, whatever that panic may have been. Some of those expanded powers (PRIZM) we have to find out about through leaks, to the detriment of the people who leaked the information for the greater good.
I guess I don’t understand this concern, because it doesn’t seem historically accurate.
There have been many pandemics in the past. Governments have responded in the past with aggressive quarantines. Yet, before this current pandemic, no country had aggressive quarantines in place.
These kinds of restrictions imposed by governments have historically disappeared with high reliability when the situation calling for them has ended.
Maybe, but in the past no government has had access to the tracking data we are freely allowing them to have to us.
I sound like I'm an anti vax conspiracy theorist, and I don't want to put that across, but there is a strong precedent for abuse of power in every government across the globe. A lot of draconian measures ease when the panic is over, but shadows of them seem to remain in place, at least in the U.S. (again, I can't speak for Australia).
EDIT:
Here's an example of how anti Covid measures are being used to stop protests.
> A lot of draconian measures ease when the panic is over, but shadows of them seem to remain in place, at least in the U.S
I'm not sure I fully buy that. What authoritarian powers were left in place as a hangover from the Spanish Flu emergency powers that governors wielded at the time? Historically, the executive of governments have had _incredible_ emergency powers during infectious diseases crises, but I don't know that I've seen those powers extended indefinitely.
I'm absolutely wary of handling governments unlimited and unchecked power, even in emergencies. I generally agree with your concerns about governments being reluctant to return powers once they're granted. But I do think it's important not to overact and refuse to allow any government action on the other side of the equation.
In the given Australia example, the state is exercising quarantine powers to stop an infectious disease. That sounds...not that novel or expansive to me. Nor does it seem like something the government will have an interest in beyond the pandemic. Quarantines, I think, are a really strong example of an _extreme_ limitation on liberty and expansion of the state's powers that are tolerated during a pandemic but absolutely abhorrent outside of one. It's also an example of powers that almost never are extended indefinitely beyond the pandemic.
> Here's an example of how anti Covid measures are being used to stop protests.
Turning to the cited article, I don't think it supports the position you're stating. The author appears to be discussing legislatures using the COVID emergency as a _distraction_, but doesn't present any anti-COVID measures being used to stop protests.
I'll admit that each of the bills passed and signed are an abhorrent restriction on the right to protest and the right to free speech and assembly. Accepted and granted. But none of those bills appear to be anti-COVID measures in any way. As far as I can tell from reviewing the legislation and reviewing contemporaneous articles, the only connection to COVID was the fact that the public was distracted.
The South Dakota bill for example (https://mylrc.sdlegislature.gov/api/Documents/69887.pdf) doesn't mention "COVID", or "pandemic". The only mention of "disease" is in the definition of intoxication (to explicitly say it is not a mental disease).
The Kentucky bill is similar (https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/20rs/hb44.html). It doesn't mention "COVID", "pandemic", or "disease", and doesn't appear in _any_ way to be designed as an anti-COVID measure.
The only anti-COVID measures discussed in the article by the author are praised as a measured and reasonable response. The only "use" of the pandemic by the legislatures was as a distraction.
I do agree that anti-COVID measures targeted at public protest should receive significantly more scrutiny than many other anti-COVID measures.
Your comment conflates two meanings of the word "minority". The first meaning relates to a group with a shared inherent property, such as race, and is irrelevant here. The second meaning, which I used, simply means a small number of people.
It's not an invisible virus. With the right tools we can see and track it. Up until the recent delta outbreak, COVID was being accurately tracked and contained in Australia, with the source of almost all transmissions known. Under these conditions, quarantine is pragmatic, not abstract.
These are probably good/important points in a totally different context, but in this discussion, talking about how the virus has been transmitted, and the effect of infected individuals to quarantine or not, it feels a little strange. problematic moral impulses notwithstanding, the virus does indeed transmit person to person
you forgot number 4, be treated like an adult and just stay home for 2 weeks and not have the government check to see if you're at home like you're on house arrest while not having committed a crime
This a certainly an option but not a realistic one. Culturally speaking it's impossible to trust anyone (adult or otherwise) to comply with something like this.
People have been getting sick literally since the dawn of man. I knew many co-workers who'd come in with a cold or a fever and get the rest of the office sick. Now, there's a virus that's so dangerous you need a test to know if you're even sick with it but people are demanding everyone stays home so nobody catches it. If you don't want to catch it, stay home, but don't ask myself or others to change their behavior
Did you just say you are under guard, being forced to stay in a hotel? And this is acceptable? Do you have covid, were you exposed to one person who had it? Did they provide proof of this or just tell you and cart you away?
Bound to repeate history looks more and more valid everyday.
I don't. My comment was to the nature of the "choice" not whether or not the mandate was warranted. Let's not pretend that people have options when they really don't. There is no need to dress it up. In times of disease, governments do sometimes order people to do things. Let's not kid ourselves. Personal choice, personal freedom, is set aside.
If you already understood that the quarantine is what is limiting people’s choice and not the app then why did you bring it up as an issue with the app?
I didn't say anything about the app. My comment was about the choice between app and being sent to a facility, about how that isn't much of a choice. I would make the same comment if the "choice" was between a facility and a vaccine, or a drug, or counseling sessions, or paying a fine. Nearly anything is better than being sent to a camp and so any such binary alternative isn't much of a real choice.
You have the choice to nose dive off the Burj Khalifa, sign over all of your assets to me, or record a chicken dance video and put it on YouTube.
OP's point is giving a set of all undesirable options which under normal circumstances and given freedom, you would decline all the options. "Choice" tends to imply you have at least some desirable options or at least have the option to refuse all of the choice options (not choosing has to be an option in the proposed choice).
If you're given a set of constrained options where you must choose and none of the choices are desirable, you're really given highly constrained freedom to the point no one considers it freedom. It's even worse when it's clear that most the constraints (choice options) point to only one option for any sane "chooser."
Sure, you could jump off the Burj Khalifa but is that really a viable option? Pretty much everyone would record a chicken dance video and choose minimal public humiliation over the other options. I gave options but they're not really options, not from any sane decision making perspective. That is the illusion of choice to make people feel like they have control over direction. We have a lot of this going on in society these days, where people have options but the options lead to one obvious path, meaning they have no viable alternative options.
Quarantine in a hotel isn't scalable. You can't suddenly quarantine the whole population. Phone tracking is just a pen and paper away from that. The leap from 'tracking the infected' to 'tracking everyone because ~reasons~' is tiny, especially given the pace Australia is running towards stuff like that.
The "least" intrusive option is still a massive government overreach. They love doing this. We could just let you go back to normal if you only show us your papers please.
This a is a mind game they're playing. Show you all the horrible things they could mandate to make the less horrible one sound better.
I'll present an argument against quarantine being warranted: Covid-19 is an endemic virus for which there are no sterilizing vaccines and hence "zero Covid" policy frameworks are an insane and hopeless attempt to turn back the tides. You will either live under these restrictions for the rest of your lives, or give them up and eventually be exposed to the virus.
Consider, however, that being exposed to the virus after being vaccinated reduces your risk of death and/or hospitalization by a factor of 10-20x. The assumption that there are “no sterilizing vaccines” is a little questionable too - even against Delta, the FDA approved vaccines are showing 40-50% immunity against infection, i.e. sterilizing immunity.
Zero Covid countries like NZ and Australia that re-open to the world once their populations hit 80% vaccination will have prevented many deaths among their population.
The real least intrusive option would be to just ask people to quarantine and trust that they do it as their civic duty. You could also offer a small support check at the end if they completed the quarantine without being seen out of the house or offer payment if they download the app and allow location permission. There are so many ways to run a quarantine program without resorting to locking people away or making them use the equivalent of a house arrest bracelet. It's concerning that you don't even see how totalitarian this is. These people weren't convicted of any crime, they caught a highly contagious virus that we will never eradicate and will be living with for the rest of our lives.
Become like what? Do you have an argument against quarantine? Would tens of thousands of deaths been better than asking travellers to check in for a couple of weeks on arrival, during a pandemic?
I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make.
I'm British by the way. The UK also has guarded quarantine centres in hotels for people coming in from what it considers “red zones”
It's absolutely insane to see young, Australian people completely embrace the Covid propaganda and totalitarian nonsense.
Say what you want about boomers, but at least they used to be somewhat cool in their 20s, during the 70s. Having unprotected sex, doing drugs, having long hair, listening to rock'n'roll, protesting the wars.
In Australia we have 25-year-old boomers, scared of absolutely everything, and cheering on the government to govern us even harder. A complete nightmare.
Quarantine for what? That's what you do with sick people. Whatever is going on in Australia has long ago left the realm of sane quarantine procedure. It will be 2022 soon, and the Australians are trying to prevent interstate spread of COVID-19. It's madness.
Precisely. It is the best cover up for global domination while distracting populations with concern trolling around a virus that is not all that significantly worse than the flu given the level of risk across all age groups.
Heart failure and car accidents claim a higher risk.
There's no magic number, but CoVID-19 is the most serious public health emergency in probably a century.
> we need to close everything for years on end?
Countries that properly managed the pandemic locked down hard for a few weeks, eliminated the virus, and then reopened. They've been back to normal (or something close to it) for most of the time since.
China, the most populous country on Earth, has no community transmission.
I don't know what went wrong in Mongolia, because I haven't been following that country, but China and New Zealand have demonstrated that with a good public health system, elimination is possible and sustainable.
China also didn't have official community transmission in December 2019 yet we were seeing people coming out of airplanes sick constantly, which allowed us to calculate their infection rates, which were then released publicly when they couldn't be hid any longer.
Today there are no flights out of China and we have to trust the same government when they say they have no transmissions.
Need I point to the centuries long history of communist regimes hiding mass deaths?
> China also didn't have official community transmission in December 2019 yet we were seeing people coming out of airplanes sick constantly, which allowed us to calculate their infection rates
No, this did not happen. Infection rates weren't calculated until January 2020. Nobody even knew there was anything like SARS spreading in Wuhan until 27 December 2019.
Within 72 hours of the first test result indicating a SARS-like virus, it was all over Chinese social media, and even CCTV reported on the outbreak. And of course, it only took a few weeks afterwards for the hospitals to become overloaded with sick patients.
> Today there are no flights out of China
This is simply untrue. Just to take one example, yesterday alone, there were 9 flights from Shanghai Pudong Airport to LAX.
The situation in China right now is obvious: the virus is gone. Just ask any of your friends/colleagues who live there.
> There's no magic number, but CoVID-19 is the most serious public health emergency in probably a century.
Do you know what AIDS is?
Unlike Covid which kills something under 1 in 100 people it infects AIDS until the mid 90s was a death sentence for anyone who got it.
I remember being in an emergency room and the nurse asking for people to give blood because their blood banks were tainted and the doctors could either let patients die from from blood loss or in 10 years from AIDS.
I have no idea why that whole pandemic has been pushed down the memory hole. It's like everyone born after 1985 doesn't even know what it is, let alone what it was like to see people you know just wilt and die.
>Countries that properly managed the pandemic locked down hard for a few weeks, eliminated the virus, and then reopened. They've been back to normal (or something close to it) for most of the time since.
Countries that don't have it keep having to lock down for two weeks every three months. NZ is the most successful and they are currently in their 5th national lockdown.
What kind of a question is that? It's a horrible disease, and it shows how important it is to have a good public health system.
> Countries that don't have it keep having to lock down for two weeks every three months.
China hasn't had a widespread lockdown since early 2020. In recent outbreaks, lockdowns have been very geographically limited. For example, the Guangzhou outbreak in May-June 2021 was ended without locking down more than just a few districts of the city. Mass testing, contact tracing, and testing requirements for people leaving the city were sufficient.
I'm in Western Australia. I'm delighted with prevention of interstate Covid. The freedom to do whatever you want is pretty enjoyable to be honest, and not worrying that family members will die of Covid is even better.
I wish this was a joke, or fake news. But no, once they control where you can go, when you can go there, etc, it's not a big jump for them to demand control over what you put in your body. It's for your own safety, after all.
Of course it did, exactly because there was a lockdown that prevented many COVID deaths.
If there hadn't been a lockdown, many more people would have died from COVID than now died from drinking. Sweden for example, famous for its non-lockdown, suffered 10 times as many COVID deaths than neighboring Norway with lock-down (and alcohol).
Quarantine has never been strictly for sick people. It is for people who might possibly be infected. You can see this in the etymolgy of the word "quarantine": it refers to the forty days (quarantena in Venetian) that people arriving by ship were required to wait on board before disembarking in Venice during the time of the plague. The whole idea is to wait for the full incubation period of a pathogen, to make sure someone is not infected, before letting them out in the general society.
In contrast, when someone is separated from society because they are known to be infected, that is called "isolation."
I'm familiar with the etymology. This makes a lot of sense for the bubonic plague. Frankly the Venetians would scoff at what we've done to our societies over a disease so tame (measured by overall rate of survival, individual circumstances can be tragic). It was also an era when people had few rights, no vaccines, no access to treatment.
Surely, we should aspire to be better than 14th-century Venice. To not treat people as if they are nothing more than viral vectors. Instead many would trade away what little control over our own lives we still have in exchange for imagined safety from a virus we will all contract eventually. That the vast majority of people have no issues recovering from.
It's not the plague. It's not Ebola. It's not the worst case scenario we were rightfully concerned about in early 2020. How this hasn't sunk in yet for most people is just baffling to me. Then I look around and see lots of motivated reasoning and state-sponsored propaganda about a permanent transition to remote work, increased government surveillance, curtailing the movement of citizens, and other social initiatives various coalitions were already working towards, that are of course suddenly "absolutely necessary" because of a "once in a lifetime pandemic", and it becomes a little clearer.
Spot on, and once the endless waves of variants no longer convince the submissive within our populations that all of these massive changes to life are necessary, the same measures will be used during a questionably endless "climate crisis" to justify the retention of this newfound power they've gained.
You said that quarantine was only for sick people. That's simply wrong.
It's not the plague, but it has killed around 10 million people worldwide, and 700 thousand people in the US alone.
Countries that have a zero-CoVID policy, such as New Zealand, China and Australia (or at least some states in Australia), must use quarantine to prevent reimportation of the virus. For such a policy to work, it is critical that even people who do not appear to be sick be quarantined.
You may argue that China, New Zealand et al. should not have pursued a zero-CoVID policy (and in that case, you should be prepared to argue that the 4 million deaths that would likely have resulted in China would have been acceptable), but given that they've pursued this policy, they need to quarantine international travelers, even if they appear to be healthy.
People die. My loved ones and I have made peace with that. Life is not about avoiding death.
10 million is frankly a drop in the bucket. We don't shut down society and hand over control of our lives over car accidents, heart failure, or anything else that kills hundreds of millions.
The behaviors that lead to those deaths are absolutely a form of social contagion and in no world are they less important or relevant because they're not caused by a communicable disease. People could choose to stop the world for those, too. It would probably work. That we choose not to, or rather, that we understand there are tradeoffs involved, does not make us callous murderers.
I feel truly sorry for people who believe that "zero Covid" is a possibility. We have documented evidence of animal reservoirs for the disease. You can vaccinate every single person on the planet and it will not eradicate this virus.
Particularly now that we are aware that 1) our vaccines are not sterilizing and 2) we have evidence of a vaccine resistant mutation on the horizon.
If you want to play whack a mole with restrictions and injections your entire life please do so of your own accord and stop trying to force the rest of us to live in this dystopia with you. I have a short life to live.
Humanity has lost its tragic sense. That there are things outside of our control. This reality does however tend to catch up with each and every one of us.
As New Zealand and China have shown, it is within our power to avert almost all deaths from CoVID-19. They have gotten through the pandemic with orders of magnitude fewer deaths per capita and far greater everyday freedoms than most of the world. Quarantine for international travelers is one of the tools they have used.
"People die" as an excuse for letting millions of people die of preventable causes is a terrible attitude to take.
China is lying and New Zealand is one of the most remote places in the entire world.
I hate to be this blunt but you're kidding yourself if you think this was ever an option for the United States.
With respect to "preventable causes", I already responded to that point. Most death is preventable. Or at least delay-able. That does not mean everyone agrees with your scorched earth campaigns to prevent it.
Here on HN, there are plenty of people who live in China, or who have family/friends/colleagues in China. They can tell you what the situation in the country is.
For more than a year, bars, restaurants and most other things have been open, mass gatherings have been allowed, etc. In densely packed cities with Guangzhou and Shanghai, what do you think R0 would be under those circumstances? Any community transmission would quickly grow into a major outbreak, just like in Wuhan in December 2019.
Yet there's no such outbreak. And no, there's no conceivable way the government could hide such an outbreak.
That's why it's simply not credible to claim that there is any substantial community transmission in China.
The other thing is that you can look at how rigorous the reaction is to every new case of community transmission. There have been small outbreaks in China over the last year, but they've been contained using contact tracing, mass testing, and lockdowns (usually only of individual neighborhoods, but sometimes of cities).
It's a third of Australia that's gone insane. The rest have checked out and completely ignored it. It's like a long holiday where you get paid to pretend you work.
But you can't say that in polite company so you just have ~40 percent compliance with whatever insanity is going on now. Hilariously enough the compliance from police is lower than from the general population so basically we have politicians and the terminally online talking about masks, jabs and sign ins and the people who are supposed to enforce it not being bothered with it.
Standing in front of the super market something like one in three pull out their phone, unlock it, point it at the check in qr code and not log in.
I'm reminded of the latter days of the USSR where no one took anything the government said seriously and just did whatever they felt like. Which does not bode well for the current incarnation of Australia long term.
I mean to say the modern courtiers of the decrepit political class are the problem and warrior-kings at the head of barbarians are the solution. Hoppe would call this natural order.
It’s a consensual decision on behalf of the individual - when you travel from a high risk region to another it’s understood by all parties you will need to quarantine for a period to prevent unknowingly spreading the virus on untold others. Which to me just seems you know, ethical and responsible?
> The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility.
> Nobody is being forced to use the app.
If there’s a cost difference, I’d say that “forced” is an unfairly neutral word to use.
SA is charging upwards of $3000 (for 1 adult, plus $1000 each additional adult, plus $500 per child) for hotel quarantine [1], and though I can’t find a definitive source, your link does say it is intended to be a “cost effective alternative to medi-hotel quarantine”.
So for a family of 2 adults, 2 kids, being charged $5000 to avoid using the app isn’t real freedom. If it means the difference between putting food on the table or not, it’s no choice at all.
My guess is you didn't read there are three options. In most countries of the world (including mine) you get only two options, yet in Australia three. Two of them being free of cost: at home with human checks, or at home with app checks. Please take down your costs strawman, it's not helping the debate.
Even if it's "just" for 2 weeks of quarantine, being able to check-in within 15 minutes seems unreasonable. What about taking a nap, taking a bath, cooking, etc.?
Many other countries trust their citizens enough that such draconian measures weren't required even at the height of the pandemic. Not to mention now.
I'd be curious how violations to check-in are handled in practice.
> What about taking a nap, taking a bath, cooking, etc.?
If you fail to check in, they try again a bit later on, if you fail again it falls back to the non app-enabled method of a police check at your home.
The app is voluntary and allows you to be at home rather than in a facility, and to not have random police checks. It's a convenience, not an imposition.
> Many other countries trust their citizens enough that such draconian measures weren't required even at the height of the pandemic.
In some like the UK, that trust was misplaced, and compliance with isolation rules was under 50%.
> I'd be curious how violations to check-in are handled in practice.
By a second request and then a police visit, the same police visit you'd get if you opted not to use the app at all.
> In some like the UK, that trust was misplaced, and compliance with isolation rules was under 50%.
More like, people in the UK more correctly assessed the risk of COVID. While is a dangerous disease, it's not so dangerous that it is worth giving up all of your civil rights to avoid it. In Australia the cure seems to be worse than the disease.
I've had to do a 14 day quarantine in the UK at home, and frankly, it was a bit of a joke. Literally no one has ever checked we were actually at home, the amount of trust in the population is insane over here. We actually stayed at home the entire time, but I know people who didn't, they had to go to work to make a living and the fine was like a £100.
In contrast, in Poland if you are told to quarantine you will get occassional and random visits from the police to see if you are actually at home, and the fine for breaking the quarantine is insane, it's like 30k PLN(about $10k USD).
I've been to Poland for a private b-day party over a long weekend in April this year (Thursday--Monday). When this country was marked red.
I came by train from Berlin. The rules were to have a negative test not older than 24hs and to quarantine after arrival. No one ever checked. Go figure.
This happened: Thursday evening, just after I arrived, my host said: let's go to tango (we are social tango dancers).
We drove to a (previously) regular event which is in a park in Warsaw, close to the center, that weekday. It was on as if nothing had ever happened.
I know the tango scene in Warsaw a bit. Everyone was there. All the familiar faces. About 80-100 people. And even some people who live like 100km away. I couldn't believe it.
Dancers I talked to there told me this was going on for months. "Basically there never was a lockdown for social dancers." they said.
"At the beginning you had to register for 'classes' but as soon as the doors were closed it was a normal dancing event. No masks, no distancing etc."
Restaurants were not allowed to open at the time. So what happened Friday was straight out of a movie.
We drove to a brand new residential building in a side street. Approaching it the door opened and woman in a black mini dress welcomed us. Immediately checking our names on a list.
Once she had found us two thugs in tailored suits who would befit the extras list of any action summer blockbuster appeared behind her; out of nowhere.
Inside they escorted us to an entrance next to the building's elevators that led through a narrow hallway, past a busy restaurant kitchen into a top notch Italian joint.
No one wore a mask but amazingly only every 2nd table was being used. There was a DJ in the middle and my friend told me: "This turns into a private club from around 10:30pm."
The front side windows had blinds that were tightly shut. From the outside the restaurant must have looked completely shut down.
After dinner, at around 11pm, my friend suggested we go to a (real) club. But we had to wait for at least 30mins, he said.
Because the police were blocking the back door through which we entered -- waiting for their cut. As they did every night at 11pm.
I asked him how he'd know. He said: "I spoke to the owner when this happened before and we couldn't leave."
The owner and the head waitress were pulling together the evening's proceedings on a tablet. Then they stuffed an envelope. My friend told me he had asked the owner and the police would expect to pocket 10% of the evening's earnings.
And they they wanted to see the proceedings on the tablet.
When we exited the building through the side street entrance again, at around 11:30pm, the police car just pulled out in front of us.
The club we went to afterwards was also in an old residential building in the center. Through a narrow old door into a wide, low ceiling hallway leading to the yard. Stuffed with rubble and old bicycles.
In the middle of the side of the hallway a narrow stairway leading down to the basement.
About 300 young guests, seemingly drunk, in a space of maybe 300sqm -- minus bars & toilets. It was so crowded you couldn't drop to the floor if you lost your balance.
I wasn't ok to enter there so went to my friend's house instead but I saw it for maybe 30 secs.
So Poland, yeah. Maybe someone got fined 30k PLN for breaking some COVID rules. Maybe.
Literally nothing that you wrote surprises me :P Sounds absolutely on par for Polish approach to these kinds of "problems".
The main key point here is that you arrived by train - and indeed, trains are not really checked at all. But if you came by plane, you'd absolutely be entered into the system and you'd have police coming over every other day to see if you're actually there. You were just lucky because of your mode of transport. I've heard similar stories from people crossing the border by car - also no hassle at all.
And to add to that - if you were actually diagnosed with Covid, your name would also be entered into the system and police would be checking if you are at home. I know my entire family were checked every day when they got ill.
I didn't mention Poland as some sort of great foolproof implementation - just that if you are actually "in the system", police checks if you are doing the quarantine or not. In the UK we were very much "in the system" and literally no one cared - we didn't even get a phone call to ask if we're actually at home. Literally nothing. Again, I'm not surprised you escaped the whole thing if you arrived by train.
Rather have the country focus on a mass vaccination drive than trying to do a full China style lockdown.
In hindsight the unlimited money spent on healthcare and a collective willingness to take the corona pill works better than whatever Australia is trying to do.
>Rather have the country focus on a mass vaccination drive
Which is a bit difficult in a lot of places due to international demand.
>than trying to do a full China style lockdown.
Tbh the seemingly extreme chinese lockdown ended with them having less overall restriction in the long run from what i've seen.
it's too late to try that here now but i probably would have preferred it.
People are much less impacted by severe limitation on international travel than a severe limitation on social and personal life.
I live in Victoria. We have certainly given up all of our freedom. Our Premier has suspended parliament and now rules by decree. Citing fabled 'health advice', which is never made public nor provided when queried, to justify anything he does. That's why we have a 9PM curfew that has done nothing to stem the spread, punitive 'alchohol must be drunk through a mask' rules and playground closures. Those were not legitimate public health measures, but punishments for Victorians risking his re-election strategy of 'beating the virus' after spending the weekend outside in the sunshine.
Police harass citizens for the crime of taking a rest on a park bench while on their 1 hour of allowed outside time per day. I have friends who have been unable to leave the country to see dying parents. I have had friends unable to travel interstate to see their dying parents. My own grandmother died in our lockdown so the last 12 months of her life were spent locked in her own home.
This is not a successful strategy, and anybody reading Australia's low deaths and case numbers need to realise this. We have myopic politicians who are suffering from an obsession with a particular metric, neglecting everything else enabled by a population of unthinking zealots who genuinely believe a single death is a policy failure.
Locking down this severely is neither clever nor demonstrates a particularly high level of consideration. It is the most blunt and basic response to the virus and it's only possible in a country of docile livestock who are content to cede every right if the person they're ceding it to promises it will make them safer from a virus, or in the case of these new national 'security' measures pedophiles or terrorists.
All of your freedoms and rights? I imagine someone will be along to arrest you for sedition shortly then?
That sounds horrendous but honestly little different to what we went through in the UK at various points in the last year and a half, and the death rates are very low in comparison.
> I have friends who have been unable to leave the country to see dying parents.
Im somewhat neutral on most of Australia's restrictions: my opinion is that theyre unnecessarily draconian, and that some of them are not in accordance with pretty well-established science (1 hour of outdoor time is ludicrous).
But this is a relatively low-confidence belief, as I don't have a strong rebuttal to those championing the minimal-Covid-until-vaccinated strategy and its relative success. I wouldn't pick the same spot on the freedom/safety spectrum, but I have no basis for claiming those who do are "wrong".
But how on earth do the restriction apologists justify forbidding _leaving the country_? It has, by definition, zero safety justification. Plus, forbidding people yo leave a country is quite reasonably considered a violation of international human rights law. With respect to this specific policy, what on earth are policymakers thinking?
Yea of course, but it's trivial to just ban returning without quarantine. This policy also has the advantage of not potentially violating international law
has there ever been anything remotely resembling justification for nighttime curfews? I've tried to find any reasoning for it and completely failed to do so.
You're not allowed to leave your state or your country with the permission of some bureaucrat, and you're claiming that you haven't given up any civil rights?
I guess no-one had given up their civil rights in East Germany, or the Soviet Union then either.
Always so hyperbolic. The state border controls are for quarantine.
In states that have covid under control, that means filling out a form stating you're not sick. Rather sensible requirement during a pandemic
The banning of country exit visas is far far more controversial and doesn't have wide spread support. It seems okay as a sensible precaution at the start of the pandemic in order to ensure quarantine places were available for people who want to return to Australia. The fact that it's gone on so long without any real effort to find a better solution is poor government.
Border controls in Australia, are widely popular. Much like in the US.
The border controls will be removed once the country reaches a steady state of vaccination levels and things are as back to normal as they will get. All other controls have been removed immediately once they were no longer required.
This mass surveillance is far more concerning, and people constantly talking about temporary quarantine controls are muddying the waters of an important topic.
UK Covid deaths 133,000 vs Australia Covid deaths 1054.
That's some cold-blooded calculus to say that Australia would have been better off with another 50,000 people dead rather than having some restrictions in place while they wait for vaccination targets to be reached.
> UK Covid deaths 133,000 vs Australia Covid deaths 1054.
Looking at all cause mortality and just eyeballing, it looks like in most cases Covid19 is reducing some lives by a few times while the fact that no one lives forever stubbornly persists.
Given the UK quarantine period was reduced by the chief medical officers "After reviewing the evidence" to 10 days from 14 by the start of 2021, it probably didn't make a difference.
How many will die from the economic fallout and how who will pay for this insane government debt accumulated over the last 2 years. The kids, thats who, the kids who don't get a vaccine and get the privilege of paying the bill for us to sit at home.
What happens to a country that stops people working and starts living on the government credit card? It's all great now when everything is paid in debt. What happens to health, education and infrastructure? What happens to peoples wellbeing and prosperity in the future? Australia's health care system was already at breaking point pre covid. Education was already at breaking point pre covid. They bullshit us that the numbers are fine, and being the fools we are we believe them even though it makes no logical sense. How will people work and pay tax when there are no jobs? How many will die you think?
Covid is not the only thing that can kill you. Poverty has killed infinitely more.
Not sure how temporary the safety gained by those tens of thousands is, nor how essential the liberty to enter a country without two weeks of quarantine is.
In fact, having just a few minutes ago come out of two weeks confined to a hotel room, into a place where there is effectively no coronavirus, I’d say not very essential at all.
1. Stay in a quarantine centre for two weeks under guard (which you pay for)
2. Quarantine at home with police visits
3. As above but check in with the app
In that context, getting pissed off about the app is ridiculous.
You want to argue quarantine is unnecessary or wrong? Go for it, make those arguments. But what you’re doing is pissing and moaning about the easiest and least intrusive option. It’s not a good look.
As someone who is coming to the end of two weeks in a quarantine centre (actually a Novotel, and there’s no app or home quarantine for international arrivals), that app option looks mighty good. And as I am about to enter a state with no coronavirus, quarantine is looking like it’s been a great plan.
Is this an official option, or do you have to install the app then turn your phone off, with the potential of this turning to 1 if they don't like you doing that too often?
I believe this is an official option, at least in WA where there is already an app, it's up to you which option to take.
AFAICT there is no "we're sick of visiting you, off to a quarantine centre" potential at all, effectively you're doing them a favour by using the app, the default would be police visits.
Unless you're found to have breached quarantine the conditions I guess. Not sure what happens then.
See the argument for having a high transmission also justifies this. It's win-win. If you have low transmission, we need to enact these laws to keep it that way. If it's a high transmission, we need to enact these laws to lower the transmission.
I'm amazed people have this much trust in their government officials. I mean they're just people with the same ethical flaws as everyone else, they just have a lot more power.
Hang on, the 15 minute interval requires constant human action, it's not enough that the phone itself is reachable? How does that even work? If that's true (which is sincerely hope it's not) being woken up every 15 minutes during the night for two weeks constitutes torture under most definitions.
It goes off once or twice a day, and you have 15 minutes to check in once it does. If you miss one, it'll try again a bit later. If you miss the retry, the police visit to check you're home.
You have to respond within 15 minutes with a geotagged selfie as I understand it. Given that one cannot know when one's chain is going to be yanked, it still sounds like torture.
The historical ignorance around Covid and other pandemics, and the way people act as though it was some unprecedented event that justifies the unprecedented reaction, is really stunning.
Quarantines and lockdowns were used against previous pandemics such as the 1918 flu pandemic.
American Samoa, for instance, was entirely unscathed by the Spanish flu because they instituted a strict quarantine at the border, the same policy Australia/NZ did for Covid-19.
See this pre-covid article from 2018, for instance.[0] Sound familiar?
> “These communities basically shut themselves down,” explains Howard Markel, an epidemiological historian at the University of Michigan who was one of the authors of the study. “No one came in and no one came out. Schools were closed and there were no public gatherings. We came up with the term ‘protective sequestration’, where a defined and healthy group of people are shielded from the risk of infection from outsiders.”
One might perhaps imagine that those concerned with the lessons of history would not overlook the lack of precedent for a pandemic taking place in a time of ubiquitous and nigh instantaneous global travel. Such a one would be disappointed in this case, certainly, but the expectation could be considered reasonable nonetheless.
No, this doesn't actually make the definitive difference you think it does. Many earlier pandemics had no problem spreading throughout the almost entire world in relatively short order.
It's not people quarantining because they have the virus, it's related to the mandatory quarantine for international arrivals. Previously you needed to complete 2-weeks of hotel quarantine when you arrived in Australia. This new compromise allows people an option to complete that quarantine period from their own home instead. It's part of a move to increase overseas arrivals while minimising transmission.
funny, if it’s not even for having a virus then what’s the point? I can’t help but think this is just the next step in evolution of the surveillance state using the existence of cold viruses as an excuse, it is not going to go well for the quality of care if the state becomes this embedded in the healthcare system, this is one of those times when a slippery slope is a very valid argument, if they start pushing unvaccinated people out of society bit by bit all based on data and science that is blessed by the state then this becomes a way of eliminating people who mistrust the government from society by force, it’s all well and good until the system is in place and the even more wrong people become in charge and suddenly at the helm of it
“people that need to quarantine” also happens to be based on something only a tiny fraction of people have the means to verify, I can’t think of anything in modern times more prone to tyranny than invisible requirements only the chosen state mages can bless
>My guess is that they would reset your isolation duration
You do know that quarantine isn't supposed to be a punishment, right? Resetting your isolation duration is punitive and has zero relationship to your ability to spread covid.
> The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being forced to use the app.
> The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being forced to use the app
Weird. In Canada we're allowed to isolate at home without a wildly intrusive app, or police visits or anything like that.
We get a fine if we are caught out when we are required to isolate, that's all.
Personally if my government was proposing this kind of quarantine tracking, I'd be looking to move somewhere sane.
> The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being forced to use the app.
Wait. So if I refuse to be tracked by the government, the government will take me by force to a detention camp?
Did someone accidently ran a search and replace for Cuba and Australia before publishing the article?
what prohibits them from quarantining at home in the first place? Is there a difference between not leaving my room for 2 weeks (except to use the bathroom) and staying in a hotel for 2 weeks?
The phone check in thing is for enforcing the two weeks home quarantine for returned travelers and close contacts of confirmed cases. While there are certainly slippery slope arguments to be made, let's not act like we've already slid down it.
> The phone check in thing is for enforcing the two weeks home quarantine for returned travelers and close contacts of confirmed cases.
So the government can effectively just inprison you in your own house, with no proof, no recourse and no due process, because they suspect you were near some guy at some particular time some days ago. They don't even ask to get tested first! How can people on hacker news of all places not see this as a massive threat to civil liberty is beyond me.
Post WW1 didn't erode rights, it actually increased them. Post WW2, the same.
Korea and Vietnam didn't leave behind any long term repression that I remember.
War on drugs and terror, ok.
Covid is a disease. We have vaccines, we'll have treatment. Just get vaccinated. We've had pandemics before, they always end and I can't remember any rights still taken away abusively after the Spanish Flu or SARS or HIV.
You are mistaking extending special rights to minority groups with citizens rights. We have been increasing minority rights as fast as possible with removing all the protections from dictatorships in the name of, I don't even know what.
>Post WW1 didn't erode rights, it actually increased them. Post
And on and on. There are libraries written about this, but no one cares because there has been a bi-partisan consensus that citizen's rights need to be curtailed.
Yes, it's hard to keep track of which act was used to curtail what freedoms.
The Sedition Act was used to silence opposition to conscription and gave us the immortal quote of "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
Which seems like an extremely level headed question about conscription in the US given that involuntary servitude should only be a punishment for a crime.
We are way past temporary here. Australia is not as far along in vaccinations as other countries, but at this point the most vulnerable have had ample chance to be vaccinated. The virus can't be eradicated, will continue to mutate, and herd immunity by vaccination alone is not likely. At some point, Australia, New Zealand and China will need to join the rest of the world in the new normal, unless they want to become virtual prison states.
Yeah, and that point is when we have enough people vaccinated. Which should be done by December. Then we can join the new normal. I would classify that as temporary.
The death rate for Covid in even a fully vaccinated population is somewhere between 2 to 8 per million per day given Israel's current figures. Which means from 700 to 3000 deaths per million per year.
Unless the exposure site is identified as a low-risk one where contacts are directed to isolate until they get a negative test, no. You have to do a test when going into iso and you have to get a negative test on day 13 to leave it. There have been plenty of cases where the day 13 test is positive, even when the test at the start was negative.
The right to bear arms also seems to fit your framework quite well. If the police knocking on your door has to fear that you appear naked that is unpleasent but merely a nuisance. If you could be armed they will probably think twice if it is worth the risk.
And this is the foundation of the Second Amendment despite the intense opposition to it. The Second Amendment creates lines that even the government will be unwilling to cross.
And yet government agents shooting unsuspecting non-criminals in their own home, after mistaking the address or responding to a malicious fake emergency call, is a line that is only crossed in the country with the Second Amendment.
Yeah, plus they're practically the only country that hasn't had serious government threatening civil unrest for 160 years and they still brag about guns.
Heck, the only real recent unrest of that magnitude, the takeover of Capitol, was without guns as far as I remember. As in, no standoff.
>Yeah, plus they're practically the only country that hasn't had serious government threatening civil unrest for 160 years and they still brag about guns.
Half a million people protesting out of ~18 million or so. For reference, that would mean 10 million people protesting at the same time in the US. I wonder if even the civil rights movement during the 60's ever got that many people out on the streets at the exact same time.
>Heck, the only real recent unrest of that magnitude, the takeover of Capitol, was without guns as far as I remember. As in, no standoff.
Condescending to other countries with smug quips by the American founding fathers turns out to be much easier than taking those principles seriously on your own soil when facing the prospect of armed Federal police.
I think in practice (from the US) they come in with 10 people, guns drawn, in bulletproof vests ready to fire at anything moving just in case which leads to unfortunate deaths which is why 'Swatting' is so dangerous in the US
They also murder unarmed people with a frequency I'm not comfortable with, so any argument that guns is what makes the police trigger happy has plenty of counter examples of clearly unarmed people getting killed.
Yeah but they always think they have a gun, or so they say. It's not always having a gun pointed at you, it's the threat that it could happen. Very real to American police that keep them on edge, where in other countries that risk is lower so there is less sensitivity to a suspect moving there arm near a pocket or behind their back if they are far away from the officer (which makes it naturally harder to see what they are going for). Not saying it's a good thing, it's just a large contributing factor.
There was recently a video of US police attacking a lady in a wheel chair with a stun gun because she was filming them detaining and being rough with her pregnant daughter.
In these incidents the victim was clearly either unarmed or in no way was threatening the police with a firearm. I think that is just yet another excuse the police use to evade prosecution when brutalizing citizens.
This is nothing new, here's the police brutalizing citizens protesting in Chicago in 1968.
These "data disruption warrants" are the most interesting to me:
> Data disruption means adding, copying, deleting or altering data held in a computer. This can only be done in order to frustrate the commission of offences or determine relevance of data. To assist disruption, a warrant can also authorise other facilitative activities, such as entering specified premises, using electronic equipment to obtain access to data, removing a computer from premises, copying data that has been obtained, and intercepting if necessary to carry out the things authorised in the warrant. A data disruption warrant also allows the officer to take actions to conceal the access and the activities, allowing the warrant to be conducted covertly.
> Data disruption warrants can be used to affect data offshore with the consent of an appropriate consenting foreign official (if the location of data is known or can be reasonably determined). They can also be issued internally in an emergency situation, and subsequently authorised by a Judge or AAT member. They can also permit the officer to seek assistance from a person with knowledge of a computer or a computer system to help in carrying out the warrant.
So they can get a warrant to come into your house while you're not home and put a keylogger in your keyboard USB cable, or put a bug on the UART of your router, etc. Or just hacking your cheap Netgear router with one of the hundreds of vulnerabilities that exist.
Scary shit. Sounds like they're pretty drunk with power. Does Australia really have a capable offensive security group like the NSA to pull these sorts of things off, though?
Scary shit. Sounds like they're pretty drunk with power. Does Australia really have a capable offensive security group like the NSA to pull these sorts of things off, though?
They do but the real question is whether its appropriate to source intelligence from a place like the NSA when the outcomes are meant to be used by the police.
> So they can get a warrant to come into your house while you're not home and put a keylogger in your keyboard USB cable, or put a bug on the UART of your router, etc. Or just hacking your cheap Netgear router with one of the hundreds of vulnerabilities that exist.
That's actually not that weird.
If you are a suspected criminal and a judge give a warrant targeting you specifically, it's quite natural the police can now gather information on you by any mean possible.
It's not warrant-less, it's not mass surveillance, it sounds like regular police work. Or am I missing something?
Not being a legal expert, I can’t tell where the boundary is between enabling legitimate police work and giving (accidentally or deliberately) the police the power to plant fake evidence, the latter being what some of this sounds like. But, I’m not a legal expert, and “sounds like” is a way to make very large mistakes when looking outside of one’s own domain of expertise like I’m doing here.
(Also doesn’t help that I hear about stories like this from people who don’t like them, so I get a potentially biased first impression).
I have no idea how Australia handles this, but in the U.S., the process of discovery is what is supposed to keep the police from just planting evidence. Prosecution needs to present all evidence that will be used against you, including exactly where it came from and chain of custody. If they can't, it gets thrown out. The only exception is they can't be compelled to give away the identity of confidential informants. But a confidential informant also can't testify anonymously, so the police would always need additional evidence beyond the word of a CI.
It's not a perfect system by any means. The police can and do plant evidence. But a lot of convictions also get thrown out and this is often why obviously guilty people get off on "technicalities" because the police don't follow procedure down to the letter.
The opposite end of the spectrum, not giving the police any power to do covert surveillance at all, is effectively just giving a license to the Mafia to do whatever it wants, as anyone who just commits all of their crimes privately will get away with it as long as they can sufficiently scare or kill anyone who would otherwise have been willing to testify.
It's a tradeoff either way, and we try to let there be a middle ground, where the police can bug your house, tap your phone, hack your router, but they need a warrant that has to be granted by a completely separate branch of government that is not in the same chain of command, and they have to prove to your lawyers that they obtained all of the evidence they have against you legally.
Indeed, I have no issue with the police having the power to read whatever data a warrant grants.
My problem is the linked page says:
> A DATA DISRUPTION WARRANT enables the agencies to “add, copy, delete or alter” data on devices.
Copy is fine, it’s the other three which are scary. Perhaps they shouldn’t be scary, perhaps they have well-defined meanings in law I’m just not familiar with (like how “Hacker News” has nothing to do with cyber crime), but I can only respond within the limits of my knowledge, and that seems scary.
I think the reason they want the ability to add, delete, and alter is so they can disrupt certain users, software, or services legally, like botnets or arms deals. It's probably too broad and could be abused though.
> A DATA DISRUPTION WARRANT enables the agencies to “add, copy, delete or alter” data on devices.
With the exception of the word “copy”, this makes it seem like the plan is to make it not merely possible but also legally acceptable for anyone given such a warrant to create/place that evidence (or delete things to make real data look incriminating by lack of context).
Again, I really know I can’t trust my interpretation of any legal text, all I can say is it does sound bad to an outsider like me.
It's certainly better than simply compromising everyone but it's not like they're going to stop their mass surveillance activities. This is just a step towards legitimization of those activities.
It's time for computer security to include nation states in their threat model. We need tamper-evident hardware.
I’ve spent a bit of time in Australia. When I compared the caliber of people who worked in tech and venture to those in mining and law enforcement, it was night and day. There’s a TON of smart people at companies like Woodside, and lots of smart people at the Australian Federal Police (to the extent where the US and other countries rely on them for help in tricky technical situations). The tech and VC crowd seemed to get off on the size of a funding round, or how tight they were with the founders of Atlassian, or if they knew some guy from America with a “successful exit,” or other complete nonsense.
With a dynamic like that, the law enforcement people are always going to point to the tech and venture people and say to politicians, “are you going to take orders from these clowns, or are you going to listen to us?” And now that you’ve got the climate activists antagonizing the mining companies, who are responsible for a very significant percentage of the economy, you’ve got two extremely savvy and powerful groups working together.
If Australian tech people want their government to take them seriously, they’re going to have to act in a manner that is as professional as those at the AFP, and they’re going to have to hit people with an economic hammer that can match the force of mining. Yes, it’s not fair that things are this difficult, but that’s life.
I'm Australian. Your argument seems to be "If only the tech sector in Australia had some smart people". That's nice but I don't think that's what is going on.
Most of the general public is apathetic to this kind of thing. They just don't get worked up like Americans do about freedom. Especially in the middle of an epidemic (covid19 is now out of control in the two biggest cities).
We have a conservative government at the moment. They're interested in power for the sake of it and very much against transparency. They're certainly not going to listen to anyone's opinions about it - they'll just do it and wear what they know will be a negligible hit they take in the polls.
I think you greatly overestimate how “worked up” Americans get. In reality, there is an enormous amount of lobbying and horse-trading that goes on behind the scenes whenever Washington wants to do anything that touches the tech and telecom sectors. Tech and telecom are seen as areas that drive tremendous economic value and national power, so they have the ability to bend things to go their way.
Australia is quite the opposite. The tech industry is a bit like a spoiled, privileged trust fund kid who shows up to the family holding company’s board meetings in flip-flops and a t-shirt and makes a lot of demands. I’m pretty sure the tech/VC industries take more from the government, in the form of mining revenue-funded tax and incentive credits and fast-track high-net-worth immigration residence schemes that require parking money in VC funds, than they contribute back to the Treasury. In fact, I would posit that the state of Western Australia’s share of mining-related tax revenue this past fiscal year was greater than all of the taxes paid by all of Australia’s tech companies combined. (I could be wrong, but it sure feels like I’d be proven correct.)
And on the side of law enforcement and ASIO, well, public sector employees and unions have a LOT of political power. If you think union members are going to vote in favor of policies endorsed by tech plutocrats than those being pushed by their counterparts at other unions... It’s time to go talk to a couple union bosses and see what they think of your ideas. It really doesn’t help the tech crowd that half of them are obsessed with union-busting pseudo-libertarian nonsense, in a country where these organizations still hold a lot of kingmaking power.
Australia’s tech industry just doesn’t have the leverage, either politically or financially, to pursue its agenda. I would flip what you said and turn it back on you, and the other commenters; it seems like all of you are applying American ways of looking at this to a country that has very different dynamics. Trying to import American-style “activism” to make your point isn’t going to get much done there, mate. What plays well on Twitter won’t work in Canberra.
It's interesting to see how, in America, tech is seen as a gateway to prosperity and something worth investing in, while in Australia it's described as a pit for subsidies.
I guess the number one customer for Australian natural resource has incentives to make sure the country stays dependent on said natural resource exports for it's prosperity. Keeps them docile...
You have an unstated assumption: that the best people in tech are attracted to startups and venture capital. In Australia that's not true. Australia is not America and you've drawn incorrect conclusions due to your incorrect assumption.
> And now that you’ve got the climate activists antagonizing the mining companies, who are responsible for a very significant percentage of the economy, you’ve got two extremely savvy and powerful groups working together.
I wonder which country is the number one customer of these companies.
Atlassian founders are the wrong place to look for tech and VC mentorship.
Every company here has a values round copying them and doing things that atlassian does.
I believe tech and VC ecosystem will improve once they become bigger. There are companies like okzellar, shippit which do not have that atlassian bias.
I simply cannot wrap my mind around what is happening in Australia. Continuing a lockwdown while the number of positive covid cases remains in the low hundreds and the daily death rate in the lower tens to single digits.
Nothing makes sense here. Draconian laws, complete shutdown over something that is and has been statistically under control and managed from months.
Am I alone here or do people really think what is going on in Australia makes sense and that attempting to completely eradicate a virus that may be as easily spread as the common cold makes sense.
Serious cannot leave your house outside and go outside for a jog … because there are 50 positive cases in a nation of millions ?
Right, there's something disconcerting about the way people are behaving in this situation, and it's hard to process this as something that could reasonably happen. "I thought we were rational people in a free society?"
The terrible thing is that this is exactly how people behaved in "historical" times - a foreshadowing to what lies ahead. The vast majority of people believe we are post-history, and that we're somehow more rational and good than previous generations. This isn't true, and people are just as susceptible to insane fantasies as they've always been. We're in danger now because of these people.
What we're seeing is exactly what it looks like: mass psychosis on the level of witch-hunts, with incompetent and superstitious leaders trying to rule with underhanded measures. There's nothing to try to understand here, it's just time to wake up from the delusion that everything is stable and properly managed.
The difference between modern and medieval people isn't physiological, it is just education. But since stupidity is unlimited, it will just pick up a new mantle and look a bit different.
Rules of public relation will make it increasingly difficult for any official to take a more relaxed stand. Fearful people are motivated people and will make themselves heard, no matter if their fears are justified or not.
Boiling it down to just education is too reductionist. Education is part of reciprocal human interaction and the academy (often associated with education) is itself an ancient institution. What's different is our collection and employment of knowledge.
> . "I thought we were rational people in a free society
There is no polity in the world in which "rational people" drove covid policy (or individual behavior) to any significant degree. Whether we're talking about Florida's low restrictions and high cases or the Bay Area's converse outcome, the best you can hope for is that the masses, through their blind superstition and social signaling, ended up somewhere close to the policy/behavior landscape that you think is optimal.
I don't disagree with this; it seems that if you ask most people who aren't following mandates why they're not following them you'll get a lot of poorly thought out answers.
I would even say that DeSantis isn't really trying to follow science in his decisions, but more trying to align with the beliefs of Floridians.
Sweden is one country which seems to have made the right decisions, though they themselves have said they would have done lockdowns if it were legal to do so. Because of that, I'd say that Sweden is at least competent and transparent in it's democratic policies. Other countries simply made lockdowns legal, clearly subverting their own established democratic processes. Now Sweden seems to be quite happy about it's decisions though.
The laws the article is talking about are the big problem - they're Federal and permanent (at least until we have a sane Government elected to reform and repeal them).
The COVID lockdowns are all operating under temporary state of emergencies under the State Governments. There's no actual reason to think they will be 'extended forever' like some crazies seem to think. For several states, our State Governments are actually much more competent and better in many ways than the Federal Government. Of course, a big part of the reason lockdowns are needed is because the Federal Government botched some vaccine deals with Pfizer etc. so we started vaccinating very late and have been continually supply-constrained since then.
The lockdowns have actually have tended to work effectively - for instance, in my state we've had a few lockdowns and have been able to quash every outbreak so far. So we've been mostly COVID free as we are at the moment, so there is no lockdown right now. Right now I can freely travel to any state except NSW, ACT and Victoria (which are hotspots). I would have to quarantine to go to WA though, but hopefully our state goes from "Low Risk" to "Very Low Risk" by their Government's rating soon so I can take a holiday there without two weeks quarantine.
The main actually ridiculous restriction is the Federal Government's ban on travel out of the country. That is wrong, and probably unconstitutional. Travel out should absolutely be allowed, just with the proviso that there may not be quarantine capacity for months to return (perhaps you should need to have to book in advance and pay a deposit if you intend to return in the next year). Although apparently it is actually ridiculously easy to get an exception to leave, I have a few friends that have taken jobs overseas and their applications were approved in hours with no questions (not even asked for any evidence they actually had a job offer).
It's not misinformation, it's that were looking at Australia from the outside. If you live in the US, pretty much any and all restrictions have been lifted for daily life. You see that there are still Covid cases and deaths, but they have dwindled in comparison to last year and life is pretty much back to how it was Pre-pandemic.
So it's absolutely insane to see that for the same or less daily Covid cases/deaths, Australia is going into lockdowns and imposing draconian restrictions. That's the disconnect between for many of us. At least in the US, any politician even suggesting such measures nowadays would be politically crucified.
For last year it was the reverse for us. We looked at the US, incredulous that you let the virus kill thousands of people every day. At that point we had practically zero cases or deaths and we lived with almost no restrictions. So we could see how bad it could get if we let the virus run free in a population that still doesn't have the majority vaccinated.
It's only in the last couple months that things have been different, and bear in mind only two states have any lockdown orders at the moment. It sucks that our federal government fucked up acquisition of vaccines but at this point it seems silly to not just wait a few months to reach high levels of vaccination rates before opening up properly.
I think you are assuming we have access to the vaccine like the US. Where at this point, if you want to get it, you have the opportunity to do so.
We don't have enough vaccine to do that yet. We have a shortage and consequently we are in 'a race' to get a somewhat limited supply of jabs into arms before the delta strain gets out of control here and starts killing folks like it's the peak in America.
I would say, Australia cares more about it's citizens than in America. But there are definite downsides, like for instance, we don't produce Pfizer or have the very strong industrial/tech base (and the good jobs that go with it)
This is pretty hyperbolic.
Examination of global excess deaths would tell you that the lockdowns were successful in their stated primary aim. Australia and NZ had significantly fewer excess deaths during the first wave [1].
And if they continue with lockdowns, they will have signficantly fewer excess deaths again no matter what else happens.
You may think this isn't a good trade-off, which is a fine point to make, but I don't think any minds need to be blown.
You are correct I think this is not a good trade-off. However I stand by “my mind is blown” that continuing with these draconian measures and the lock down approach borders on madness.
For reference in my part of the world we are fully open going on the 5th week of full in person schooling. All athletic teams and events have resumed with full crowds. In a school district of 2600 students we have over 45 positive cases (temp quarantine). The week prior we had 35 cases.
Neither of these case numbers are concerning and we continue to promote vaccination and frequent testing to limit the spread.
It's hard to evaluate what this means without knowing, at least, the demographic make up of your part of the world, the vaccination rates, the vaccination kinetics, and health system capacity and access.
I could equally cherry pick places with more disastrous outcomes as a counterargument eg Italy early on.
Nevertheless, I'm envious of your lack of restrictions. I haven't seen my father for a long time.
The low vaccination rate means it takes little for cases to jump from double to triple or even quadruple digits, at which point things spiral out of control like already happened in many other countries. Compare this to countries like Britain or the US with high vaccination rates and even higher percentages of the population with antibodies.
Students are not the only members of a community or geographic area.
I’m unclear how this is a relevant comparison to “Covid in Australia” or “lockdown strategy” beyond ‘smaller numbers are smaller’
If you are going to compare the numbers you just provided (which are not a good direct comparison), then it shows that it’s considerably more out of control in your school than in NSW, which is the least contained outbreak in Australia.
26k active cases in 8.1M population. Approx 0.3%.
35 in 2645 is 1.3%.
Other states of Australia are considerably better. So again, what is your point?
Sometimes in Western Australia I forget covid is happening if I don't check the news. Brief, sweet moments. We haven't been in a lockdown longer than 3 days in quite some time.
> Continuing a lockwdown while the number of positive covid cases remains in the low hundreds and the daily death rate in the lower tens to single digits.
Surely you can see how this is equivalent to asking why the company hires a system admin when the system hardly ever goes down or gets hacked.
And you have always been allowed outside for a jog. Please do not spread false information.
This talk about "Draconian" lockdown in Australia needs to stop. Our privacy and digital rights laws are awful. But the lockdowns are necessary.
NSW had upward of 1000+ cases and that's why they're (still) in a strict lockdown. QLD and i beleive WA as well for example are not in lockdown at all because of their much much lower daily cases.
>This talk about "Draconian" lockdown in Australia needs to stop.
I haven't been following the lockdown laws interstate, but here in Victoria there have definitely been some restrictions that seemed to be extremely harsh and soul-crushing in comparison to their effectiveness at stopping the virus.
The 5km radius and curfew both spring to mind. I (legally) haven't been able to see a single friend or family member for almost 2 months now, even if socially distanced, wearing a mask, vaccinated and outdoors. They're all outside my 5km.
Yet at the same time a 10 year old kid can go into Woolies with 200 other people and not even need to wear a mask.
Very much agree with the 5km rule and curfew. If there is strong evidence to suggest that they are necessary than so be it but after months and months of restricting basic freedoms 'we follow the health advice' just doesn't cut it anymore.
Hope you’re ok mate. We’ll be vaccinated soon, hold the fort. I can’t see my family and friends either and it’s undeniably tough. But the rules do make sense, it’s just always hard to see that when they affect you.
The 5km makes it possible for them to be talking about the western suburbs being somewhat under control, and for targeted testing and messaging operations to be useful. My area has been in a lull for a bit after being in the spotlight, so I’ve checked out of keeping track —- that is a luxury in its own way. Without the 5km I don’t think I would have that reprieve from the stress.
> This talk about "Draconian" lockdown in Australia needs to stop.
Actually, telling people to stop talking is what needs to stop.
Here in Victoria we're in our 6th lockdown. 220 days of lockdown since last year. Today there were 221 covid cases reported in Victoria. 87 people in hospital - that's not a daily rate, that's total. These are not big numbers.
We have an angry Premier who yells and threatens. Together with his side-kick health officer, they condemn people for taking their kids to park or watching the sunset. [1]
When watching the sunset is considered immoral, it's time to break out the word Draconian.
We have a curfew here in Melbourne. This means everyone must visit the supermarket in reduced opening hours, increasing density in those places. There is no evidence curfews work. Mask mandates outdoors even when by yourself is another useless signalling technique. Australian authorities love their signalling and behavioral manipulation.
They love blaming the lockdowns on the community. They love their new unchallenged surveillance powers and privacy compromising backdoors. They are ecstatic about the idea of mandating apps and vaccine passports for entry to cafes and venues.
People here are vaccinated enough. A high proportion of older and vulnerable people are vaccinated. Young and healthy people would not fill the hospital beds if lockdowns ended. There may be a small surge, but it would level out, we would deal with it. Lockdowns are doing more harm than good at this point. 80% vaccination target is not a magic number from the Gods.
UK and Israel have proven the "vaccinate your way out of trouble" strategy doesn't work, therefore Australia's lockdown regime will not work either.
Australia is, at a massive social and economic cost, delaying death and cases. They are not preventing them.
At extremely high levels of vaccination, Australia could see 10-50 daily deaths presuming lockdown is eased. There's already prior evidence, other countries have been through this.
Vaccination is not a silver bullet, and lockdown advocates need to stop implying as such.
80% vaccination will mean thousands of daily cases.
Not to mention lockdown advocates routinely ignore the massive costs associated with the ideology, such as additional deaths (suicides, delayed medical treatment, poverty etc) and mental health (1 in 10 Victorians "seriously considered" suicide in 2020(!!!)).
Also, poverty, which will absolutely be the result of this economic destruction, has a directly link to excess mortality (mortality is >100% more likely when you're in poverty).
The recent mask study in Bangladesh comes to mind. I hazily remember it finding mask effectiveness at about 10-15%, which caused the press to proclaim that masks work. However against an exponentially growing virus this reduction amounts to a brief delay in transmission.
Happy to be corrected by someone who has looked at that study more deeply.
If lockdowns are "necessary" then there are other things like taxing unhealthy foods and dedicating the economy to produce enough N95 masks that are vastly more necessary.
1200+ cases in NSW out of a population of over 8 million.
So we should extend a strict lockdown … to do what exactly? Is the plan to manage this virus with a series of alternating lockdowns and get the number of cases to zero? Is this realistic, is this the type of world you want to live in?
The virus appears to be as contagious as chicken pox, vaccines help with serious cases but are doing little unfortunately to stop the spread. At what point do you think it would make sense to manage the disease and resume normal life instead of draconian lockdowns for a untenable goal?
Please put some effort in getting information instead of creating straw man. NSW and Victoria are in a lockdown to have time to get 70-80% of eligible population double-vaccinated. Modelling by couple of institutes show that if lockdown ends today, hospitals would be overwhelmed and lots of preventable deaths occur.
By all estimates we would reach that 70-80% number in 1-3 months time, so that's the plan. Google for "Doherty Institute planning", visit https://covidlive.com.au, check daily press conference of VIC and NSW premiers - answers to your questions are in plain sight.
"Unvaccinated people in New South Wales could be barred from locations and denied movement freedoms even after the state achieves 80% double dose vaccination"
> the premier, Gladys Berejiklian, warning vaccine-hesitant residents they will not be able to “let everybody else do the hard work and then turn up” for equal freedoms.
> “I just want to send the very strong message that don’t assume you’ll get everything that vaccinated people get at 80%.”
Vaccine apartheid. Enjoy ! I'm glad I visited long ago
To be clear, that's 1200 cases in one day. There are currently 26907 active cases in NSW.
The goal of the lockdown is to keep new case numbers as low as possible so a greater percentage of the population has the chance to be vaccinated. Nobody is suggesting it's going to zero. Living with Covid, as you suggest, is the end goal. You're advocating for the current plan.
> Continuing a lockwdown while the number of positive covid cases remains in the low hundreds and the daily death rate in the lower tens to single digits.
Correction - thousands, not hundreds. But comparison to the previous numbers is required, because it's approaching the peak we've seen. So close to highest ever, rather than something to be dismissed.
> Serious cannot leave your house outside and go outside for a jog … because there are 50 positive cases in a nation of millions ?
... You can still do that. There are several allowed reasons to leave your house, and exercise is one of those, and always has been.
One day at the beginning of the pandemic I was out exercising and the police interrogated me over wearing jeans instead of sports wear. The copper was unsatisfied by my responses and directed me to return home + threatened a fine of several thousand dollars if I did not comply.
> Do you have to wear a mask when jogging outside?
Given my encounter and as jogging isn't well defined I assume this is at the discretion of the nearest officer.
American here. It appears to me to be poor incentives reinforcing themselves in the political sphere. If you make a single metric the measure of success, most will go to extremes to game that metric. Australian politicians seem to have made the low number of COVID infections the sole measure of their success. The result is somewhat predictable.
> Serious cannot leave your house outside and go outside for a jog … because there are 50 positive cases in a nation of millions ?
There were around 1.5k new cases in NSW today. NSW is in lockdown. Victoria has new cases too, but is opening up its regional areas where they are covid free. WA has no cases and no lockdown.
It's not like the whole country is locked down over 50 cases - there are many times that many, and the whole country is not locked down.
> because there are 50 positive cases in a nation of millions
Australia is currently experiencing 1500 daily case of COVID with some 30,000+ cumulative case since the start of this last outbreak which is now some two months old.
> Nothing makes sense here.
Firstly only three of the seven states and territories are in lock down.
Four states and territories are experiencing zero cases and for them life is very close to normal.
However, the reason two states are now in lock down is because, as a developed country, Australia is last in terms of vaccination roll out.
And it is not only last, it is last by a long way.
There are only two ways to deal with COVID:
1. Lock down until the vaccination numbers improve
2. Open up and let the virus rip and hope the hospital system can cope with the increased demand.
NSW is currently in lock down (i.e. option 1) and even with these strict rules in place the health system is not coping well, as it struggles with the uptick in COVID hospitalizations.
The simple fact is Australia stuffed up the vaccination roll out and we are now paying the price for that mistake.
As an Australian, I should note that the reason positive cases were in the low hundreds — actually, low tens most of the time — was precisely because of the lockdowns. Once people stopped obeying the lockdowns, positive cases started rising, and we ended up with the current situation here in Sydney with ~1500 cases per day. The only reason it’s not any higher is because (a) we still have lockdown in place, and most people comply, and (b) we’re rapidly getting vaccinated as I type.
(And also, the lockdowns weren’t continuous by any measure. Lockdown restrictions were consistently relaxed as soon as cases dropped to single digits.)
They're trying to buy enough time to get enough people vaccinated before they "let it rip". Delta has an extremely high R value and will come back in force. This way we eliminate many more unnecessary deaths. Not hard to understand.
We can refer to both now as acts because — in what is an increasing trend in the Australian Parliament — the bills flew through both houses in a single day.
Why is this an increasing trend? Voting is mandatory…so are voters more trusting of their institutions or just apathetic?
Voting is compulsory at federal elections, by-elections and referendums for those on the electoral roll, as well as for State and Territory elections. Australia enforces compulsory voting.[24] People in this situation are asked to explain their failure to vote. If no satisfactory reason is provided (for example, illness or religious prohibition), a fine of up to $170 is imposed,[25] and failure to pay the fine may result in a court hearing and additional costs. About 5% of enrolled voters fail to vote at most elections
Compulsory voting does not imply a politically engaged populace. I believe the majority of voters do not enjoy the requirement to attend on polling day, and treat the whole affair like supporting a football team. Except they care a lot less about the election results than their football team. Mandatory voting probably has the effect of protecting the two major parties more than anything else.
There was a surge in minor parties in the Senate about a decade ago. In the (very large) Senate ballot you were able to vote for a single party, and their official preferences registered with the Electoral Commission were automatically applied to the entire form. Minor parties with similar policies were obviously preferencing each other, and preferencing major parties very low. (The whole point of a minor party, sometimes a single issue party, is a significant deviation from the uncontested policy agreed upon by both major parties). So the process was changed and now the voter has to manually nominate at least 6 parties on the Senate ballot form. The effect of this is even the motivated voter with interest in the policies of a minor party cannot usually name 6 that they prefer over the 2 major parties, and so one (if not both) will end up getting a reasonably high vote preference when the previous scheme would have seen them near the bottom. This further secured the position of the two major parties.
Even though people may not be engaged in politics mandatory voting is important. It reduces extremist politics and the constant need to be increasingly divisive. It forces regression to the mean.
In non mandatory voting systems the politicians need to motivate people to the polls. The default of the population is apathy so to generate action you appeal to the extremes who are the most likely to act. The more people you can make act the more you can get to vote for you.
But with mandatory voting the apathetic mass (who are most likely to be moderates as they don't really care but generally are reasonable educated people and don't agree with the extremist views) cast almost random votes which smoothes out the skew to the extremes non mandatory voting causes.
Except this implies that disagreement on any policies agreed upon by the two major parties is extremist. What is the solution to issues where both parties perpetuate the status quo?
I would suggest reversing the Senate ballot 6 votes rule. We can have status quo in the lower house, and negotiation with minor parties representing the population on issues they deem most important - and handled incorrectly by the major parties - in the Senate.
It is important to note that you are making an argument for outcomes where the design of the system should be philosophical. What system best represents the will of the people? (Or whatever question best frames this problem. This is troublesome and often prejudicial.) It's the subsequent application of this system that is the people's voice. We should not be designing a system to get the political outcome you prefer.
Compulsory voting in an unengaged populace can only serve to lower signal-to-noise ratio. How many times do we need to relearn "garbage in, garbage out"? The responsible ballot choice when uninformed is "abstain". AFAIA, Australia doesn't provide that option.
Also, the intransigent moderates you mentioned create inertia biased toward status quo and inhibits appropriate policy action and change (see e.g. the slow-moving trainwreck of climate destabilization).
To be precise, there isn't a specific "Abstain" option on the ballot paper, but it is perfectly legal to leave the ballot blank. After all, if they could trace blank ballots back to the voter to punish them, it wouldn't be a secret ballot.
For context, "informal votes" (i.e. those votes which are rejected at the counting stage) have typically accounted for less than 5% of votes cast, and blank votes were about 20% of the votes cast in the 2001 federal election[0]. That suggests that about 1% of the population is "abstaining" in this way.
Disengaged voters will simply vote for the current leadership or loudest guy, typically the same thing, without a thought towards the issues.
Strongmen love compulsory voting, it creates a false perception of legitimacy, because corruption or no corruption, if only 30% of a population is engaged in the issues and the other 70% could give two shits, that is a slamdunk for incumbents.
There's some evidence for this. Chile adopted voluntary voting in 2012. According to this study[0] this decreased the incumbent's advantage in the elections that follower.
It's not extremist politics. There was no TV marketing about how x group is the devil and they need this law to stop it. The government just passed quickly without much publicity. The average Australian is not radicalized like Americans are and they generally do not hate peoples existence based on how they vote / make their vote their identify.
There is no such thing as "a group of liberal supporters protesting" like you see with trump and biden supporters.
The Australians voted for these parties who then pass this policy. This policy is extreme. That sure seems like extremist politics to me.
I don't get why you are talking about the US. This policy was passed by Australia. I am not saying that non mandatory voting will avoid extremist politics. All I am saying is that mandatory voting is not a silver bullet to avoiding extremism.
The Australians who voted for these parties largely do not give two shits about the bills, because a) unlike HN, they don't understand them, why they're bad or any of the consequences, and b) because the media monopoly here ensures they don't get adequate explanation or coverage, which in turn feeds a).
I agree with GP that this is less about the Australian population being extremist or facilitating extremism as much is it is about voter apathy and a lack of proper coverage or education on these bills.
Just because the average person doesn't know what bills are passed is irrelevant to what I am saying.
All I am saying is that forcing people to vote has no impact on stopping extreme policies. If you were correct Australia wouldn't have passed this and other similar laws over the past few years.
I agree that voter apathy can lead to extreme policies passing. That point is irrelevant to what I was trying to convey that extreme policies are still passed despite mandatory voting.
I feel like even when they do get coverage it doesn't matter. This issue has had plenty of coverage but the situation is pretty much "yeah? well what are you gonna do about it? Both parties support it"
Even the greens have been supporting objectionable laws relating to tech. I feel a good chunk of people do care but there is not a single thing that can be done about it.
> who are most likely to be moderates as they don't really care but generally are reasonable educated people and don't agree with the extremist views
Except this isn’t true. Non voters are significantly less educated than voters. This creates paradoxes like both Trump and Biden voters being wealthier and more educated than the average American.
Non-voters are less likely to be “extremist” in the sense of having strong party loyalties. But they’re much more likely to host a whole myriad range of beliefs that are disproportionately found amount the least educated and aware. They’re more likely to believe in psychics or be 9/11 truthers or to think Bill Gates is tracking people with Covid vaccine microchips.
> But with mandatory voting the apathetic mass (who are most likely to be moderates as they don't really care but generally are reasonable educated people and don't agree with the extremist views) cast almost random votes which smoothes out the skew to the extremes non mandatory voting causes.
Pure moderates aka centrists don't exist. Those people average out to be moderate but they're actually "cross-pressured" - they have crazy beliefs that are inconsistent because they never thought about them.
The one constant is that nobody in real life is a libertarian, even though you always run into them on the internet.
There was a surge in minor parties in the Senate about a decade ago. In the (very large) Senate ballot you were able to vote for a single party, and their official preferences registered with the Electoral Commission were automatically applied to the entire form. Minor parties with similar policies were obviously preferencing each other, and preferencing major parties very low. (The whole point of a minor party, sometimes a single issue party, is a significant deviation from the uncontested policy agreed upon by both major parties). So the process was changed and now the voter has to manually nominate at least 6 parties on the Senate ballot form. The effect of this is even the motivated voter with interest in the policies of a minor party cannot usually name 6 that they prefer over the 2 major parties, and so one (if not both) will end up getting a reasonably high vote preference when the previous scheme would have seen them near the bottom. This further secured the position of the two major parties.
The previous system was being actively gamed. Because the Group Ticket Votes flowed between candidates in unnaturally high proportions, it was possible to snowball your way to election from a very small number of initial votes. How small? Wayne Dropulich of the Sports Party initially won election with 0.2% of the initial first preference votes.
This possibility meant that there was a large incentive to create a minor party and join a large preference-sharing network of parties which shared little in the way of ideology. No-one knew who was going to get the Senate seat when the music stopped, but it was a pretty good lottery to enter. You may remember Ricky Muir of the Motoring Enthusiasts Party, who won election based on above-the-line preference flows from these groups: Bank Reform Party, Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party, HEMP Party, Shooters and Fishers, Australian Stable Population Party, Senator Online, Building Australia Party, Family First Party, Bullet Train For Australia, Rise Up Australia Party, No Carbon Tax Climate Sceptics, Citizens Electoral Council, Palmer United Party, Democratic Labour Party, Katter's Australian Party, Socialist Equality Party, Australian Sex Party, Australian Voice Party, Wikileaks Party, Drug Law Reform, Stop CSG, Animal Justice Party, and the Australian Independents Party. That's right, the vegans of the Animal Justice Party together with the Shooters and Fishers - I'm sure that's all about well-considered ideology?
The problem was that the previous system gave you two choices - you could rank all of the candidates - often well over a hundred - or you could accept another party voting for you. The new system instead allows you to rank the groups, of which there is a far more manageable number (and the groups are far more recognisable to candidates in most instances than the candidates anyway) - or you can still rank all 100+ candidates, if you like - or as few as 6.
The system after the abolition of group ticket voting more closely reflects voters democratic choices. The big parties get a lot of seats for the entirely unsurprising reason that a lot of people vote for them!
We don't vote on every bill, we vote on preferred parties every 3 years. It's still a predominantly 2-party dominated system though, and there's basically zero difference between the two on issues like this.
How do we vote for and elect representatives in sufficient quantities that will throw out privacy and security overreaches like this?
Very few of the representatives in both houses will understand the technical means, underpinnings, and exploit and overreach potential of these bills because they simply don't understand the technology in the middle.
All a party/member needs to do is draft the bill and then cause enuf fear and panic in a sitting parliament for the large majority of representatives to pass it. Are these things even being challenged in parliament? Who objects to this who understands it?
My theory is none of the parties object to it because its in both their interests to pass it. Labour or Liberal, both do not care about privacy or "digital rights", because it benefits them to spy on citizens.
Recent bias/availability heuristic being what it is this might not be a fair assessment: but my recollection is there has been 1 person ever who’s been able to engage on these topics. I thought it was an independent, but I also thought their name was Scott Ludlum. But a quick Google tells me he was the deputy leader of the Greens so my recollection is wrong on at least one of those fronts.
Which is exactly the problem: A single example that is but a distant memory. No contemporaries that can challenge the status quo.
I think one solution could be to vote in a faceless/anonymous type candidate that simply provides the context/details up for any vote, then votes based on the outcome of a live poll from their constituents.
There would be several tech challenges, but it could provide a more pure form of the people’s will.
Empower third parties to hold the balance of power. We did it last century with the Democrats and it moved the needle on some vital issues. We can do it this century with the Greens.
This is pretty much it. It's not so much that people do not care about these issues, its that any time they feel spooked about their investment values or taxes, all other issues become irrelevant.
IMO it’s the latter, plus a sprinkle of COVID-19 lockdown distraction (source: I’m Australian).
We haven’t had a prime minister see through a full term in quite a while (they keep getting shuffled out mid-term), and right now everyone is so focussed on lockdowns impacting ~60% of the population that it’s hard to stay up to date and focussed on some of these more important bills being put through the system.
When it comes to authoritarianism Australians are either extremely apathetic or they are generally in favour of more government intervention in private life. Try having a calm and balanced discussion with an Australian about bicycle helmet laws for a wonderful example.
Not Australian and never been to the continent, but... are bike helmet laws an actual example of authoritarianism? Like, I don't hear about the existence motorcyle helmet laws or seatbelt laws as proof of authoritarianism, aside from fringe groups of protestors (with several of them ironically dying from accidents that would've been survivable with proper safety measures).
It's a little different when you consider that the taxpayer funds everyones healthcare. Most people taking the side of requiring bicycle helmet laws are probably thinking "I don't want my taxes going towards looking after some numpty who was too stubborn to wear a helmet and crashed".
People arguing this position are assuming that requiring helmets will decrease the risk of injury, which I am well aware there is conflicting evidence around.
I guess but I don't think it's as rational as that.
I mean you generally don't see people arguing compulsory helmets for car passengers. Even though the number of people requiring medical treatment head injuries caused by cars is orders of magnitude higher than it is for cyclists.
> Try having a calm and balanced discussion with an Australian about bicycle helmet laws for a wonderful example.
As an Australian I’d be curious to know what the argument against them is? (Keeping in mind that most Australians don’t see ‘freedom’ as a terminal goal.)
there's some research suggesting that bicycle helmets are harmful. In part because they are pretty useless at protecting against the type of accidents that actually cause severe head trauma, and then also because they seem to induce risky behaviour from both cyclists and cars around them. And then finally because they significantly reduce uptake of cycling which means people are doing other unhealthy things instead.
(I'm not actually arguing a position here, just saying that this is not as clear cut as you might think).
Because the lived experience of politicians on both sides is that the less time something spends in the limelight the less scrutiny it gets. Once something is determined to be supported by both parties (and almost universally when it involves increasing the power of government over citizens they are all in favor) it is not in anybody's interest to have it linger around for debate.
Most Australian politics is cynically focused on controlling the debate rather than solving important issues. So both sides will usually pick strategically controversial but unimportant things that they think favor them and then focus exclusively on those. Everything else is dealt with as expeditiously and in the most minimalist fashion possible. It does have the upside that a lot of "good government" where both sides agree happens in the background without anybody realising.
Democracy fails if the majority is some combination of apathetic, uneducated, or incapable of critical thought. I don’t know about Australia, but the US is in serious trouble if that statement holds. We are a Republic, which probably buys us time. I’m amazed by how many voters I know personally who have never even read the US constitution or the bill of rights. It’s a real shame, and my guess is it won’t end well.
When I first moved to Australia I rankled at compulsory voting as I believe that not participating is a valid political act. Countries without compulsory voting talk about the turnout as relative to previous years, and if it falls too far there will be questions about a mandate to govern.
In Australia that can't happen as turnout is always high, this leads to very little opportunity to overhaul the mechanism of elections to make it more applicable to the community, or to overhaul political parties entirely. Red team or Blue team are guaranteed some high proportion of the country voting for them and it gives a false sense of relevance.
However I'm now fully in favour of compulsory voting. Why?
Look at America, what an absolute shambles of a democratic system. One party spending decades attempting to stop black people voting. Voter suppression and gerrymandering (also not possible in Australia) baked into the political system. No thanks.
Australian politicians are no better, they would reach for those tactics in a heartbeat, compulsory voting stops us from heading down that path. There is no utopia, the system has problems, but the trade-off is worth it.
As an Australian living in America for 10 years you absolutely nailed it; compulsory voting effectively prevents what is the worst part of American democracy - the unceasing efforts to stop people voting .
Plenty of other bs, but at least the right to participate is guaranteed.
> compulsory voting effectively prevents what is the worst part of American democracy - the unceasing efforts to stop people voting
No, it doesn't; sloppy, deliberately overbroad purges of voter rolls (without notification of the targets) are a key voter suppression technique, and are not at all impaired by compulsory voting.
Are you Australian? I’m asking because I’m not aware of of that(very American) tactic being employed in Australia. Imho the requirement of voting moves the window of what’s acceptable in terms of voter rolls - I can’t think of one time I’ve heard of purging being employed inappropriately in aus. And I can’t really imagine a party getting away with it.
I could of course just be blissfully unaware, and it actually occurs all the time.
I am American, and I was reading “compulsory voting effectively prevents what is the worst part of American democracy - the unceasing efforts to stop people voting” as a claim that, applied where those efforts occur, compulsory voting would be an effective and adequate remedy, rather than “In Australia, compulsory voting exists and the efforts seen to suppress voting seen in America do not”.
AFAIK (which, I’ll admit, isn’t very far—my knowledge of domestic Australian politics is more of a very light random smattering than the result of any focussed study), you are correct that those don't tend to occur in Australia.
I understand your point now, thanks! I agree somewhat; if all you changed tomorrow in the USA was to make voting compulsory, you would immediately see redoubled efforts in purging rolls etc.
I agree I probably overstated, there would still be ways to stop people voting. Although it cuts out many many avenues, so you would imagine(hope?) the overall disenfranchisement would be significantly less, and decrease over time as the attitude of voting entitlement sets in.
> Look at America, what an absolute shambles of a democratic system. One party spending decades attempting to stop black people voting. Voter suppression and gerrymandering (also not possible in Australia) baked into the political system. No thanks.
It’s always interesting to see this essentially fake narrative. No one is trying to stop anyone from voting. It’s made up, to try and role the base, the same way you describe —- it increases turnout for the left. So they push the fake narrative.
Anyway, I see your point. But the US is an entirely different beast. As much as people want to knock it, the system is extremely robust. The federal government really isn’t supposed to have a mandate. That’s essentially the entire left and right debate in the US. States rights vs federal rights.
The issue you’re seeing in the US are that the left are socialist/Marxists who want a strong federal gov (authoritarian). The right believes that’s anti-American, and believes we should have strong states and personal freedom (Republican). If the left stopped trying to enact federal control (through monetary, economic, political, etc), the right would be totally happy. California would do its thing and Tennessee would do theirs, the best would win.
Unfortunately, that’s not what we’re doing.
This literally goes all the way back to the founding with the federalists (John Adam’s) and anti-federalists (Thomas Jefferson). The system is dysfunctional by design, the goal was never to have a strong government and while its tense, you have more freedom and security than just about anywhere.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, "What's the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?"
Carvin responded, "Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game."
If you are saying the Republican Party has spent decades trying to stop black people from voting, that is simply incorrect. It is what the other party’s propaganda would like you to believe. Same with voter suppression.
Southern conservative as Democrats or Republicans like Jesse Helms and Trent Lott were very much in favor of not letting African Americans vote. Who they caucused with later is unrelated.
But yes, to say it was Democrats or Republicans would be very technically inaccurate.
It isn’t a coincidence that the states that were practicing Jim Crow before are the same states trying to discourage voting today.
"Texas ranks number 10 overall when it comes to engagement among African American voters, including being first overall in proportional representation of blacks in state legislature and national party conventions."
Just because they've been trying doesn't mean they've been successful yet. But just pile up more voting restrictions and let's see what happens...its not like Texas has very high voter engagement over all (which is on par with other poor southern states and...Hawaii).
Of black voter engagement (via some metric). Overall they are in the bottom 10 of voter engagement. I guess it should be ok to be compared to Mississippi.
Yeah, that's the problem that the new voting restrictions aim to fix. Likely also the redistricting; both because the Voting Rights Act, by which the federal government prevented Texas (among other states) from wholesale disenfranchisement, is out of the way.
The reality on the ground is that all Western European nations have stricter voting laws / requirements than the US does and almost nobody on HN will dare to talk about that fact because it's inconvenient to the propaganda game.
It's the sick joke of eg Major League Baseball moving the All-Star game from Georgia to protest new voting laws, shifting it to Colorado which already had similar voting laws to those that Georgia wanted to implement. It's all bullshit propaganda.
The same is true of immigration restrictions. You're not supposed to talk about how strict most other affluent nations are when it comes to who they let into their countries to become citizens.
Can you imagine the global uproar if the US began a cultural genocide program against Muslims like Denmark is aggressively doing? Forcibly taking children away from their parents to be re-educated via nationalist propaganda and forced value systems.
How about something less sinister - a national ban on full face veils like France, with punishment by forced re-education. The US would be called draconian, Islamophobic and racist for such treatment. Meanwhile over there's Macron one step away from calling for a cultural crusade.
When the US does it, it's bad. When everybody else does it, it's logical and good and progressive.
> all Western European nations have stricter voting laws / requirements than the US does
The UK* has never required voting ID for elections, and it is possible to walk into a local polling station and be given a ballot paper after just stating your name and address. Sadly that may no longer be the case for future elections, because the UK Conservative party has decided to introduce a voter ID requirement, modelled on the success that the Republicans have had with it at decreasing turnout especially among the poor and minorities.
The fact that other Western European nations have voter ID laws is likely because they generally have mandatory national ID cards already, and it makes to use those to record who voted (how many times). If Republicans were first pushing for mandatory state ID, then later requiring those IDs at polling time would not be seen as so suspicious.
> The same is true of immigration restrictions.
I'm sure it's possible to find examples of policies in some European countries which are worse than the equivalent US policy, but to provide some factual comparison for how welcoming the US is of (poor) immigrants, let me point out that Sweden hosts 8.52 refugees per 1,000 people while the US hosts 0.92, ranking 13th and 68th respectively on the global league table for this.[0]
But you're right, the US would receive criticism for adopting more bigoted policies, just as France was condemned for its bigoted face veil policy.[1] If you live in the US, it shouldn't be surprising that you hear (and are more sensitivity to) criticism of the US more than criticism of countries like France.
* Technically voter ID was trialled in some English constituencies recently, and it has long been standard in Northern Ireland, so perhaps "Scotland" is a better example of a "Western European nation" here. On the other hand, not every US state requires voter ID, so I hope it's still fair for me to say "the US does" require it.
You pointing out edge cases isn't a very convincing argument against Europe as a whole.
In general, Europe has more strict voting ID laws (fact).
In general, Europe has more restricted immigration laws (fact). I mean in the US the debate isn't even about who to let in, rather if we should even have a border and allow people to come in as they please.
In general, Europe is more racist. When Orlando Patterson, a renowned race-baiter in the US, surveyed the evidence he found that America was less racist than any other white-majority country by far. Americans are more open than Europeans to living next to a neighbor of a difference race. And we have sharply rising level of intermarriages.
I think you are making some reasonable points here, even though I don't agree with all of them. You're right that I was cherry-picking the example of the UK (just as the comment I responded to was cherry-picking examples of French and Danish policies) but I think I was justified in doing so since the other comment said "all Western European nations". Perhaps the difference between "all" and "nearly all" is not worth quibbling over, but my cherry-picked example does show that it's perfectly possible for a country to have legitimate elections without voter ID, which I think is relevant here.
Your comment would probably be more convincing if you provided some citations for your claims, though. The EU average for refugee population, on the link I gave last time, is 2.3 per 1,000 people and the European average is 2.01 per, which are both twice as much as the US. I suppose it's possible that Europe is more welcoming of refugees than other immigrants, but I think your second "fact" is not self-evidently true. The only policy you might have in mind is that EU states can, in some circumstances, expel citizens from other states, despite freedom of movement[0] and the Schengen system, which doesn't have an equivalent in the US as far as I know.
Of all your claims, though, the one that I think most needs to be supported is the idea that not having a border is a mainstream position. I don't think you're saying that every inch of America's land and sea borders need to have an impenetrable physical barrier to even qualify as a border at all, so can you point to an example of an official mainstream party policy saying that there should be no limits on who can enter the country? I'm sure some people on Twitter have suggested that the US shouldn't have a border, but I don't think it has more political support as a policy than, for example, the "shoot to kill" policy suggested by Georgia state Rep. John Yates (R).[1]
I think the poll worker would be entitled to perform a citizens arrest at that point, unless "the first person in line to mumble" that was also wearing a very good disguise.
So even without a physical ID document, the poll workers have at least the ability (if not the duty) to remedy a fraudulent vote attempt. The latest US "voting rights" push is to have as few voters as possible physically enter a polling place. Americans aren't grumbling about ID because they hate minorities; they're grumbling because their dead relatives voting in Chicago have been a running joke for 60 years.
The Democrats say that voting is being discouraged. What is being discouraged is invalid votes, to diminish fraud. Republicans would love to encourage an authentic black vote.
I'm not sure this is true, even as a black republican with several black republican voting family members. My experience is that most black voters are more conservative, but almost always vote based on race rather than policy. This is obviously changing, to skew towards black voters being less conservative- but calling candidates racist will usually trump all other values that go into the voting decision.
Black and Hispanic voters are more socially conservative on average, but they vote for the people that don’t actively work against their interests, as anyone who isn’t a push over should.
I’ll gladly vote for a Republican if I feel like the other side is working against my interests, ideology isn’t a determining factor.
So why do Black people say that Republicans are trying to stop them from voting?
I can't tell if you're completely comfortable with the fact that no evidence exists supporting fraudulent voting, or if you just think it's A-OK to break a few black eggs in order to make the omelette of your desires.
It also sets up conditions by which people have no choice but to make a choice which is in their own interest, rather than having a political process built on vote suppression, non-participation and the kind of clientelism which arises when politicians are more concerned with energizing their own base than expanding their appeal.
Quoting political scientist Waleed Aly:
"In a compulsory election, it does not pay to energize your base to the exclusion of all other voters. Since elections cannot be determined by turnout, they are decided by swing voters and won in the center... That is one reason Australia’s version of the far right lacks anything like the power of its European or American counterparts. Australia has had some bad governments, but it hasn’t had any truly extreme ones and it isn’t nearly as vulnerable to demagogues"
I think your point about compulsory voting creating ripe conditions for more propaganda is not borne out by reality - the USA is just as flooded with fake news as Australia.
I enjoy the quote from a political scientist, while ignoring the reality.
In Australia we have an example of what happens when you force everyone to vote. It’s not going well, they literally have concentration camps, ask for papers, don’t let you leave your homes, etc.
> I think your point about compulsory voting creating ripe conditions for more propaganda is not borne out by reality - the USA is just as flooded with fake news as Australia.
I think you assume what you see on TV is legit news. I agree, you see the same “fake news” everywhere. The problem, is those who believe fake news are often not those voting because they don’t do their own research, they aren’t engaged. You want the engaged going to vote, because they’re engaging with society. Forcing everyone to vote is basically a recipe for getting the candidate that “gifts” the most to the people. It’ll be the downfall of nations.
> It’s not going well, they literally have concentration camps, ask for papers, don’t let you leave your homes, etc.
Anyone who thinks this is actually what is happening in Australia is falling for propaganda.
> they literally have concentration camps
Offshore detention centres for refugees seeking asylum is a stain on Australia that cannot be excused or erased.
If you mean the quarantine centres they are finally building then.. they are nothing like concentration camps. They are a better alternative than the hotel quarantine system they have been trying and failing to make work until now.
And within 12 months we'll hopefully have vaccine rates hight enough travel for vaccinated people can get back to normal and they'll only be needed for people who choose not to be vaccinated and choose to come to Australia.
> ask for papers
I assume this is asking for vaccine certification? Seems reasonable, given our failure to get enough people vaccinated quickly enough.
> don’t let you leave your homes
I think this refers to home quarantine? That people in quarantine aren't allowed to leave their homes seems kind of the point?
> vaccine passports haven't been implemented in Australia yet.
The lack of vaccine passports is of little consolation when its citizens have already accepted this:
"The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person."
That is specifically about enforcement of home quarantine as an alternative to hotel quarantine for interstate travel. It's not generally applicable in any way.
Sorry, I should have provided more clarifying context. My point wasn't that this was a general policy, but that Australians have accepted a system of self- and AI-administered biometric constant surveillance for at least some citizens, some of the time. I could easily see this being used to enforce future lockdowns, or being a replacement for vaccine passports (checking that non-vaccinated citizens don't attend any venues they are not permitted to).
Mandatory voting can be done well if the first two options for every race are "I approve of none of these candidates" and "I approve of all of these candidates". Nobody should be forced to vote for a candidate that they don't want to, but it's also useful to be able to distinguish between a disaffected voter (the first option) and an apathetic voter (the second option). With non-mandatory voting, that distinction is erased, and the winner gets to freely claim that they have a mandate of the masses even if 70% of the eligible populace stayed home because they hate all the candidates.
Minor parties and protest candidates already offer the mechanism for that in Australia, and preferential voting means those protest votes often make a meaningful difference
In my anecdotal experience, people don't care about politics here and will most likely vote on either "I'd rather have a beer with X than Y so I'll vote for X" or "they're both as bad as each other so I'll just vote like my family always have."
That didn't sound like the point you were making, and others agree with me. Everyone is responding to you thinking that you were criticizing mandatory or compulsory voting, not universal suffrage. Your choice of words "forced to vote" rather than "right to vote" conveyed that meaning.
Forcing people to vote is universal suffrage on steroids. I don’t think universal suffrage is good be default (it might be idk), but I think forcing the vote takes the worst parts of universal suffrage, uninformed and/or indifferent population voting, and over samples that group
Australia seems on a steep decline and a testing ground for western authoritarianism. Look at the requirements to leave the country, you need to jump through hoops and prove that your presence is required outside to be granted permission to leave. This should be unacceptable for anyone, whether you are Australian or not.
Absolutely, requiring that to leave is all sorts of fucked up. That's some combloc country-type bs. Reentry requirements are different but leaving doesnt put aussie citizens at risk so there's basically 0 justification beyond control.
I just did a quick look, searching (without quotes) "Australia permission to leave" on DDG. It looks to me like you're conflating emergency restrictions for COVID [0] with something like the exit visas that the former USSR used and Russia still uses. There are a great many people dying in the US at this very moment who were making this same sort of argument, right up until they caught COVID and ended up on ventilators. [1]
No it does not. I'm Russian, and the only thing you need to leave the country is an international passport. You can apply for one online, then come to the immigration service to have your picture taken, then a month later you come again and collect it. The passport is valid for 10 years. I believe it's fairly similar to the process most other countries use.
Many other countries require Russian citizens to have visas, and some visas are hard to obtain (like Australian one, lol) but that's another story entirely.
Good to know, that's more in line with the normal world. I would think that only applies to Russian citizens, though. Getting a visa into Russia is a different story under normal conditions, let alone a pandemic, and exit visas do apply to foreign visitors (at least from the US).
The question is then: Why is that an emergency COVID restriction in the first place.
I seriously do not understand where the logic is here. I can understand restricting travel in, but why restrict travel out? In my mind there is no reason why someone LEAVING your country might be a health concern.
But hey we're talking about the folks that thought the logical solution to prevent people from spreading COVID at dog shelters would be to just shoot all the dogs.
> I seriously do not understand where the logic is here. I can understand restricting travel in, but why restrict travel out? In my mind there is no reason why someone LEAVING your country might be a health concern.
I think I get it: Nations can restrict the liberties of their citizens, and monitor compliance with these restrictions -- impose pandemic-related social distancing or mask usage, sanction you for murder or theft or indecent exposure, etc etc -- on their own soil. Abroad, they cannot -- at least nowhere near as easily -- monitor you. So while they can restrict your liberties in the country, one liberty most nations find it very hard to deny their citizens is entry into the country. After all, WTF is the worth, the meaning, of being "a citizen" of a country if it won't even let you in? (cf Wolf Biermann.)
Put those two together, and the logic becomes obvious: If you let people out, you gotta let them back in. But you can't know where they've been and what they've done and with whom, so you have no idea whether they're infected or not. So you'll have to i) take their word for it; ii) investigate, at great effort, cost, and risk of inaccuracy; iii) put them all in quarantine, with the inevitable screeching about liberties infringed upon... Or just not let them out in the first place, avoiding the problem of having to let them back in altogether.
I'd even say their reasoning (as I interpret it) is legally, on the balance, somewhat sound: Once one of your citizens shows up at the border, at least metaphorically still outside it (although in Australia's case in practice of course on their soil already), they're only asking one thing: To be let in. And precisely because that's just one simple ask, and such a basic civic right, it's damn hard to deny them that. Within the country, though, within its jurisdiction, the state already is generally accepted to be within its rights to (sometimes drastically) limit the liberties of the citizenry. Like, hey, during this pandemic many countries have at times forbidden their citizens to leave their homes. So what's all that much worse about temporarily forbidding them to leave the country?
There is a lot of trust in Australia that their elected officials and the public service / police will do the right thing. These new laws being introduced if used in the spirit they are intended could be good. The continual refusal of the current federal government to introduce a federal crime and misconduct commission as most of the states now have is a disturbing trend. For instance three local councils were placed under administration in my state after the elected leaders were found to be doing illegal things - the classic is the Lord Mayor of Ipswich being found with a suitcase containing $50,000 at an airport, he is now serving a jail term.
So these laws, a refusal to have a watchdog, scaling back of FOI request responses, searching journalists homes by the AFP, are a disturbing trend in the federal arena. Looked at dispassionately you can only assume they're trying to hide something.
The only power that’s safe from abuse by an errant politician is one that politicians as a category aren’t allowed to wield to begin with.
I think the best guiding principle for government is to ask yourself when faced with a proposed extension to the power of politicians this question: “would I be comfortable with politicians having this power if the Cabinet consisted of people who personally hated me”. If there’s any doubt, these powers can and will be used to abuse. The rights that protect the worst of society also protect the rest of it, we remove them at our peril.
> These new laws being introduced if used in the spirit they are intended could be good
We already know they won't. Here's [1] the Australian anti-terrorism Police arresting a young online journalist at his house, because he was asking probing questions to a politician that said politician did not like. Video of the incident clearly shows the Politician lied multiple times in his police statement (which is a crime).
Yet the anti-terrorism taskforce was used to arrest this person at his house.
In the years before covid, as the sole American in a few 'strayan social circles, I'd receive sh*t for Americans protesting about their "rights" and how entitled they are.
Now with Covid, Australian citizens can't leave or can't come in (without significant effort).
I've seen a shift in thinking amongst my Australian friends and family. The Australians I know now see value in something like a bill of rights. Like in business, no one pulls out the contract unless things are going to crap.
It does if the people take it seriously. If they tolerate infringement of their rights every time the government says there is a crisis, they will careen from crisis to crisis until their rights are gone. A bill of rights is just paper until the people give it force by refusing to tolerate violations under any circumstances.
I don't know dude I just partied all weekend without any issues, no mask, no constraints on where I could go. No mandates. Seems like some places have their ducks in a row. Get vaccinated and live a little bit...
The only thing I find cringeworthy is people who revel in “Covid Culture”, making a deliberate spectacle of what a good, compliant, obedient individual they are and what awful crimethinking, irresponsible saboteurs anyone who takes a taste of proper life again is. People who use the “it’s a pandemic stupid” line to sweep perfectly legitimate concerns about civil liberties, generational inequality, and the futures of businesses who aren’t massive chains under the carpet concern me far more than people ditching masks and going to parties do.
Zero Covid is up their with young Earth creationism and homeopathy in terms of completely irrational policies. Living where avoiding getting sick and avoiding others getting sick is your primary goal isn’t a life at all, it’s an existence like that of a diary cow or a battery hen. That might be distressingly close to how politicians and their patrons privately see us mere mortals, but it’s no way for a free society to function. We aren’t just economic fuel to be burned up for the benefit of society and discarded when we’re not longer useful, we are human beings and we need a life that’s more meaningful and dignified than “stop the spread covidiot”.
Until recently, Victoria has managed to bring all previous outbreaks to zero. COVID zero works until other states started undermining said goal in the name of business. By saving NSW businesses 3 weeks of not locking down, they've geniously bought themselves 2 months and counting of lockdowns along with high highest number COVID ever seen in Australia.
> We aren’t just economic fuel to be burned up for the benefit of society
By not locking down (and providing you with payment), you literally become their economic fuel you mention to keep their markets going.
Stop listing to what the right wing media are pedaling. You're literally goosestepping into their freedumb.
This isn't a partisan thing, the liberal/authoritarian axis is independent from the collectivist/individualist axis. I'm against authoritarianism full stop, I don't care about the other policies sold alongside authoritarianism. Trying to tar me as right-wing for being anti-authoritarian is ignorant at best and deliberately misleading at worst.
Zero covid is a fool's errand unless you want to be a North Korea-style hermit kingdom shut off from the rest of the world. It is at best a policy that buys time to get people vaccinated, but attempting to carry it out indefinitely is nothing more than an iron fist of tyranny concealed in a velvet glove of safety. The way out of this is vaccination against covid and society coming to terms with the objective fact humanity will never be rid of this virus. We will be forced to live with the virus one way or another, it's just a matter of how much collateral damage zero covid zealots do to society on the way there.
Put it this way, if some tinpot dictatorship in the developing world was preventing dual nationals from leaving they would be sanctioned to Hell and back in a month.
> It is at best a policy that buys time to get people vaccinated
This is exactly the strategy in Australia, from all states and territories. We're last in the OECD in population vaccinations and so COVID-zero via lockdowns are our only strategy until jab rates get to 80% (of people above 16).
I cannot accept a policy where people are imprisoned within their borders and not allowed to leave as ethical. Free countries don't have laws to stop people escaping, and there's no threat on earth where a genuine police state is an ethical response.
> and there's no threat on earth where a genuine police state is an ethical response.
Pandemics need a centralised, coordinated effort to combat. Sure, being a Libertarian is great, but unfortunately Libertairism is about the individual. You don't fight a common threat by individualism.
There's a huge spectrum of opinion between libertarianism and wilfully endorsing authoritarianism because you happen to agree with a particular policy. You don't fight a common threat individually, but the government isn't always the best organ either. In my country the pandemic response has primarily been an exercise in tearing up civil liberties (there's now permanent legislation against protests for example which I doubt could have happened without the climate of panic that the pandemic precipitated), enriching a self-serving sociopolitical elite with all kinds of unethical behaviour such as dodgy PPE contracts, and arguably failing anyway at preventing widespread loss of life despite the immense collateral damage. That's not even mentioning the devestating effect on generational inequality which was a terrible problem to begin with.
I'm particularly disgusted by the use of military-style behavioural psychology tactics against our own citizens to terrify people, I cannot conceive of the kind of person who'd think that's okay in a free country. The only thing we've actually done with any distinction is the vaccine rollout, which was excellent mostly because the government left the details alone and simply gave the existing infrastructure the resources to do its commendable work (I'm willing to be proven wrong on this, as my information is conflicting).
All the "all in this together" talk is complete crap in the cold light of day, sometimes collectivism is required but parliaments and certainly partisan politicians in a power-drunk executive branch aren't a good organ to do it with. We do not need to build a permanent surveillance state or other organs of tyranny to defeat COVID, nor do we need to build a society of mean-spirited, curtain-twitching moral authoritarians which will takes decades to undo.
A pandemic where healthy, vaccinated people have a far, far lower chance to die or be seriously injured than driving to wherever they are going. You can hide in your home for the rest of your life in order to minimize any potential change of future risks, but good luck forcing everyone else to do so at the point of a gun. This virus is never going away, and people are getting sick of the authoritarianism being carried out in the name of "safety". Life is inherently risky, and this is just another one of life's risks. Myself and my friends have been vaccinated since spring, and we have been living life exactly the same as we did before the pandemic started here in New York - and we will continue to do so.
But are we in a "pandemic" still? How do you define pandemic?
If you go by "a disease spreading out there", then surely colds and flus qualify every year, just nobody bothers to think much of it.
I think we need some quantitative benchmark, like:
- if emergency measures are ever taken, any ban on vaccines is lifted
-once vaccines are no longer banned, to qualify for increased measures the disease must be expected to have 5x worse case fatality rate than the flu in vaccinated people.
So in the US we have 3 groups:
- vaccinated people where the disease risk is very low (lower than flu)
- children who are banned from taking the vaccine
- unvaccinated people whose deaths should be labeled suicide. Their deaths are tragic, but it's basically more akin to suicide than anything else. I mean if I just don't eat, I don't really die of starvation, I die by suicide. So it's fine, let them do what they want, but don't make everyone suffer for it.
The pandemic is forever. It will be 2040 and I guarantee you the Coronavirus will be here with various mutations.
For some reason people are not grasping the reality of how long this is going to last. Until we die, the masks are here to stay, the restrictions are here to stay.
Vaccine stocks are going to the moon because there is going to be a need for vaccines for many decades. We will be taking shots every year if not more frequently.
I'm always kind of surprised by people who move to Australia. It's a country that has had an active policy of censorship on entertainment for a very long time - books, video games, movies. The fact that the populace is okay with such a policy would make me reconsider moving there.
I've also read some really questionable things about policies regarding aboriginals in the northern territories. In 2007 the government 'temporarily' banned alcohol and porn for aboriginals as an 'emergency' measure.[0] And apparently it, or some replacement, is still in effect.[1]
Edit: also, turns out that banning alcohol doesn't get rid of alcohol consumption.[2] Who knew?
The ban on alcohol in some communities is (AFAICT) welcomed by those communities, which have massive problems with it. There are laws in other states which allow people to declare their house a “dry place” which is then enforceable by law, to try to stop anyone from bringing alcohol into the house.
I can’t tell you whether any of these measures work, but they aren’t implemented for reasons of racist suppression, from what I can tell. Also no idea on the porn bans.
I’ve just moved to Australia, for the second time. The censorship you talk about is trivial and easily worked around (Video game didn’t get approved for sale? Order in from New Zealand or Hong Kong)
The populace isn’t so much OK with the policy as unaffected by it. These policies usually come from SA and are usually rooted in religion, which still seems to hold sway there.
The appeal of Aus to this Brit is that it has space, so much space, and sunshine. And it’s not as downright crazy as the USA (guns, employment rights, healthcare etc)
If you have punitive anti-drinking policy, and a racial group susceptible to that problem, it becomes a racist policy. There's alternatives that don't set people with problems back even further.
I think you could also take in to the willful enforcement as another aspect to the law.
For instance, ACT police are known for not drug testing for cocaine, whereas meth and speed are. (At traffic stops).
This causes the rich, who can afford to take coke, to continue with their lifestyle, and punishes the poor. Using the justification of moral corruption.
For what it's worth, I am Australian, am ashamed of the countries history of treating the rightful owners of the land, but do agree that the alcohol issue is something that has more nuance than appears to outsiders.
Other things that are supposed to address the same issue, such as demonizing social benefits spending with budget control debit cards are outrageous. They are just weapons of the election cycle, and a way to recover campaign funds at the expense to the countries public.
>No it doesn't. A law does not become racist when one race disproportionately breaks it, otherwise every law everywhere would be racist.
I think you'll find there are quite a few folks that disagree with you on this point, some feel that laws can be considered racist exclusively because of disproportionate impact on specific communities.
Personally I think it just boils down to how people define the term 'racist'. When I was growing up (many moons ago), the term was used primarily to describe intent, but now it has expanded to include outcomes.
Intent is an increasingly imaginary concept when decisionmaking is partially or completely performed by neural nets and checklists. As such, outcomes end up being the important thing to examine.
I agree that it's important to examine outcomes. It's actually the fundamental measurement of a decision and if we recast 'intent' as 'desired outcome' then its clear why paying attention to it is important.
My problem is that I was taught that 'racist' describes an ugly mindset that would confer malice. That may be true in some cases where outcomes disproportionately affect certain folks, but it's clearly not always the case and implying otherwise just distracts the conversation.
Agreed, but this cuts both ways. Intent has a lot of moral judgement attached to it - if we're redefining a word to be primarily about outcomes instead of intent, we should also drop the implied moral assertions around it.
Mmm, I'm not so sure. Certainly the things it means about the person responsible for the decision are a little different - lots of people accidentally put policies into place that harm minority groups, etc. But if the outcome is the same and a person in power chooses not to fix it, it really doesn't matter what their intent is, it's a moral failure not to help the people who need your help if you're able to do so. I don't really care whether they say slurs in their spare time with friends, I just want my elected (and un-elected) representatives to do what they can to prevent people from dying of starvation or preventable diseases.
It may or may not, depending on the context. If you make abortion illegal, for example, women will disproportionately break it. If you make it illegal to drunk drive, on the other hand, and if men are more likely to break it, that's a different case.
Again, I'm not familiar enough with the causes or effects of these policies to have a properly informed debate BUT on the surface it looks like these rules have been put in place in partnership with the communities in question, in order to try to help what is evidently a severe problem.
But perhaps the reality is different.
(Edit - perhaps I do have the read on this wrong, and these policies were not put in place with community agreement, in which case they should be changed. In other states such as Queensland the 'dry place' legislation is far more voluntary)
What if the communities are the ones creating/supporting these policies? Are the being racist to themselves? As from my reading this is often the case.
I'm not an expert in this field but it seems to me you are vastly oversimplifying the policy and without context. And using language like 'punitive' seems unfair as I dont see how this is a punishment, even if one were to believe it was misguided or ineffective. And I respect this policy has flaws and questionable value, while at the same time feel its fair to recognise it is being done in co-ordination with the community itself and and with altruistic intent.
What are these other alternatives you mention? Please suggest. I suspect they come with a whole set of other flaws and failures as rarely is a solution to these problems without a flip side.
I feel like the sentence “the censorship … is trivial and easily worked around” isn’t as hopeful as it sounds like. Isn’t it bad to have to work around censorship? Or maybe I’m reading too much into it.
This is why I’m an anti-authoritarian first and a democrat second. Civil liberties are more important than democracy, they’re worth too much to let the masses throw them in the bin at the first scent of fear.
Same for me. I'd like to see many more small countries and city states. Or at least people taking federalism and subsidiarity serious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
Eg in a US context, there's no reason at all why they need to have a federal minimum wage as far as I can tell.
Different people have different opinions on how minimum wage works, if at all, but from what I can tell minimum wage is an issue that can be done at state or even municipality level only. There's no need to have federal uniformity here.
The issue is that all of those small separate states will do one thing or another wrong. This causes an outcry for centralization because the idea is that the central authority will set them right. And once the power has centralized it doesn't go back to the small states. Eventually people realize that the centralized state also does some things wrong, but now there's no alternative.
Where, of course, 'wrong' is in the eye of the beholder.
Many people cheer on Supreme Court decisions that forbid states from making certain laws or policies that their democratically elected legislatures and governments decided on.
I think the idea that the alcohol rules are authoritarian is misplaced and it’s more complicated than your summation. To have an informed debate you would need to be familiar with the situation on the ground, which I am only in passing, and (respectfully) I suspect you are not at all.
The “censorship” is not really any worse than the UK’s BBFC.
I know what these laws mean for me because I’ve lived here before. They mean very little.
As the Australian government rapidly moves toward an authoritarian police state, does part of you wonder if they'd be so cavalier if their citizens had guns? Or if that might be a deterrent to tyranny at some point?
I don't think it is moving towards being an authoritarian police state any more than any other western country, and I wouldn't want to live in a country where citizens had easy access to guns, and suffered the violence and mass shootings that seem to come from that, like in the US.
"I don't think it is moving towards being an authoritarian police state any more than any other western country"
The example on which this thread is based, and otherwise discussed within this thread (checking in every 15 minutes with the state or be visited by the police), is well beyond other western countries and especially the USA at this point. We'll see if that holds.
You imagine some ragtag groups fighting against the police and military with the guns they bought a decade or two ago?
Personal ownership of guns doesn't help that much. You need a lot of people, a lot of organized people. At which point you can acquire or even create the weapons you need.
The sheer numbers and equipment of modern police and military forces are overwhelming. You need a lot of people, good organization, support from the inside.
Not to mention you'll be hit with the media first, discrediting all of your efforts and painting you as a terrorist or traitor in everyone's minds. Then you're easy pickings.
> I'm always kind of surprised by people who move to Australia. It's a country that has had an active policy of censorship on entertainment for a very long time - books, video games, movies. The fact that the populace is okay with such a policy would make me reconsider moving there.
That seems very bizarre to me. I'm not sure what you're talking about here exactly, what you've heard/read. Compared to which countries? Where are you, that censorship in Australia seems like a dealbreaker, or a way of feeling so superior? How would 'it' affect you at all? "The fact that the populace is okay with such a policy" - is it a fact, or your guess?
(Personally, the apparent US movie/TV morality of genitals or swearing being forbidden, but someone shooting peoples' heads off by the dozen being absolutely fine, seems crazy to me. The other way around would be far more sensible. At least for childrens' viewing.)
Age ratings in Australia are legally mandated, but the rating agency regularly refuses classification to video games. Until 2013, it was illegal to publish a video game unsuitable for 15-year-olds. The introduction of R18 for video games was a step forward, but it seems to be backsliding again. In 2019, Hotline Miami was prohibited from being re-released.
>
ABSTRACT: When Alaska became a state in 1959, state laws removed control of
alcohol regulation from the federal government and Native communities. In 1981,
however, the state legislature changed alcohol laws to give residents broad powers to
regulate how alcohol comes into their communities via a local option referendum. By
mid-1999, 112 small communities had held 197 alcohol control elections under the state
law. Sixty-nine percent of these elections added new restrictions on alcohol, while 13%
removed restrictions previously imposed. The remaining 18% of elections did not receive
a majority vote needed to change the existing status. Most communities passing local
option restrictions chose to ban sale and importation. Although most of these elections
occurred during the first eight years after the law was passed, elections continue to
occur as the law evolves and as communities debate the merits of alcohol control.
Although growing evidence suggests that the local option law may reduce adverse
effects of alcohol abuse in Alaska Native communities, its most important contribution
may be to restore to these communities a limited form of self-government.
And any reservation where the tribal council votes to go dry, the Federal government will enforce it. (Well, to the extent that it will, you know, actually spend the money to have BIA police officers assigned to that Rez.)
>that the populace is okay with such a policy would make me reconsider moving there
When I had to decide for a job relocation whether I should move to the UK or to the US I had many issues in mind, wages, safety, public transport, childcare, culture but I'm gonna be honest 'censorship in videogames' wasn't very high on the list.
Not to mention that the discourse in regards to Australia seems incredibly hyperbolic in contrast to more strict countries like Singapore or China, which actually have significant limits on freedom of expression, and even in those countries for the average middle-class person it is almost irrelevant compared to safety, income, housing, and whatever else.
I'd like to say it just 'censorship' than 'censorship in videogames'. OP said 'books, video games, movies' so it seems that every media can be censored in the future.
You can say the same things about a lot of things in many countries, someone can probably say the same about the one you live in.
I suspect the censorship that you talk about are not as black and white as you seem to be trying to project. It's easy to cherry-pick the things that you don't like to get your own view across.
Not really sure what you are trying to achieve here than to push your own personal viewpoints on things that you don't like? I mean, I could say something like "I'm always kind of surprised by people who want to move to the US because the lack of gun laws", and what does that achieve?
> Not really sure what you are trying to achieve here than to push your own personal viewpoints on things that you don't like? I mean, I could say something like "I'm always kind of surprised by people who want to move to the US because the lack of gun laws", and what does that achieve?
The previous post simply engaged the original with additional comments on why someone might not want to move to Australia. You could always counter with your own thoughts on the matter. This is a place to discuss ideas. The post hardly felt pushy to me, and I don’t understand the skepticism of the poster’s intentions.
> The post hardly felt pushy to me, and I don’t understand the skepticism of the poster’s intentions.
Two things that lead me to thinking that:
* Blanket statement on censorship without providing further details and references
* Picking a policy that affects a small part of the population and referencing articles that already say that many experts already find problematic
I think it's great that you could read the comment with good intentions, but the way that the details are presented and cherry-picked doesn't sit right with me.
I can only agree to disagree on your point that's just part of how we communicate.
Like everything, the reality is more complex up close.
We've never had to think too hard about what underpinned our prosperity, about the law that underpinned our freedoms, because they never failed too badly, for too many people. Perhaps we've had as much law as we needed, and when things chafed we have pushed for changes?
Australia has no official right to the kinds of freedoms you're discussing, but those books and movies were here. Economically Australia has always been top at nothing, top 10 in everything, and that prosperity meant people were free to choose a life they wanted and live free of coercion. Like the poster above, I fear we're embedding an inequality we don't have the will to resolve. But that's been the perpetual fear, that the luck has finally run out.
I don't agree with the 'Intervention' the measures you mention in Aboriginal communities, but not because it restricted rights, because I think Aboriginal communities must be allowed to define how individual rights and collective obligations are balanced in their communities. I disagree with it because I don't believe it was driven by Indigenous people. Colonisation dropped a new worldview and law onto an existing civilisation and imposed it with genocide. Indigenous civilisation has different conceptions of duty and rights. If Non Indigenous Australia manages to build a new relationship with Indigenous Australians, I might feel I have the right to form my own opinions, but for now I don't think it's possible for me to understand enough to understand what is right for Indigenous communities, that has to be Indigenous led.
I detest the government that brought in the intervention, but in doing so they were supported by senior Indigenous leaders whom I respect.
> I'm always kind of surprised by people who move to Australia. It's a country that has had an active policy of censorship on entertainment for a very long time - books, video games, movies. The fact that the populace is okay with such a policy would make me reconsider moving there.
On my list of things to be concerned about as an Australian, censorship of media is pretty low down. It's not something we run up against in day to day life.
> It's not something we run up against in day to day life.
Perhaps consider that instead you just don't hear about it? Australia has some of the harshest defamation laws on the planet and journalists routinely self-censor.
When evidence of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan came out the federal police raided the ABC head office taking hordes of hard drives and documents trying to find out who was the whistleblower. None of the evidence presented by the ABC was ever contested and has subsequently been proven true. The raid has been deemed entirely valid under Australian law. Maybe that doesn't bother you, but it's clear that investigative journalism in Australia runs the same risks as many basketcase countries.
> In 2007 the government 'temporarily' banned alcohol and porn for aboriginals as an 'emergency' measure.[0] And apparently it, or some replacement, is still in effect.[1]
In 1976 France implemented a temporary permission to abortion, just to hedge the wave. A lot of social rights come from temporary laws that were never deactivated.
That's such a bizarre take.
I would love to meet these immigrants that care more about whether or not there is gore in Left 4 Dead 2 than social stability, health care, education and economic opportunities.
It's snark but it's relevant. All of this shit has been pushed through during a climate where people are willing to let the government get away with a little more to help fight covid. And look what they're ramming through.
At the point where a critical mass of people realize this has nothing to do with public health and everything to do with seizing and consolidating power.
Anytime a government is unified in something, like it has been here, you should be highly skeptical. Politicians make calls for “unity” all the time and of course they do as everyone agreeing with them makes exercising power that much easier. The main objectives of any political elite/party in any form of government throughout all of history are to increase their power and to remain there. Division doesn’t mean dysfunction.
The Patriot Act was roundly supported and of course it was - it increases the political classes power across the board, legitimizing the increase for “safety”.
The problem is that this legislation wasn't introduced to deal with COVID.
The intense international focus on our public health restrictions is a huge distraction, and undermines the message we want to send regarding authoritarianism.
Aren't we Five Eyes nation members all affected by this? The U.S. should pull out of this. We need to re-assert privacy rights and avoid trade as much as possible with any countries that enact these kind of laws.
The US will not pull out of Five Eyes because it enables the US to circumvent the constitutional rights of its own citizens via proxy. This has been used in multiple high-profile cases to catch cybercriminals.
The government does not give back power it manages to hoard for itself. This is the fundamental problem with modern progressive liberalism and anti-choice conservatism. When you give the government power, it WILL use said power against you.
Not a single government in human history has not turned on its citizens.
US will never pull out of FVEY the reach they get is the main reason they started the alliance. The US doesn’t need massive overseas bases in places where it may not be possible or feasible when it has partners like Australia and New Zealand.
If by "our" you mean Western governments, Western countries are all democracies. If Western governments have switched to economy over everything mode, that's because that's what the electorate wants.
My family is pretty politically diverse and I would say none of them are ever happy with that is going on over the last 10+ years outside of a few things. Its just people making a choice about what they hate less.
But yes, we can't cut the cord fast enough. Still, trade is another matter than shared mass surveillance. If the USG is sharing our data with the CCP, I'd very much want some people fired and perhaps jailed over it.
It's ironic that a country founded by England with prison convicts who pushed out the indigenous people would eventually choose to create a police state.
Edit: Fixed for people who knew what I meant but want to bust my...
Maybe it isn't ironic at all. This is the conclusion by Waleed Aly (quite a prominent journalist in Aus) that I read a while ago:
> The British arrived with Governors, ready to assume the role of governing. [...] Then, these governments set about building infrastructure in a way they never did in Britain. They were not managing a society that existed. They simply crushed the Indigenous ones that did, then proceeded as though no society was here in the first place. That set in motion a peculiarly Australian logic that government created society, not the other way around.
> All these traits are invaluable weapons against COVID. They’re also what makes it possible for us to legislate gun control after an isolated massacre, pass expansive counter-terrorism legislation without anything like the scrutiny of a serious public debate, and maintain a brutal policy on asylum seekers. [...]
> Perhaps America cannot control its guns for the same reason it can have a spectacular civil rights movement. And if that’s true, perhaps we stopped COVID for the same reason we stopped the boats.
> They’re also what makes it possible for us to legislate gun control after an isolated massacre,
This statement alone should call the writer's knowledge into question. Whilst it was after a particular mass shooting, it was because of the increasing regularity of mass shootings that the laws were drafted.
I remember riding the Melbourne Eye, which has a narrator explaining that "before Melbourne, there was nothing here" and then later mentions the Aboriginals used to live in pretty much the same places.
There's a difference between "country founded by", and "land occupied by". Yes, the aboriginals, like native tribes all over the world, were displaced by modernity. One can debate the good vs. bad of it all, but the country of Australia was founded as a penal colony (after displacing the aboriginals).
And Tasmania (the Australian island state right at the South) was the prison island for the worst convicts. It is now probably the most conservative state in Australia. It's like the phenomenon where the bullied becomes the bully, but on a societal level.
Tasmania (where I live, and am right now) is definitely _not_ the most conservative state. While this may have been true in the 90s, it's not now, and while we do have a Liberal (the right-most of the big Australian parties) State Government, they are the most left-leaning of the State Liberal governments.
I don't know how we can stop this. Majority of Australians don't understand the implications of our constantly eroding rights because they are spoon fed bullshit by our media. When 95% of what you hear is cheering on the liberal party here, nothing can change.
I re-read a bunch of Ben Franklin this past year. It’s hard to overstate just how fortunate the US was to have foundation-builders who could think so clearly. After reading the founders, watching anything on CSPAN is just depressing.
Warren Buffett famously quipped that he looks for companies with a system that could be successfully helmed by a monkey, because eventually, a monkey will be at the helm. I think the founding fathers thought the same way, and attempted to set up such a system.
We’ll see how long it can last with monkeys at the helm.
“The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from convicts, but that so many of them are descended from prison officers.”
- Clive James
CCP is literally cancer on all citizens living in currently free democracy. They show that it's possible to keep a huge population under control with current tools and technology. Our politicians show public disdain, but fuck are they being seduced. And Australia is just stepping into it step by step while asking it's citizens to trust the government because they seem to be at odds with CCP publicly.
As someone who lives in New Zealand, this isn't the democracy we want our closest neighbour turn into.
Please wake up and do something Aussies, take no bullshit, you can do it. Can laugh about it later, but this shit is serious.
I'm sorry to say that it seems to me no one around here gives a flying fuck about politics let alone anyrhing to do with digital rights. This is a war we've already lost.
I blame Murdoch but quite frankly most of the people I talk to are too wrapped up in working to pay their bills and care for their families to care about anything else.
There's still a few of us, but I think you hit the nail on the head with regards to being too busy.
Political reporting tends to either oversimplify things to the point it is not useful, or be so verbose that only the most committed citizens will read it.
I have started working on the idea of using knowledge graphs to fix this problem. The idea is basically representing political values/ beleifs/policies as nodes that are connected by edges representing reason (e.g. "cut income taxes" -> because -> "low taxes are good" -> because -> "high taxation makes the economy less efficent" ). This way, voters can fill out a survey of their values/beleifs and this can be compared to the graph that represents the beleifs of all candidates. Thus, instead of spending tens of hours just trying to understand the political landscape (and likely failing), voters can spend less time and have a greater certainty that they are making a good choice.
Also, evidence could be added to the graph, so that 2 people who disagree on basic ideology could easily see the basis for their differences (by diffing their graphs)
We could have had an amazingly well educated, liberal, progressive, and wealthy nation, but the Murdoch media and the LNP usurped the national agenda for their own personal gains and ideology.
We are an apathetic bunch, but that doesn’t give malicious actors the right to take advantage. They’re still responsible to a large degree.
Isn't Australia showing the exact opposite, that you don't need CCP-style top down control to enact powerful surveillance laws? That's always been possible in a "free democracy".
The Australian government has explicitly aligned itself with the US and against China in the current tensions, as a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. In my view Australia (and New Zealand) are being seduced by US power above all else.
For example, in 2020 a Strategic Dialogue took place between the US and NZ, which was barely reported on. Items for discussion included "the strategic and economic architecture of the Indo-Pacific" and " the U.S.-NZ strategic partnership, including security cooperation"[1]. I bet you less than 1% of Kiwis know that this high level military dialogue took place - an impressive level of control over a population of a kind that the CCP could only dream of.
yes, amazingly enough anything can be achieved in a free democracy. I heard Nazi was elected too. Just takes good people's indifference.
To be honest, any military dialogue isn't of major interest to New Zealand because um look at our military? We have at most 2 planes that are usable. And maybe 5 sea faring vessels that probably can't even attack anything.
The difference is the CCP is more aligned with the best interests of the country (not so much as individuals but as a whole) while Australian politicians are only interested in their own profits and those of their friends.
CCP recently published a list of demands of the US which shows what they care about.. and getting travel visas and lifting financial bans for their elite was like number 1.
So I'd hardly argue that's the best interest of their country really...
Living quality, wealth, technology and infrastructure has all improved dramatically in China. While we all disagree with the CCP in some ways, it is undeniable that they are not doing a bad job in general. The average person in China has faith that the future is going to be better than the present/past which is not something much of the west can claim.
I don't know if you're being intentional, but one of these isn't like the rest. The reach and ambition of CCP though without much elegance is overwhelmingly overshadowing any efforts shown by others.
You can always find a reason for this, alternatively in the US you could thank Osamma bin Laden, because the patriot act with it's Section 215 was legislated as a result of 9/11.
Delusional blaming CCP for AU surveillance state that is fundementally driven by FVEY interests. Turnbull literally admitted the reason why Huawei was banned from AU networks was because Huawei hardware made it harder to surveil on AU/FVEY citizens. He was worried about denial of access to network that would undermine FVEY capability to spy on each other's citizens vs CCP interception. FVEY's been undermining Kiwi/member populations long before CCP entered the picture.
I don't see what that really achieves when all the chips and OSes are backdoored. Not to mention the fact that the entire backbone is meticulously tracked.
Or, realize that security is not only a tech problem. It’s also a people and societal problem. If we don’t live in societies that are conducive to personal liberty, it becomes extraordinarily hard to have any privacy.
If all encryption became illegal, for example, with a death penalty & minimal trial for those who are discovered to be using it — nobody is going to be using encryption. It doesn’t matter how technically savvy you are, very few people will risk death just on principle of “privacy”.
That’s an extreme example, but makes the point that you need both the tech and the society to support liberty and freedom. And it’s a similar dilemma that people are feeling today — what can you do if the government has compromised nearly everything? Those few uncompromised pieces probably don’t stand much of a chance. So instead, it really is a problem of people and society.
Long time FastMail user. Never got a straight answer on privacy so moved to Tutanota for now. Much better, end to end encryption- nice clients too.
FastMail seems to have automated default address collection, backup of drafts & deleted email, ability to archive email. With no at rest encryption this could be possibly used for data mining too.
This new law is the last straw. So far they have not bothered to address the issue. Till few years back FM used to be awesome but feel they have not moved with time.
Australia is China lite. In China people don't really have a choice, but in Australia people actually voted for this government, which makes it even worse.
Just wondering will this new acts have negative consequences for global and independent internet agencies as Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) is well within Australian borders [1]? If it's function going to be severely affected by these new Australian acts APNIC should it be moved somewhere else without these dubious acts.
Australian here, have left the country along with a friend because of the bad vibes such as:
- not being allowed to leave, aggressive cops arresting pregnant women, raids on journalists, culture of fear growing, increasing surveillance and police powers and intimidation tactics, defunding the arts and humanities, rising costs of living, house crisis and stressed out friends, tall-poppy crushing boring uninspired alcoholic culture.
yes
>AN ACCOUNT TAKEOVER WARRANT enables the law enforcement agencies to take control of an account, and even lock the account holder out of it. This can be done covertly and without consent, so the individual wouldn’t necessarily know what is going on until or if they are ever charged. It includes removing two-factor authentication and using one account to gain access to others (directly contradicting cyber security best practices for staying safe and secure online).
The accounts that hotly defend the australian government interventions seem to be created specifically for this purpose.
They only comment on australia covid response posts.
Food for thought.
The top thread which I think you're referring to mixes up the new digital surveillance laws and one state's digital quarantine phone app. I don't think anyone from Australia is going to defend the new digital surveillance laws.
I've lived in Australia for 10 years and really considering my familys future in this country. We are sleep-walking towards a very average future.
An undiversified export economy, out of control house prices, a job-market primarily focused on two cities, a government intent on selling all public assets, very limited political interest in positive climate policies. The latter is simply addressed with "technology will help us out when we need it to".
It really feels sometimes that the only thing the average Australian cares about is the price of their property portfolio.
Or maybe 3 months into the Sydney lockdown is finally getting to me.
Born in AU so bias is to stay, which leads me to push more for political change required to try to address these problems. Most of your 10 years has been under a particularly bad (and honestly corrupt) federal gov.
Country has a large state capture problem from largely mining companies but also other special interests that have lobbied and . Anything that might threaten those interests is being pretty heavily targeted, including action on climate[0] (See "Gas led recovery", and the use of funds intended to renewables used for things like CCS/CCUS and "blue" hydrogen.). And this is bleeding into laws and enforcement.
Then there is the constant resistance to a federal anti-corruption agency as well as reducing the influence of money on federal politicians (see backbencher/ministers resolving door with lobbying firms).
The conclusion I've (sadly) come to, is that (in the short term at least) more money needs to be thrown at smaller parties and independents to try to combat this. Unlike the USA, Australia has precedent of minority governments and compulsory voting combined with a preference system means that gaining even a small number of lower house/senate seats can make a disproportional impact to the policies being set around Australia. Both major parties are so similar but just switching from Blue to Red is unlikely to result significant change in policies for some of the issues you've raised.
This always seemed like madness to me. You can force someone to vote, but you cannot force them to vote responsibly. They may just vote "screw you" just for revenge.
The right to vote includes the right to abstain from voting when one does not care.
Forced voting sounds like a recipe for bad election results. I would expect the same from paying people to vote.
I think that I would be okay with compulsory voting if there was a 'none of the above' option on the ballot. If "none of the above" wins the vote then all the people on that ballot are disqualified from running in any election for a period of time, say 10 years and there is a do-over on that particular electoral district election.
I'd like to hope that would clean up politics real quick.
You must show up at a polling place (either prior to the election or on election day), and you must identify yourself to the polling officer, and receive a ballot paper.
You do NOT have to complete the paper: you can put it in the box untouched, you can write "screw you all" on it, etc.
So ... yeah, you are obliged to show up, but you don't have to actually vote.
Rather than a “None of the above” option (though I do find your disqualification concept interesting) I prefer an “I abstain” option. Food requires a small amount of effort but an effort nonetheless. Every time a voter picks up the ballot, you hey are faced with the question “do I really have nothing to contribute here?”
Yeah, that happens. One of my close friends is disillusioned with the government, and usually just uses the ballot paper as a way to "politely share his thoughts on the matter" with whoever is unfortunate enough to read it. They don't verify that a vote was cast, just that you showed up.
>Forced voting sounds like a recipe for bad election results.
The previous conservative, neoliberal PM, John Howard, said the same thing. Rationally, it doesn't make sense.
However, even he admitted that empirical, historical evidence has shown it to be a good thing that prevents either major political party from catering too hard to the extremes.
On balance, I think it's better, because systems where voting is voluntary seem to really encourage voter disenfranchisement. Also, the system means that the logistics must be in place for the system to be able to handle everybody turning up to vote, so it would be very unusual (in my experience) having to wait in line for more than 20 minutes or so. As opposed to stories we saw in the US of voters having to wait hours to vote.
As others have said, it's an option to just submit a blank paper.
We don't have voting machines in Australia. You write on paper with a pencil (I believe you can bring a representative with you if you're vision impaired and things like that).
We definitely have voting machines [0] that started being trialed back in 2007, and more widely in recent years.
The process I experienced last time I voted in local elections was you validated where you lived and were given a one use barcode/qrcode (can't remember) which you scanned at the machine, made your selections and dropped the barcode paper in specific bins.
I don’t see this as anywhere near the same thing though. These so called ‘donkey votes’ are derided, and categorised as together with voting errors and other invalid voting forms. The right to withhold your vote is as fundamental as the right to withold your labour. Voter turnout is an important metric in its own right, and is observed tactically in, say, the UK.
Compulsory voting simplifies competition, and destroys some forms of it. In particular, the ‘mandate’
I highly doubt most non-voters are intentionally "witholding" their vote. I think it's more often just laziness or lack of access (voting during work day etc.).
It has to be incredibly more meaningful to have statistics on how many people intentionally said "screw you" with a vote for "ficus" or w/e.
Yes, they are counted, because it is a perfectly valid vote.
This does indeed advantage the candidate who draws the top spot on the ballot (the positions are randomly assigned). In a preferential system it advantages the candidate in the final two that drew the higher position - it seems to be worth about 0.7% ( https://www.crikey.com.au/2010/08/02/whats-the-donkey-worth-... ).
The amount of electorates that swung, and the percentages that the winning representative (and party) received mean that's not true at all, in my opinion anyway. Happy to be convinced otherwise, but the "mandate" still exists.
It’s not “forced” it’s “your responsibility in a democracy”.
We have preferential voting here, and plenty of minor parties to vote for, so your vote isn’t “wasted”. Living in a democracy means participating in voting to help decide what the country does, and honestly it’s a pretty minor requirement: the actual act is quick and easy, it’s on a weekend and anyone who has to work at is given the opportunity and the results are usually mostly finalised by the end of the day.
I strongly disagree. There is already informal voting (aka donkey vote), people who want to use their vote as a "screw you" have to choose between a number of candidates/parties, so who they are "screwing" is pretty hard to tell.
I actually think compulsory voting brings forward the importance of thinking about the consequences of voting, and voting for candidates that have the same values. Granted this can be manipulated (and is) with ads etc but getting people use to being involved I think is far better than making it optional and creating people that either never vote or a population that does when things are "bad" and an apathetic group when things are "good".
To clarify, donkey votes are perfectly valid. This is where the voter simply fills the boxes the same as they are displayed (first presented candidate gets number 1, second gets 2, etc.). A donkey vote is a formal vote, just one typically driven by the same factors that would drive an intentionally informal one. An example of an informal vote that I encountered during scrutineering a local council election is when one voter drew their own box, labelled it "Tony Abbott", and voted for that.
Voting is not compulsory. It is a myth. What is compulsory is visit the polling booth and scratch your name on the electoral roll to record your attendance. You DON'T have to actually vote.
> The right to vote includes the right to abstain from voting when one does not care. Forced voting sounds like a recipe for bad election results. I would expect the same from paying people to vote
I've gone in a bit of a voting system rabbit hole recently, and this depends on the system of voting. There are some systems where abstaining from an election can help a voter's preferred choice win: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_criterion
So I think depending on the election system, it could make sense to have compulsory voting, even if the person voting simply puts all candidates at equal preference.
> I would expect the same from paying people to vote.
That's already the case pretty much everywhere since populists promise benefits to whoever elects them. So de facto you are getting paid for your vote if you are in a special interest group.
There are pros and cons to either approach. I've been wondering recently if voluntary voting in the US is partially responsible for the tribal political atmosphere? As I understand it, one of the big challenges both major parties face in the US is how to motivate their voting bases to actually turn up to vote at all. And as social media has shown us, there's nothing more engaging and motivating than outrage.
So both sides of US politics, and their surrogates in the media, are incentivised to stir up outrage against their opponent, leading to a more divided country in the long run.
Whilst officially Australia has compulsory voting, unofficially you merely have to sign your name off. If you fail to have your name signed off, the fine is $20 (for federal elections, $55 for the state of NSW). Voter turnout is still a way of measuring disengagement, as well as measuring the number of informal votes, and more importantly, the nature of the informal votes. You can write whatever you like on the ballot paper at the end of the day, so if voters feel that no party represents them, you can fill in nothing. If you do not like any party, you can submit a blank ballot, which does represent a decent percentage of informal votes - but I think that given you're already there, most people have some idea of who they like _less_ or _more_.
I think the cultural aspect of the _appearance_ of compulsory voting is important: not voting because it's raining and you'd rather stay in bed is very different to abstaining based on your political beliefs, and compulsory voting (in Australia) means you are less likely to encounter the former whilst still enabling the other. I would argue that this makes abstaining for political reasons a bit more explicit than non-compulsory voting (technically you can even write your reasons for not voting on the ballot paper, which would officially mean nothing but would certainly be evaluated in research on informal voting), but I do concede that this feels a bit disingenuous: the system works because you're told to vote even though you kinda don't really have to vote, but make sure you jump through the hoops to make it look like you voted.
It can't be any worse than what we have in the USA. I mean for god sakes, Trump actually won the presidency. Something is definitely broken in the US system (primarily voter suppression, legal corporate bribery, and gerrymandering is my theory)
I would say the current party dynamics are a big problem, both the symptom and cause of other problems.
One party fights for total control, with near total resistance to the other party, playing a negative sum game in order to maintain power despite demographic disadvantages.
The other party has a wider spectrum of views, and is more open to bipartisanship. But it has difficulty strategically unifying when it would make the most difference. So it often negotiates from weakness despite having demographic advantages.
As far as I can tell, this dynamic is getting even worse and infecting most people and many institutions that would be much better not being politicized.
Mandatory voting means it is mostly a logistical exercise.
"You participated in the process."
Like building Ikea furniture, you now think that the process is better and more valid. Less civil unrest that way. Of course, you are still allowed to say whatever you like about how stupid any politician is in any role - even the PM. But you are more likely to accept the authority invested in them by the process when you are part of it.
Thirdly, you can still donkey vote if you are desperate to make your vote meaningless.
You can force someone to vote, but you cannot force them to vote responsibly.
How does this not also apply to similar civic obligations, like jury duty?
(I've always mentally put compulsory voting in the same box as compulsory jury duty. In both cases of course it's not really compulsory to take part, just to attend).
So I'm Australian but from the part no one ever visits (ie Perth). I say this because for most visitors Australia = Sydney, maybe Melbourne.
Anyway, I've gone to live overseas a couple of times now. The most recent time was to the US 11 years ago. I'm still here.
As many problems as the US has, the one big selling point it has is career opportunities and earning potential as a software engineer. Like... it doesn't even come close. I'll take what my US compensation buys me in NYC over whatever compensation I could get buys me in Sydney (in particular).
Property in Australia is like a game of musical chairs but the music stopped in Sydney in 1978 (in Perth and Melbourne it was more like 2003).
One thing I like about the US tax system is there is no negative gearing (mostly). Specifically if you earn over a certain amount ($150k but it starts sliding down at $100k) then you can't offset ordinary taxes with passive losses. I really think Australia desperately needs this system but negative gearing is so ingrained in Australian culture now that it's political suicide to try and change it. I believe Labor made noises about this in a recent Federal election and suffered the consequences.
It's a shame because Perth and even Melbourne used to have a relatively low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life. I honestly don't know how anyone does it now.
As for the politics, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Australia doesn't have the crazy evangelicals that the US does, for example. Like when the gay marriage issue was decided even the highly conservative former PM Tony Abbott basically came out and said the matter was settled and it's time to move on.
As for climate change, while I believe in it I also don't think anything will change out of pure altruism by any large group of people. And that's anywhere. It's not unique to Australia. Look at what's happened to the price of solar in the last decade.
I'd say the ugliest side of Australian politics and culture in general is actually the treatment of refugees and the so-called (this name still sends shivers down my spine) Pacific Solution.
Oh and we can't forget Australia's most pustulent export: Rupert Murdoch.
> It's a shame because Perth and even Melbourne used to have a relatively low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life.
I'm British and have just moved to Perth. I am looking at being able to get a house 2-3 times as large here compared to the UK, for similar outlay.
Add to that the weather and the sheer space... the QoL here seems so much higher than back home.
I have spent time in some parts of the US (about 4 months in Texas, probably about a year in other parts in total), but haven't lived in NYC. It always seemed nice, if you like the big city, but I had my fill of that in London some time ago.
Now over east? Yeah housing seems utterly inaccessible in Sydney and Melbourme. But out west here it doesn't look that insane by my (British) standards.
Australia by and large is also much less grubby than the UK.
(I say, 'grubby' not 'dirty', because I don't know whether the UK is actually dirty. Eg all the buildings just look dirty and drab compared to Australia. Perhaps it's a leftover from centuries of burning lots of coal?)
I agree, Perth has always seemed sparkling clean compared to most cities in the UK. Other Australian cities I've visited seemed that way as well.
I think partly it's the light - it's so bright here in Aus that things look cleaner anyway, but also the light and the heat keep things a little cleaner, UV sterilises and the sun bleaches after all.
Aus doesn't have as much of a legacy of concrete brutalism, either, lumpen concrete buildings in the UK that started out grey and end up brown, water-stained from all the rain and oppressive-looking.
And also I think better care is taken. Visiting London after having lived here in Perth for a couple of years about ten years back, I was struck by just how often as I walked around my nostrils were assaulted by smells of rotting rubbish or just plain urine.
So yeah, bunch of things, but it does feel much cleaner here.
I'm genuinely curious about this. My questions are:
1. What do you do for a living in Perth? What I guess I'm really trying to determine is what income bracket you're in.
2. Where in Perth are you looking at renting or buying? and
3. How much of your ability to buy is because you sold a house in the UK so have a huge deposit to put down?
I've known quite a few British people who have moved to Australia and pretty much all of them had (3).
I would say that QoL is generally much higher than the UK though. Houses and blocks are of course larger. Earning potential in London at least is pretty high though. But if you want a house you're probably commuting for an hour each way when the trains are running, which they generally aren't. Crossrail will be interesting.
> Like when the gay marriage issue was decided even the highly conservative former PM Tony Abbott basically came out and said the matter was settled and it's time to move on.
Australia recognized same sex marriage in 2017. That was 3 years after after the USA did. I'm not sure I would call Australia as being progressive by that measure.
So, for the record, I 100% support gay marriage and abortion rights.
What you have to realize about the US is that the Supreme Court deciding these issues is... controversial. Many view it as undemocratic (although it's worth noting that many of those same people don't feel the same way about the Supreme Court's pro-2nd Amendment interpretations of modern times).
We're still seeing the ripple effects of Roe v. Wade being decided almost 50 years ago.
As others have pointed out, Supreme Court precedent is only that until a later Supreme Court comes along and changes it and that could very well happen with the current court composition. And you need look no further than the Court's refusal to stay the Texas abortion law pending a full judicial review.
So the date this was decided doesn't really give any moral superiority here of the US over Australia for two reasons:
1. Australia's position was decided by a democratic process; and
2. With 62% (IIRC) of people approving of the change, the matter is effectively settled. No one can complain about it. As such you don't see any real conservative Christian blowback like you do in the US as witnessed by the statements of Tony Abbott and others.
> We're still seeing the ripple effects of Roe v. Wade being decided almost 50 years ago.
Abortion is far less of a political and cultural hot potato in Australia than in the US. While no doubt some of that is due to other cultural differences – for whatever reason, conservative Christianity has never been quite as strong an influence in Australia as in the US – I think a big factor is the difference in how abortion was legalised.
In Australia, there is no constitutional right to abortion. And yet abortion is legal nationwide. Its legality was achieved through a gradual process, involving state legislation, and state court decisions – those state court decisions were not based on constitutional law, rather the state courts simply decided to reinterpret the existing criminal laws against abortion to not apply to medical procedures. The federal courts stayed out of it completely, and constitutional rights never came into it, only statutory law – if they wanted to, the state parliaments could have overturned the state court decisions effectively legalising abortion, but they chose not to.
The fact that the process was much more gradual, and had greater democratic legitimacy, has helped make it less of a controversy. And since it happened through a series of state laws and state court decisions, opponents of legal abortion don't have one single highly visible event to focus all their opposition upon, like Roe v Wade is in the US. Almost every American has heard of Roe v Wade – even many non-Americans have – by contrast, few Australians know about the Menhennitt ruling (which de facto legalised abortion in the state of Victoria in 1969) or the Levine ruling (which did the same in New South Wales in 1971). American opponents of legal abortion focus most of their energy on trying to get justices appointed to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v Wade – the main purpose of this latest Texas law is to get a case before the Supreme Court which will give those justices an opportunity to do exactly that – its Australian opponents don't have any national focus, which in practice makes them a lot weaker.
It is totally consistent to support legal abortion, but to also think that Roe v Wade was a strategic mistake.
>doesn't really give any moral superiority here of the US over Australia for two reasons:
I wouldn't call the US morally superior here anyways. In fact, i think anyone after the US is really late to the party. The first US law was MA legalizing gay marriage in 2004. It took 11 years of fighting after to get to supreme court.
American liberals have a bizarre authoritarian idea of how governance/power works because they were spoiled for the Warren court for so long. They think of government as a tree of daddies and mommies of increasing wisdom and credentials with SCOTUS at the root, to gift you civil rights if you're pure of heart and can just word your petition correctly. They've completely given up on getting buy-in from the ignorant, downtrodden, misunderstood, and miseducated masses that vote for them (don't even ask about the ones who didn't.)
The recent ruling on the Texas heartbeat law might make a dent in that, although I doubt it.
Changes made by pure fiat don't last. Gay marriage in the US could absolutely turn out to have been temporary for just the reasons you explained.
Surely you could have mode your point ("Changes made by pure fiat don't last") without the diatribe overgeneralizing and insulting a large percentage of the American population?
> Australia recognized same sex marriage in 2017. That was 3 years after after the USA did. I'm not sure I would call Australia as being progressive by that measure.
The US was only the 17th country in the world to allow same-sex marriage nationwide; Australia was the 23rd. Still only 28 out of 193 UN member states have it fully nationwide – less than 15%. Only a 3 year gap, when any country having legal same-sex marriage is just over 20 years old. If we look at this in a global and historical context, both countries are very progressive on this particular issue. To argue that the US is in some significant way "more progressive" than Australia just because it got there a few years earlier, you have to be looking at things from a rather narrow perspective.
"Fully nationwide" above is only counting the main national territory of the country, not overseas territories. Even for the US, same-sex marriage is not legal in the territory of American Samoa – the territorial government of American Samoa claims that Obergefell v Hodges doesn't apply to them due to some legal technicalities, and it appears nobody has yet challenged that claim in court. Likewise, Netherlands, New Zealand, and UK all have legal same-sex marriage throughout their main national territory, but not in some of their overseas territories.
So if you want to be hyper-pedantic about it, the US still doesn't have legal same-sex marriage (throughout all of its territory), Australia does.
The USA recognized same sex marriage in 2015, but we did so via a Supreme Court ruling. The Court's composition has changed since then, and the new Court has signaled a willingness to overturn settled precedents.
While our current detent may persist, I would imagine that an action taken by the Australian Parliament would tend to be more durable.
> I would imagine that an action taken by the Australian Parliament would tend to be more durable.
I'm curious to understand why you'd think a law passed by elected lawmakers is more durable than a verdict by judges who have their position for life? Obacare was surely very controversial, but despite the best efforts by the conservative and an ideologically hostile Supreme Court, it remains in place after ten years.
> [...] but despite the best efforts by the conservative [...]
Those efforts were actually pretty half-hearted. They talked a big game, but they don't actually want to abolish it. (Reminds me of how the UK doesn't really want to face up to a no-deal Brexit, despite lots of brave talk. Or how no government in the UK has so far re-nationalised the railroads, despite re-nationalisation perennially polling high with the general public.)
This is a really good point. Conservatives had two full years to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They had campaigned as a party for "Repeal and Replace" for nearly 10 years, but then they didn't repeal it.
In Australia's case, the same-sex marriage law was approved by 61% of voters in a national plebiscite, a non-binding referendum (officially it was called a "postal survey") before Parliament enacted it.
Legally, Parliament could repeal it tomorrow and ban same-sex marriage again. Politically, that would be impossible without another plebiscite, and there is no reason to believe a new plebiscite would deliver a different outcome; it would almost certainly return the same result, and likely by a bigger margin.
No conservative politician in Australia wants to talk about this. I'm sure some of them are still personally opposed to same-sex marriage, but they all realise trying to repeal it is hopeless, and so they'd rather talk about things that they have some hope of achieving.
Simply put: two of the five justices who voted in favor of Obergefell (the case that legalized same-sex marriage) are no longer on the Court. They have been replaced with justices who would be more likely to vote the other way.
The realignment of the Court, plus this Court's willingness to overturn settled law, together signal that a new law prohibiting same-sex marriage might be allowed to stand if brought before today's Court, returning the US to a country where same-sex marriage is not universally legal.
So I would regard our current regime around same-sex marriage, civil rights, etc. to be subject to not being directly challenged at the Supreme Court.
The Australian Constitution is heavyweight on the mechanics of federal government, and how heads of power are divided between the state and federal governments, and the role of the court to adjudicate, but quite lightweight on peoples "inalienable rights". There's no "bill of rights" - though there are certain principals like "natural justice" and "customary law". Parliaments are empowered to legislate, and that's what they do. So it's comparatively rare that the court will discover some basis to neuter legislation - though it does happen.
I mostly agree with everything here but will point out that SE salaries have risen quite dramatically over the past 10 years in Aus. If you are a (genuinely) senior engineer you should be on $170k+. In a place like Brisbane (if you can handle the summers) that's a reasonably liveable salary. But yeah - I fear it's going to end up like the rest of the country fairly quickly...
One of my major gripes is that education here is not at all egalitarian.
> Property in Australia is like a game of musical chairs but the music stopped in Sydney in 1978
The central premise of musical chairs is that there are less chairs than people but every round everyone gets an opportunity to get a seat.
So in my analogy, the last round ended in Sydney in 1978 meaning if you weren't sitting then then you didn't get another chance at a seat.
I remember seeing property shows in the 2000s and there'd be a young couple in their mid-20s with a baby looking at houses that were up to $800K. You'd really need to be earning $200k+ then to afford that or, more realistically, $250k+. Not a lot of jobs in Australia (even Sydney) paid that then (and still don't for the record).
So how were such people affording houses? The Mum and Dad Bank is how. Their parents who were sitting down in 1970s were now sitting on considerable unrealized property wealth and this gets passed along to the children.
Some important context here: this applies to probably every Australian city but is particularly prevalent in Sydney I feel. And that is that the notion of what Sydney in keeps changing.
So when I say Sydney became unaffordable in the 1970s, I mean what people viewed as Sydney back then, which is inner Sydney, the North Shore and coastal suburbs. But these have now been so out of reach for people who aren't wealthy for so long that people don't think of them as Sydney anymore.
Now when people talk about the affordability of Sydney they're talking about the areas where "normal" people buy. Sydney has expanded far to the West, basically to the Blue Mountains (eg Penrith). It's also expanded south (eg Campelltown). But somewhere like Mosman isn't part of the normal person's mental picture of Sydney property where it was 40+ years ago.
This reminds me of something that happened to me in university. I mentioned to someone the suburbs I'd be staying in over the summer when university was out and they literally said "la di da" like it was fancy. To them it was because they were part of a newer generation who lived very far north (I remember they took 3 buses to get to university). To me, it was just where my grandparents lived and had done so for 40-50 years. When they bought that house it was literally the edge of the city, as in the other side of the street was bushland.
You see it on the train too. When I went to university the one where all the students and twentysomethings lived was 5 stops from the CBD. 15 years later it was 8-9 stops.
levels.fyi does not agree with you. I feel we are making more software engineers than jobs that are available. Many are offshoring product development to India.
The replies to you seem a bit off to me. $1000 a day is plenty to live on in Brisbane.
I do fear that housing here is going to end up like the other major Aus cities though. I think Brisbane house prices are rising at like $500 a day or something. An amount I couldn't have fathomed paying in rent weekly when I first moved to Sydney.
Yeah agreed. $200k a year is more than enough to live on. Heck, I'm saving 80% of my pay cheque -- specifically to save enough to offset this crazy property price capital growth.
But a simple example that shows how lucky I and others are: I can rapidly, from $0 (if I was silly enough to have no savings for this exercise) save up a deposit within a year or two, less if one has a partner.
Any of my friends and acquaintances, unless they also went into high-paying jobs and industries here in SEQ, or unless they have parents well-off enough to help them, are writing off being able to enter the property market for years or decades.
You have to remember that tax regimes are different in different places. In the UK I’ve been on about $120 an hour, equivalent after tax to a salary of about $200k, and your health care is already paid.
Comparatively it seems like contractors in the USA get punished by the tax system.
1. Tax matters
2. COL matters
3. AUD-USD conversions aren't that straightfoward when discussing this.
$1200 a day puts you into the top few percent of salaries here in Australia. I don't really care what a "brisbane sized city in the states" might be doing, because moving there means I have to live in a country that I'm not a good fit for culturally.
>I really think Australia desperately needs this system but negative gearing is so ingrained in Australian culture now that it's political suicide to try and change it. I believe Labor made noises about this in a recent Federal election and suffered the consequences.
The senior ministers of the ALP came to a similar conclusion.
Mid this year they announced no changes to negative gearing or capital gains tax offsets.
For the non-Australians following along, this means both major parties support rampant speculation on the residential property market.
negative gearing allows the average person investing to have the same tax advantages as a company investing (in anything), because for a company, only profits (revenue minus expenses) are taxed.
If there were no "negative gearing" for investment properties, then either there would be fewer such properties, or people would have to form businesses to perform such investments (which adds an extra bit of friction with accounting and tax).
Making it possible to deduct "expenses" from "revenue" of a person doing the investment makes sense.
> negative gearing allows the average person investing to have the same tax advantages as a company investing (in anything), because for a company, only profits (revenue minus expenses) are taxed.
From a quick Google, it looks like companies are not entitled to CGT discounts. This means that forming a business would increase the tax you pay for almost everyone.
>If there were no "negative gearing" for investment properties, then either there would be fewer such properties, or people would have to form businesses to perform such investments (which adds an extra bit of friction with accounting and tax).
This doesn't sound like a bad thing. It would discourage people from speculating on the property market and outbidding owner/occupiers (which is a net negative for society) and encourage them to invest their money in productive businesses (which is a net positive).
The problem with negative gearing is the 'average person' can't participate in negative gearing.
Negative gearing only works for those who have a high level of income with the corresponding high level of taxation.
Why it works so well for these individuals is they can greatly reduce their tax liability by using the property deductions negatively gearing has to offer.
As a secondary benefit, those same investors also win on the capital gain side of the equation as these negative gearing tax incentives create massive demand for property.
Your 'average person' living on the average wage can't benefit from negative gearing as their wage bracket does not attract a high enough level of taxation.
In fact it hurts this group of people only because those higher property prices also means they are priced out of the housing market.
> It's a shame because Perth and even Melbourne used to have a relatively low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life. I honestly don't know how anyone does it now.
The experience of living in Melbourne in 2000 as someone not on the property ladder is very different to now.
In 2000 it was possible to be on the poverty line and still live within an easy bike ride of the CBD. Now everyone I know lives increasingly on the fringes of the city.
This change is not unique to Melbourne but I can't help feel something is lost when you go to a house party and the only people you meet are ones who can afford property.
I'm increasingly assuming anyone who buys in Melbourne is doing so with the assistance of multi-generation wealth.
I'm at the age where a lot of friends are beginning to buy (in Melbourne). There's basically two classes: the people buying houses in the outer-inner-suburbs that would still be vastly outside their price range without massive help from both sets of parents; these buyers are unfailingly couples. And second, single friends buying without parental assistance, but buying off the plan apartments not much closer to the city but which at least offer a deposit low enough for someone to get on the property ladder. One is taking on a lot more risk than the other to enter the market.
> the people buying houses in the outer-inner-suburbs that would still be vastly outside their price range without massive help from both sets of parents; these buyers are unfailingly couples.
I suspect there is a big difference between the long term wealth implications of buying a house vs buying an apartment. There are never going to be more houses in outer-inner-suburbs. There is going to be a constant supply of new apartments as we move towards higher density living.
People who have wealthy parents are in the best position to make better housing investments.
With regard to gay marriage - Donald Trump ran and won in 2016 on a platform that included the recognition of gay marriage as a settled right. AU and US aren’t so different!
That's kinda my point. It is of course unknowable but I really wonder if Trump could've won the 2016 election if the Supreme Court hadn't handed down that decision.
This has happened before. Dubya largely got reelected in 2004 because Karl Rove tied the campaign to blowback against states and plebiscites in favour of gay marriage.
`It really feels sometimes that the only thing the average Australian cares about is the price of their property portfolio.`
If this is the only accessible form of financial gain - why wouldn't they?
I strongly suspect that in order to have a dynamic economy a weak housing market is a pre-requisite. Given the choice it's much easier to plunk money down in a house and watch cash magically appear than it is to start a business or do anything creative.
Not in Australia but it's been kind of an insult to see my house earning more than the top tax bracket income I've been making from my one-man business for the past 3 years. Sometimes I wonder what the point of trying to earn money with work is. Of course it won't last, but it has a psychological demotivating effect.
All the while being bombarded with ads from real estate companies trying to FOMO you into buying a very average house for a price you really can't afford.
People are always feeling bad that they missed out on the hot new investment thing. At the time I bought, prices were already rising rapidly and people were complaining how they'd missed out, assuming the boom was about to end. The rise of cryptocurrency is probably creating a lot of unhappy missed-outers too. But these people somehow forget that they're still able to get in on the ground floor with the next hot new investment thing. I remember during the first couple of bitcoin bubbles, people complaining how early adopters were making so much and how they missed out. But then the next bubble would come, and the next, and the next. Some people are just too risk averse to ever win the bubble lottery.
Almost 11 years in Melbourne (from NZ) and I couldn't agree more.
The 220~ days (and counting) that Melbourne has been in lockdown has certainly worn me down, but even before C19 the political climate, attitude towards technology, cost of housing and the impact of increasing bushfires has taken an enormous toll on the country over the past decade that I've been here.
In my experience New Zealand is more different from Australia than a lot of Australians seem to assume.
Generally speaking New Zealand is far more socially liberal than Australia, however there are greater financial / job opportunities in Australia due to it's size.
In New Zealand you're less likely to own a fancy new car or have has many expensive possessions but to me at least it didn't feel like you "need" them as much as in Australia.
There weren't many tech job opportunities in New Zealand given its small population, however I suspect the global rise in remote work coupled with New Zealand's relatively capable internet infrastructure may be changing this.
Entertainment wise New Zealand hands down has more stunning, enjoyable, accessible nature and outdoors - while Australia pre-covid has a far more international offerings (musicians, comedy etc...).
Property prices are absolutely insane in both countries if you want to live in city / inner suburbs.
It's hard to explain but I've always felt that if Australia was socially and politically the USA, New Zealand would perhaps be somewhere in Scandinavia.
What's stopping me from moving back to New Zealand? - My life (friends, work, cat) is in Melbourne, if I was offered a good job opportunity back in the South Island of NZ and moving costs covered - I'd certainly be considering it.
Of course this is all highly subjective and only based on my experiences / observations.
South Africans moving to NZ often mention the "tall poppy syndrome" in NZ. Do you feel like that is a fair comment?
This comment reminded me of the concept:
> In New Zealand you're less likely to own a fancy new car or have has many expensive possessions but to me at least it didn't feel like you "need" them as much as in Australia.
I'm a Kiwi who's lived in Australia for two thirds of my life.
New Zealand's economy and cost-of-living is markedly weaker and higher than Australia's; the property-is-the-only-investment idea is somehow even worse in NZ, at least lately
The day-to-day life in NZ is lovely though. At least where I'm from in Northland.
Australia and NZ are more similar than they are different, I feel.
- They have good access to nature/beaches
- Property prices are nuts, most people see property as their primary investment vehicle. This is a big cause of wealth inequality
- general populace has a relatively easygoing disposition
Aus has better weather (assuming you like warm and sunny), higher salaries and is somewhat less far from the world if you want to travel
NZ has a better human rights record, much cleaner grid, and doesn't seem to have the authoritarian bent that Aus does. It's like the slightly hippie/socialist/woke little sibling.
The USA is hard to gauge because its much bigger and more diverse. Housing affordability, access to nature etc all vary heaps by region. Culturally Australia has the most in common with the USA, although the general populace in the USA seem less apathetic about politics.
The Netherlands has rubbish weather for 2/3rds of the year and not a single mountain/hill/beach worth mentioning, but is extremely liveable. Income/CoL ratios tend to be higher than the Bay Area for a given quality-of-life, although you might be earning less in absolute terms. Cities and Towns are very well designed, even Amsterdam (outside the center) feels like a cosy village but you still get access to big-city things. Probably more socialist than NZ, with things like this happening https://nltimes.nl/2021/09/02/dutch-cities-want-ban-property...
Americans like to say that they are "free" but there are so many religious crazies.
Ultimately I can't live in a country where people are religious so that leaves only North Europe and the Netherlands is the most antichrist of them all.
I guess I don't really follow the reasoning with the examples.
Syria has always been a somewhat dangerous place. Ukraine got invaded by Russia. Hong Kong was taken from China by the British, became it's own nation and is currently being ... taken back against its own will in a sense.
Not that it couldn't happen. But Australia is not really a place I would imagine a violent uprising happening compared to most other places. I think we have too much social cohesion, even between those who are politically opposed.
Australia is still the same 'lucky country' written about over 50 years ago [0]. A second rate political and economic system survives on the back of huge unearned benefits - vast natural wealth, a comparatively small population, multi-culturalism, distant from war and most environmental issues, etc.
The result is still a very attractive place - lots of resources, educated people, safe, little poverty comparatively, etc. But people take it for granted and its sleep walking into a Corporatocracy with fast growing wealth gap.
Moved to Sydney from New Zealand and have been here for 6 years. I do like it here compared to New Zealand but I think I would move elsewhere given the chance.
The internet here is an actual joke, the politics are biased towards conservatism, don't think about owning an electric car but... the pay is quite good and it's a nice place to go out. Lots of nature and you can find nice apartments to rent if you look.
New Zealand by comparison is great but it's remote, expensive and has a low salary when compared to other western countries. It has been a while since I was there last, but public transport is hilariously bad - but if you enjoy nature and silence, it's there in abundance.
My company has offered to relocate me to NYC, which is interesting. Looking on YouTube at what the city looks like and it's pretty ugly if I am honest. Apartments seem to be small and you don't get modern style apartments even 45 minutes from Manhattan via public transport. I am concerned that my lifestyle would suffer living there.
> My company has offered to relocate me to NYC, which is interesting. Looking on YouTube at what the city looks like and it's pretty ugly if I am honest.
This is a great opportunity that you'd be silly to pass up because of some YouTube videos. You have to at least visit in person to give it a fair shot. NYC is the largest city in any western country. I guarantee you can find parts of it you'd like.
> Hey Canada, how you doing?
Pay in tech is way, way higher in NYC than in Canada.
Not so good with out of control house prices, fueled by safe-haven demand … at least we won’t run out of freshwater as fast as Oz will … still, Mosman is heaps above Kits / Point Grey in my opinion! NYC is really a dump though. West Coast is the best coast! If you’re from NZ you will likely love the areas around Vancouver, Whistler & Victoria BC!
I'm releasing a feature film exploring this in a few months (Aus ponzi economy, limited social mobility of next generation here). If anyone is interested in seeing please email hackernewsfilm@gmail and I'll keep you updated.
Hope it goes well for you wherever you choose to go, although I don't think there are many places left that aren't like that, at least not any places that have an acceptable standard of living. Something about a city having a future at all makes the real estate vortex come to life.
Know of a place? Tell me, dear reader, I'd love to hear it.
The next election is critical, I think. Need a minority Labor Government with a strong crossbench - neither major party ruling in their own right will make any moves in the right direction for the country at this point...
We need a labor government to call a royal commission into Murdoch's influence in Australian politics. Truth in media laws and the immigration minister needs to revoke Australian citizenships of a few people in those orgs who could rightly be considered malicious non stat actors.
This is one view... but I suspect most people living somewhere that is a proper city as opposed to a resort would say similar things.
Net migration rate provides a more objective view of whether a country has an 'average future'. If you look at the global net migration rates, Australia and particularly the capital cities have some of the highest rates in the world, despite being far away from anywhere.
The factors driving this may not align at all with what you personally want from a country or a city, which is fair enough. But your comment seems like quite a generalisation to make from a very specific position.
I feel you mate. Sad part is Australia has all the potential to have a really good future but the only thing missing is competent leadership. The liberal government continues to fuck up time and time again and the Murdoch press just turns a blind eye.
Fucked up quarantine, fucked up vaccine rollout, fucked up climate policies, fucked up the news media bargaining code, and fucked up numerous policies just to prop up the housing market. And it'll be the younger generations that will certainly pay for these fuck ups.
I really hope we have an early election and Australians choose Labor over Liberal this time.
I keep hearing this every now and then, but the incompetent leadership does not come from nowhere nor has conceived itself. The country leaders have been legitimately elected, which means the leadership is the direct reflection of the country people's will. People consciously elect incompetence that bears the incompetent leadership, for that is what they desire for one reason or another. There are a few progressive, young parties that could steer the future of Australia in the right direction with progressive policies that make sense in the 21st century. Guess what? An average Australian does not care about the progress, they care about their real estate portfolio in maintaining the status quo for a change is scary and frightens people. Politics have become a career ladder excercise with public servants serving their own self-interest rather than working out differences between differing views and opinions and working towards a modern future of the country. Australia has been become mired in complacency, pipe dreaming and discussing how Labour is better over Liberals (or the other way around) whereas both parties are more or less the same in the grand scheme of things.
>. The country leaders have been legitimately elected, which means the leadership is the direct reflection of the country people's will. People consciously elect incompetence that bears the incompetent leadership
Counterpoints:
1. Australia's two big parties are closer to an oligarchy than an egalitarian system, these parties recruit from university politics so there's a whole pipeline that will seed out people who have non-party views. Having mostly uni-people will automatically restrict the party to a small percentage of the population.
2. Incompetence can be hidden from the voting populace. If you consume only Murdoch content (i.e., most private TV news, most published newspapers, public TV station boards are also getting packed with government people) then you will probably think that things are running great.
> the leadership is the direct reflection of the country people's will.
Every 4 years you get to influence the politicians for a few days and they do their best to make you happy. On all the other days, the lobbyists and party factions get to influence them.
> The country leaders have been legitimately elected, which means the leadership is the direct reflection of the country people's will.
I don't disagree. Although influencing the people's will is a lot easier when the main stream media is monopolised and heavily biased towards one political party. If we want a government that truly reflects the people's will we need a diverse media landscape. Also a reason why I support Kevin Rudd's push for the Murdoch royal commission.
We also need a population that takes an interest in what's going on an will vote out a corrupt politician regardless of their party. Most will excuse anything if it comes from their side.
I'm in SA and I do what I can to support Rex Patrick as I see strong independents like him being the only hope in the immediate future.
I don't want to single you out, but the monomaniacal hardon that middle aged Redditors and Kevin Rudd (same thing) have for Rupert Murdoch is fascinating from my outsider perspective. It seems like a relic of a bygone generation—think 2003 and "Faux News." Like, it's not the wrong news that's turning Australia shit. Mean old Newscorp didn't force Labor to vote for increased surveillance, to leave negative gearing alone, or to go soft on coal lol.
"Mean old Newscorp didn't force Labor to vote for increased surveillance, to leave negative gearing alone, or to go soft on coal lol."
On the contrary, Newscorp does exactly that. It's called wedge politics, and Newscorp is highly competent at wielding the stick that ensures that anyone who doesn't toe the line with the conservative parties is deemed a threat to the nation.
I would say a great deal of it is the media. Almost all the large outlets now are basically operating through a pro-Liberal/National political filter and pushing misinformation about the Government on people. There is huge complacency about the Government, and I think most of that is because many people literally have no idea what's going on. Probably less than one or two percent of the population would have actually heard of any of these mass surveillance or "national security" laws, the "eSafety" censorship laws, etc.
It used to be better, but Fairfax which had some fairly decent papers got bought out by Nine Media, whose chairman is retired Liberal party Treasurer Peter Costello. The paper's reporting has shifted to a very pro-Liberal Party bias since then. The News Corp papers were always politically slanted towards the Liberal/Nationals. ABC has been cowed by funding cuts and undermining by the Government appointing terrible board members and chairpersons, and they have literally pushed people out because they didn't toe the line (like Nick Ross, because he reported accurately on how bad the Liberal Party's policy on the NBN was, or Emma Alberiche because she reported on the fact that corporate tax cuts generally haven't been shown to increase economic growth when corporate tax cuts were basically the only policy the LNP had).
We'll see what happens this election. Murdoch might temporarily switch sides for a couple of months like they did in 2007, because he hates backing a loser (and I think Morrison's and the rest of this terrible Government's incompetence is a bit too obvious despite the protection racket the papers and TV news try to run). But if they do, almost as soon as Labor gets in, it will likely be back to attacks and undermining of Labor and pro-Liberal/National party bias...
> The country leaders have been legitimately elected, which means the leadership is the direct reflection of the country people's will
I think this is only true if the Australian voting system is Condorcet based. Otherwise I think technically you can elect someone overall less popular, but that has a very strong base of dedicated voters.
For US folks, The Liberal Party is Center Right and further to the left than the Republicans, Labor is Center Left and further to the left of the Democrats.
This isn't quite accurate. Really, Labor over the last five or six years (but mostly in just the last two) has actually moved basically centre-right as well, but still to the left of the Liberal/National coalition.
In terms of the Liberal and National parties (who are in coalition Federally, and the two state branches merged in Queensland), while they are slightly left of the GOP overall, there are definitely a fair few MPs and senators in the party that are just as far right-wing. For the 'moderates', they're mostly captured by business interests (especially the resources (coal, oil and gas) and property lobbies).
For Labor, the shift right is because a massive media campaign spread lies about some of their slightly more progressive policies last election, so instead of trying to correct it, the leader of the opposition who replaced the one who ran at the last election just decided to drop the policies. Also, Labor have voted in lock-step on all the mass-surveillance laws, censorship laws. Finally, despite being on about climate, they have voted for increasing grants and subsidies to new coal and gas exploration, such as in the Narrabi and Beetaloo basins, against the wishes of much of the population, farmers in the area, and the First Nations traditional owners of the land.
They are definitely the "lesser of two evils", but where I would have laughed at the thought of not voting 1st for them ten years ago, now I give my first preference to a minor party or independent (preferential voting is seriously a good idea, by the way).
Under the current leadership the LNP inches closer to the GOP with each passing day, so, I don't expect they'll be perpetually to the left of the Republicans.
Sorry if this is a silly question but are the LP and the LNP the same party? When I try to look up LNP I see references to Queensland which confuses me if it's a national party. If not are they related?
> .. Labor is Center Left and further to the left of the Democrats.
Do you think? I'd have pegged things like Green New Deal, fairly strong consensus around fossil fuels and renewables, as strong US Democrat party line -- compared to AU's Labor being still wedded to a fossil fuel future, still keen to satiate Murdoch and co.
What broad policies / positions are you suggesting indicate AU Labor is more left than US Democrat?
On a lot of things, universal health care, how strongly they are in favor of nuclear disarmament, gun control, etc. Remember President Biden is the head of the Democratic Party, And the US itself has been pushed further to the right by a conservative dominated supreme court.
Sure, and that's objectively a weird position to take for someone who appears to be as empathetic as he is.
But it (as you observe) does not reflect 'the party policies' - simply the current elected leader. And while that's obviously important, it doesn't necessarily define policy of either party of (current) administration.
The fact it's at odds with what the majority of the rest of the party would advocate speaks to my earlier claim / question.
People don't appreciate how left the Democrats are because almost everyone's political opinions are 5-10 years behind reality. The Democrats are one of the most successful left parties in the world currently; as soon as you count "respecting immigrants" then e.g. Europe loses cred no matter how good the healthcare systems are. And those systems weren't designed by the current generation.
> The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed the Bill, with a total of 60 amendments, and while Labor has thrown its support behind the Bill as a result of the amended document being a "better Bill", the Australian Greens have not.
Out of all the things you mention, privatizing government owned assets it actually a good thing.
Or at least it can be a good thing, as long as the process ain't mismanaged too badly. Governments seldom do the simplest thing of just auctioning off eg a state-owned business or plot of land to the highest bidder.
Most of the time they insists on beauty contests where politicians want to judge bidders' plans. That's a recipe for corruption and cronyism.
Or they only sell off eg a business piecemeal, making a turnaround in private hands much harder.
An undiversified export economy, out of control house prices, a job-market primarily focused on two cities, a government intent on selling all public assets, very limited political interest in positive climate policies. The latter is simply addressed with "technology will help us out when we need it to".
And you suggest New Zealand?!
- Australian housing is a bargain compared to NZ ones.
- NZs job market is focused on one city, which is smaller, more expensive, lower wages and more crime than Brisbane or Perth.
There's a reason so many New Zealanders live in Australia and not vice versa.
This is going to happen sooner or later, the pandemic accelerated it, exploiting and abusing the liberty of people will be the new norm - 1984.
Observation: at least in NSW it seems that most people trust the government and cooperate with government orders (Digital Tran formation for public service is on the right track, see the delivery of digital driver licence and all other perks and all other self-service integrated services, at the cost of giving up some personal info and privacy (state government says that we can trust them for securing the data/info)...
I have been living in Sydney, Australia since 2008. Agree that country is facing tough and worrying economic outlook for the 2020's. It was seriously `lucky country` (mining boom, Rise of China, etc.) when I first landed in SYD, however, with the deterioration of Australia-China relationship, and the undiversified economy structure (mining, education, tourism, etc.), the "lucky country" is going downhill towards the "luckin coffee" direction LMAO.
The country is run by politicians holding law and/or accounting degrees with no social responsibility or morals (in comparison with Germany and northern Europe), who are good at making taxation (or similar) laws but with no vision for the country's future (geopolitical influence, economy, etc.). Most people underestimate the stupidity of government and central banks, keep printing $ (QE) and pump the money to the banking system, making the asset bubbles bigger, while failing to stimulate the real economy, most $ went into the construction industry)
All bubbles pop, there is no exit strategy for QE... Recently watched "The Big Short" again and seriously history is repeating itself, so similar. Good luck to the people live in the "lucky country", keep doing what you believe is right, manage risks well (I know many family highly leveraged into investment properties), stay healthy stay sharp ;-)
"The world is sinking, people ware partying."
Housing "un"affordability will cause negative consequences for the society: psychological problems -> family problems -> community problems -> social problems. Politicians don't care, only focus on winning the next election, they they come and go, they've got their exit route well covered...
I recall readinga book when I was young, it was all about a nuclear war - and the perspective of the characters was that AU was the last bastion of humanity to survive... and went on to talk about how the people were able to survive there...
So dystopian weird idea follows:
What if "they" are 'cleansing' Australia to make it clear for the oligarch elites to come in and claim the land!
It would be wonderful if HN had an ear for SCI-FI ideas as opposed to taking every gosh darn thing literally...
I understand the need to keep some "thought-bumpers" to prevent reddit-ization of HN (ironic given that HN is the seed of Reddit) -- but FFS lighten the heck up.
I lived in Australia for 5 years and my sense is that, as harsh as it sounds, Australia needs to go through an extreme hardship to wake up as a nation. Australia has lived true to its moniker as the Lucky Country - at least two full generations of Australians have never witnessed economic hardship or downturn of any kind. Natural disasters pass the nation by (other than wildfires). Even Covid looked like it was going to give Australia a miss until very recently.
The populous of Australia are fat and happy, and therefore unbothered by the extremely worrying creeping authoritarianism, an economy teetering on total collapse and incompetent local governance. I had real Brave New World vibes living over there.
One could argue that Australia has always been this way. The full quote is:
"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck."
written by Donald Horne in 1964. These words were true prior to 1964 and are still true in 2021.
What saves Australia is the word "mainly".
There are some first rate people in Australia, mostly not in positions of authority, who stop the ship from sinking. Examples are solar power, quantum information and medical researchers, pockets of the Public Service but less so in 2021, people like Donald Horne, ... Mostly things are second rate, but sometimes something first rate breaks though.
"Just as Samson after being shorn of his hair was left eyeless in Gaza, was this generation, stripped bare of all faith, to be left comfortless on Bondi Beach, citizens of the kingdom of nothingness, who booze and surf while waiting for the barbarians?"
This is exactly my feeling. Aussies are constantly whinging about extreme first-world problems and are completely apathetic (or willfully ignorant) of what real hardship is.
As a result the general population is blindly letting the government erode our rights and are too pre-occupied with their own lives to actually realise what's happening.
I mean, stop repeatedly voting for blatantly corrupt parties, for one.
The current LNP are so actively corrupt with their corporate interests, religious interests, repeated exposed in-house scandals, etc, yet the majority of the population continue to vote for them because they ignore it all and just keep supporting 'their team'. The Labor government tries to suggest that they're different, and end up with their own dramas of a similar style, but are kind of not as bad. Kind of.
There are other options out there, but we're all lead to believe that only the 'big parties' can form government. Which only remains true due to the self-fulfilling prophecy of people only voting en masse for the big two parties (and the preference system that funnels votes into those parties).
The likelihood of that changing? Low.
The other solution would be to dismantle the corporate media monopoly that glosses over the actual issues the country is facing, but that's probably even less likely to happen.
I suspect until just recently it was because of the negative gearing policies, but now that Labor has officially scrapped any changes I feel like the differences between the parties gets thinner and thinner.
3 things.
1. People always look after their back pocket. Any policy that reduce income or wealth is a vote loser
2. Rupert Murdoch owns a majority of print and TV media and has extreme bias for the conservative govt. People do not see any other viewpoints.
3. Extreme divide between rural and urban population. It is impossible to satisfy both. A pro-climate change policy in urban Sydney is a vote killer in regional Queensland.
Organize people who think similarly to you. Turn them in to activists who run for office, pressure politicians, protest, lobby and vote. I know “pressure groups” or “special interests” or whatever they call it in Australia are always derided. But people form these groups for a reason.
In Australia people are compelled to vote, so the problem looks like the majority having a different take. Not that I agree with their votes, but you can’t say they don’t vote.
Ultimately what is one supposed to do in a democracy (never mind Australia for a moment) when you’re just not part of the majority opinion on something?
> Ultimately what is one supposed to do in a democracy (never mind Australia for a moment) when you’re just not part of the majority opinion on something?
I think the only option is to emigrate. I didn’t and still don’t agree with most of the government policies in The Netherlands (regarding immigration, climate, EU, etc), but most Dutch voters apparently do. Eventually the best option is just to cut your losses and leave for greener pastures.
At least this way I am not forced anymore to have my hard earned money taxed on issues I don’t support.
I moved from Australia to the Netherlands as well and felt the same about not having my tax dollars directed where I didn't want them to go. I unfortunately had to move back to Australia and now get to watch my tax dollars flow to the richest companies (including foreign luxury brands) thanks to Jobkeeper.
Actually I moved from The Netherlands to Thailand, since I don't like the way things are going in The Netherlands :)
If you do hope to move to The Netherlands in the future, if you believe it's a better place for you, I hope you can succeed. I would agree based on the news from Australia, that The Netherlands seems the better option of the two.
In spite of the tendency for part of the US electorate to wish to federalize all government functions, there's still a lot of difference between US states.
That seems to work out pretty well. It isn't like California is identical to Arizona, at least currently.
Well, I think that's where individual rights and a constitution is supposed to help. If at least you enjoy the rights you get, there's that. Maybe you disagree with how best to run the country so it can protect those rights, but at least you'd have them. And then you could argue that if a majority thinks one way, it might be right even if you disagree.
Otherwise, I forgot which philosopher said this, but the only real freedom is the freedom to choose where to live and the choice of many places with different viewpoints and social norms. That way each individual could pick what matched their preference best and move there.
Unfortunately the freedom to choose where to live is not really something the world provides. So you might be stuck where you are, but if you're lucky, you might manage to get into another place you prefer.
If that doesn't work, your last resort is the activist route. Make your case and change people's mind. It's happened in the past, but it's a tough road.
But the only way to realise that gain is to downsize or move out of town. And neither of those options is easy, because of restrictions on development and redevelopment.
The culture helps too. In Australia the "democracy is majority rules" meme (which is a lie) is very strong. Just ask the Australian Indians.
Fun fact: Māori people had the right to vote in Australia from the start, Aboriginal Australians (just how racist are they when there is no word in Australia for the first people?) did not get that right until 1967.
While many people think that the Referendum gave Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples the right to vote, this wasn’t the case. Aboriginal people could vote at the state level before Federation in 1901; Queensland and Western Australia being the only states that expressly prevented Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from voting.
It wasn’t until 1962, when the electoral act was amended, that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were given the right to register and vote, but voting was not compulsory. Full voting rights were not granted federally until Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were required to register on the electoral roll in 1984. ...
When the Constitution first came into being in 1901 there were only two parts that referred to the First Peoples of Australia: Section 51 (xxvi) gave the Commonwealth power to make laws with respect to ‘people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any state, for whom it was deemed necessary to make special laws’; and Section 127 provided that ‘in reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted’. ...
On 27 May 1967, Australians voted to change the Constitution so that like all other Australians, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be counted as part of the population and the Commonwealth would be able to make laws for them. A resounding 90.77 per cent said ‘Yes’ and every single state and territory had a majority result for the ‘Yes’ vote.
Democracy is not majority rules. Democracy is rule by the people. Minorities matter too, and if minorities are railroaded by majorities it is not much of a democracy.
Voting is important, but much more important is the rule of and access to the law.
"Australian Indians" means the same thing as "Australian Aborigines" Indian and Aborigine are synonyms.
You schooled me on the right to vote! My prejudice leaked out!! I will not let it become bigotry. But I think it is at the federal level. At federation (I thought it was 1905) they really wanted NZ to be a state, and in NZ Māori electorate was a thing, not a particularly democratic thing, but a thing. So to make NZ a state Māori had to able to vote at a federal level.
Hi. "Democracy is rule by the people" - well, I know enough to know that it's not any one thing, or captured by any one definition. How that one differs from "majority rules" I'm not sure. Anyway. Let's not get into that here.
> "Australian Indians" means the same thing as "Australian Aborigines" Indian and Aborigine are synonyms.
Uh I'm not sure where you are, but in Australia it sure doesn't mean that. No-one here calls aborigines "Indians", and far as I know never has.
Hehe it's ok, I think most Australians probably believe that 1967 thing, if they know the date at all, I'm not sure why. The truth is somewhat complicated.
Gee, I had no idea NZ was involved in the pre-Federation conferences in Australia, although sounds like NZ just wasn't very into it. A wise decision!
The continent was home to a very large number of difference language groups and languages prior to settlement. There is not one common demonym - in southeast Australia "Koori" is often used, but more commonly people are referred to by the language group to which they belong (eg an Arrernte man).
Compulsory voting with good preference system already in place which means we have a ~90-97% participation rate.
>Protest - particularly direct action
Agree, but increasing using/changing laws to reduce this (declaring environment activists as "terror" groups).
>Challenge them
Not even sure what this means exactly but more people are organizing support for independents/minority parties over the major two. This combined with the ability to form minority governments I think is the best chance for progressive change, but a lot of money is being spent to keep the status quo.
I recently read an article in which protesters were fined thousands of dollars for violating "health codes". A country who cannot allow protest is no free country at all.
The right to protest during a pandemic is dubious, in direct conflict with other peoples rights. It is also self defeating, when the majority consider the protesters arseholes for willfully endangering the general community and don't get around to considering the actual issue being protested.
If other people aren't afraid of the virus, you have no right to stop them; it's their choice. Now maybe you could argue you have a right to keep them out of your house, or your personal space, if you don't want to be infected, but you have absolutely no right to stop them meeting on the street far from you.
> You do so have a right to take measures for public health, which may well involve arresting people who ignore the necessary measures.
Do you even understand what a right means? Rights, be it as defined by the US constitution or the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are inherent moral rights, it's not something the government can freely suspend based on some arbitrary utilitarian justification like case numbers. The whole point of those declarations of rights is protecting people from authoritarian governments; if the government has the power to suspend those rights, you have no rights!
Tell me in which declaration of rights is there a right to have armed police attack and lock up people peacefully assembling on the street?
And if you don't believe in rights, believe anything is moral as long as an elected government makes it law, then consider this. Would you still feel that way if the democratically elected government decided it was okay to rape worik's wife/daughter/mother? Would you still feel that way if the democratically elected government decided worik's ethnic group should be sent to gas chambers for cleansing? If not, then clearly you do believe in absolute rights.
What the hell? Nobody sitting at home in their house has the right to prevent other people meeting peacefully on the street. People like you are what's wrong with Australia, you authoritarian monster! Nobody has the right to stop other people meeting because they might spread a virus to eachother with a 99%+ survival rate that might somehow eventually find its way back to them.
Willfully violating health orders endangers others, who are forced to share public spaces. As a community, we decided the law to protect ourselves (security of person) and the vulnerable (the people who don't have a 99% survival rate if they catch COVID; the immunosuppressed, the elderly, the chronically ill). Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we are entitled to security of person and protection by the law. And yes, it also declares several articles further down the right to protest. So the rights are in direct conflict.
It is also worth noting that people can still protest. They just can't do it while violating health orders. Yelling maskless at police on lockdown days is going to get you arrested. Other protests on non-lockdown days with people maintaining social distancing have proceeded fine apart from grumpy words and fear mongering by politicians.
Dudes strongmen literally attempt to kill the (15 year old) kid which can be seen in another video, so you know the act cuts deep as a form of protest...
100% agree. It's almost like Wall-E was written about Australia in 50 years time.
The irony being that 30% of the population was born outside of Australia with a decent part of that in countries which have experienced recent hard times.
No dual citizens in federal parliament. That 30% are, generally, extremely under-represented in the political system. This is by choice of interpretation of the current federal judiciary (High Court).
At a state level, in many states, rules for dual citizens are more complicated, but result in a similar situation.
I can understand the need for this legislation, but it does tilt the balance in favor of 3rd+ generation Australians (as many 2nd generation Australians can inherit their parent's citizenship).
Yes, if your country of non-Australian citizenship allows you to renounce it, that is recognised in Australian law. But it can be a complex process, with little value unless you have political ambitions (or maybe complex tax issues ;-) ).
Melbourne has been in lock down for over 200 days. Sydney is not that far behind.
Massive amounts of people are unable to work, and a lot of us haven't seen our interstate family in almost 2 years.
A few months before Covid started, 180,000 km2 of Australia was burned to the ground, enshrouding our capital and major cities in smoke, making breathing outdoors almost impossible, causing a mass shortage of P2 masks. Many people died. Many more lost their houses.
What sort of additional hardships do you want to prescribe for Australians exactly?
In which 5 years did you live here? Some time in the 90s? We endured the GFC comparatively well thanks to shrewd economic leadership from the Labor government of the time but to say we haven't faced downturn in two generations is absurd. Speaking as someone who has been out of the office due to COVID since March 2020, I'm amazed you can say it seemed like it was going to pass us by "until recently". As for natural disasters passing us by "other than wildfires", those bushfires have killed hundreds of people, burned thousands of homes, killed over a billion animals, cost billions of dollars, and most victims of the most recent bushfire which scorched half the country still haven't received any relief. There are a lot of very misguided ideas about Australia in this thread, but the least someone driving by could do is spare us condescension.
It will not happen. As luck would have it next generation energy will be renewables, Solar, Lithium and Hydrogen. Australia is chock full of these. Steel will still be required and Australia will start producing coal free steel from Hydrogen. The current government has a backwards policy right now but it will change rapidly. The wheels are in motion and can't be stopped.
I've lived here for 6 years and you got it 100%. I feel you mate, feels like their focus has been wrong year after year and it doesn't look like it's getting better at all.
I wonder how much Australia is influenced by people who loathe the US and move from it to Australia because it's far away and yet Anglophone and "western".
> I wonder how much Australia is influenced by people who loathe the US and move from it to Australia because it's far away and yet Anglophone and "western".
No, you don't get to blame Australia's insanity on the US. They're fully in control of their own destiny and are one of the richest, most privileged nations in world history. Australia will have nobody else to blame if they plunge further into fascism from here.
Probably very few. Liberals who are alienated with the U.S. would sooner move to Canada for the healthcare, conservatives alienated with the U.S. would sooner be dead than be alive in Australia without guns if their bumper stickers are to be believed.
In 1997 they banned “defensive” firearms. The guns you want because they work well. Semiautos, center fire handguns, pump shotguns. Bolt actions are still possible to get, but not great at self-defense, or overthrowing your government.
Side note… in 1997 these guns were banned, and crime fell. As it turns out though, not only was crime already going down, but there was an increase of 2x police per capita, and curiously crime in the USA fell at a greater rate with no gun ban or large increase in police, crime was high in the 90s for some reason, some people say lead paint bans but the causation is weak.
I don't think they hear anything that'd make them want to emigrate. We just hear that most of the country is desert, even though when I actually went there everyone (in the cities) turned out to be tanned Scots obsessed with beaches and coffee.
If there's places Americans want to go, it's Canada, Europe or Asia, though I think their opinion of Europe is a little overrated if anything.
The foundations of the internet and computing were built by people from the cold war when modern civilization was a technical glitch away from ending at any given time. Half the stuff in networking is decades old, written by people who are decades older then that and raised by the generation before them. Implying the internet is a byproduct of the recent "good times" seems a bit disingenuous.
The internet (FAANG if you want a concrete definition) and modern medicine are both multi-trillion dollar industries; for very fundamental reasons. I'd argue their relative success would probably occur in both good and bad times.
The foundations of the internet were laid during the post war boom era. It was considered by some a golden age. The modern internet is a product of successive booms in the 90’s and 2000’s.
The internet came about because of the cold war and the attendant arms race. Empires that last were all born in blood and fire and terror, and universally spend more blood to maintain cohesion against the outside.
What type of la la fantasy histories have you been reading? Fat happy people maintain the status quo. Hungry desperate people innovate.
Anyway. The world wide web is probably what you meant. And yes, universities and science and medicine makes progress during peaceful times, and ultimately the quote is facile and glib. There is a nugget of truth there, however.
Establishing a frontier in human well being has historically required limiting the power of the state in ways that support the relative liberalizing of its culture. States historically require blood sacrifice before any power is ceded. It takes strong people to achieve and hold progress., and the quote encapsulates the notion that there is a place in the natural order of things for strong individuals to shake things up. For principles to be held to at great cost, however inconvenient or even fatal it may be for others who just want to perpetuate "good enough".
The fallacy is that good times can't produce good and strong people, which is wrong. It's just a simple matter of conviction being stronger when provoked by trauma than abstract rationalization.
Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Robert Goddard, Werner von Braun, William Shockley, John von Neumann, ... those just come off the top of my head, I could keep going for pages.
Yeah, a bunch of hungry desperate people there.
I mean sure, some were deeply flawed or had tragic lives, but that wasn't from being hungry and desperate. They were not poor, and they were supplied with ample resources to pursue their visions by governments or private companies.
That quote is just too much of an oversimplification. The real situation is far more complex and nuanced, and like I said in the other reply it matters a lot how you define strength and how you define good times.
I see your point and how the language has been masculinized but the meaning still stands as of now.. until the next changes take place. Language is evolving and these will inevitably change as well at some point.
You’re talking about it like it’s far away. Yet here I am saying this is an out of date convention and everyone gets their hackles up as if it is such a horrific inconvenience to include others in their ideas. The change has already arrived, only some stragglers angrily clinging to the old way.
You can quote whatever you like however you like, but it ain't all men out there. Relying on such worldviews to understand the world leaves you with a truncated world.
As the other poster pointed out the word men has multiple meaning which depend on context. The meaning is clear to me and no need to modify it. Next time you quote it you can make your own changes.
I didn’t say it did have that, I said it is the same as doing that. Hilarious to accuse me of whimsical arguments while you morph me into the straw man you need to be right.
What happens in Australia in housing also is happening more or less globally when unlimited "rent seeking" is allowed. People and companies can buy residential properties and then rent them out. With current low interest rates they can run amok and make a lot more than the interest. The Netherlands has a way to deal with this. A landlord tax on rented houses.
https://borgenproject.org/dutch-housing-crisis/
If you buy a house = no tax, rent it out = tax.
This acts to add costs to rent seekers, but real owners do not pay it. They can adjust the tax to the right level to make landlords sell their places.
Many parts of the US have something effectively the same called a Homestead Exemption. You get a discount on your property tax for the house you live in. Any other houses you own pay the full rate. It varies greatly by location and not everywhere has it but it's pretty common.
We don't have anywhere near the individual rights focus of somewhere like the USA, so anything around security is a wedge issue for the other side of politics. Means that things like this are too easily introduced and passed.
Both major parties have promoted these policies. The party in charge has been very effective over the past decade creating an immense atmosphere of fear and envy; the Opposition party believe there are too many votes to lose by not addressing this and have sacrificed a lot of their previously progressive stances to match the tempo of the right-wing. Besides both sides of government, the people pushing it are morning TV show hosts and, naturally, the Murdoch media. There are PLENTY of dissenting voices, typically on the grassroots level or among arts/media industries, but few of them are empowered to match the ferocity with which these other entities will go after them. Police raid journalists' offices and homes at worst, relentlessly harass them in the news or cover them in defamation lawsuits at best. There are a lot of Australians who do not want this current situation, a lot more who are afraid and misguided, and a small but influential fraction protecting their self-interests at the expense of the rest of us. If that summarises things.
One thing no one is mentioning is how China is the no.1 beneficiary of a pacified and monitored Australian populace. They are already completely dependent on the Aussie natural resource exports, and are deeply interested in Australia continuing to be friendly towards them, and could easily overwhelm them in a fight.
Oh yeah of course in a heartbeat. I think the main objection I have to apple / google hoarding my data isn't actually apple / google having them, it's that the government can make them fork it over and so them having it means the government does by proxy.
Google and apple can be regulated or even trust busted.
The government can be forced to serve the people instead of the other way around.
Humanity as a whole may have lost many battles, but we have won some. Plus the war isn't over.
Thing can get better, even if they've consistently gotten worse since before I was born.
I'm prone to despair myself, I always have to give myself self affirmations like this throughout my day. Helps me, hope this comment helped someone else out there.
Perhaps this is why people pray to their god/gods if they have them, to give infinite morale in a seemingly hopeless situation. The majority of casualties occur during a route in war.
Democrats and republicans alike, let's make sure we don't do this in USA. Please donate to EFF, FIRE, ACLU, etc. I feel like both parties are becoming more authoritarian. COVID-19 is here to stay for many years if not decades. We're not going to be able to wipe off the virus from the planet. Governments will continue to use this as an excuse to erode privacy.
This whole clampdown feels completely anti-Australian to me. Australians I've met are all very open minded, free spirited folks and they are always flipping a birdie to the government.
> Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The Court's decision articulated the view that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state.
> "[r]eal liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others."
You're making the mistake of conflating Australia's COVID-19 restrictions with this legislation, when they're entirely unrelated. These digital powers were something Australia has sought for many years- under the good ol' reasons of terrorism and child safety.
The recent hubbub surrounding Australia's restrictive COVID-19 measures were possibly the best thing that could happen for our government- when our vaccination numbers rise, the public health restrictions will rollback, whilst the digital legislation will continue on unabated.
One can point to Australia's COVID death rates (~4 per 100,000) in comparison to the United States and the United Kingdom (~200 per 100,000) and make a case for that.
This legislation is far less justifiable, and should have no reason to exist. By associating the two issues, you are weakening the case against it.
There is some justification for nearly all authoritarian laws. One can point to the low crime rate in Singapore relative to the United States, for example.
People who oppose authoritarianism do so because it's not worth the cost, not because terrorism, child abuse, and disease aren't real problems.
Is it good practice compare a very large island that has 2/3rd the population of California, or it’s 1/10th the population density of the whole of the USA?
Seems like a flawed argument for at least a dozen more reasons.
I'm not interested in pursuing this debate, but I will point out that our highly urbanised population means that it's not as cut and dry as you're making it out to be.
I whole heartedly agree. I made a top-level comment, but I think it bears repeating: this is human nature at play.
Governmental parties are making plays for more power under the guise of working “for the people”, but sadly they are deluded.
Not sure what the answer is here, but just voicing that you’re 100% correct in my estimation. This pandemic and the tragedies yet to come will always be leveraged by those in power to gain more power.
Fun fact: Vermont ratified the individual right to gun ownership and the abolishing of slavery in their State Constitution at the same time in 1777. The second amendment actually helped defeat racism and the only thing racist about it is the disproportionate infringement against minorities.
> Vermont’s Declaration of Rights of 1777 set forth the following fundamental rights and abolished slavery: That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent, and unalienable rights, amongst which are the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. Therefore, no male person, born in this country, or brought from over sea, ought to be holden by law, to serve any person, as a servant, slave, or apprentice, after he arrives to the age of twenty-one years; nor female, in like manner, after she arrives to the age of eighteen years.
> Vt. Constitution, Art. I, § 1 (1777). See Zilversmit at 116. The Vermont Declaration also provided: “That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State . . . .” Id., § 15.
3. ACLU used to defend free speech of even neo-nazis but have since then abandoned their principles:
The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics. Now, they have completely reversed its views, arguing vaccine mandates help civil liberties and bodily autonomy "is not absolute."
You know, of all places where Big Brother would be a real thing, Australia was not in my list. I always think a country that use the C word as a term of endearment would know how to take things slow.
Rahm really nailed it with that one. I mean, I’m almost certain he had it tattooed somewhere, it was his modus operandi. But, really nailed as a succinct collection of words.
As an Australian, I feel like we're all just squatters on the mining companies land. They are tolerating us for now. If you are Adrian Burragubba from the Wangan & Jagalingou people their patience has run out.
you think this is bad, in South Australia they're making people download a government app, and they'll randomly message you and you need to take a picture of your face and it'll submit your face and location. If you don't respond the police with turn up to enforce it.
The problem here is a human one, not a governmental one. The government is just doing what humans tend to do: consolidate and protect power.
The fact that this doesn’t serve anyone (other than their) interest is really just a side effect of the underlying cause.
We should champion this issue and we should fight to keep this kind of thing from happening. But the deeper issue here is one of human nature. How do we build a system that guards against ourselves? 50 years ago I would’ve pointed to our own government as an example, but I’m becoming less and less sure.
Not sure why this is downvoted but it’s factually correct. Organizations consolidate power and try and hold onto it. You can even see it in a big corporation where groups will get territorial and actively try and sabotage other groups even though they work for the same company.
That’s why functional democracies are a patchwork of rules that try and prevent such consolidation.
Every time Australia is mentioned on hn the same two whiners appear to spray about how it's so horrible here because "nobody has any problems" and everything is "too easy and good", which makes them feel some kind of doomsday prepper type indignation. It seems pathological:
"These FOOLS are happy as long as they have extreme happiness, wealth, health, peace and general ease. Little do they know their sacred right to convenient encrypted communication is under grave threat".
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You don't have to change your views but we want thoughtful, substantive comments here, not battlefield stuff.
I'd put more effort into posts if they weren't just removed by someone who didn't like what they said. Give than you've unflagged a half dozen of them 12 hours later.
I'd say it's at least borderline. If you start off with a quasi-insult like "Do you know what AIDS is?", you're already posting in the flamewar style. Please don't do that on HN. It's enough to provide correct information respectfully.
I remember one time as a child attending school in Australia, overhearing a discussion between a woman who lived near the school and a local council officer. The council officer had discovered the woman had a dog of a certain breed that wasn't permitted in that region, and was telling the distraught woman that the dog would need to be taken away and killed. The dog hadn't caused any trouble or bitten anyone, mind you. Although at the time I didn't have any notion of "freedom", it shocked me nonetheless.
As someone put it, "The problem with Aussies is not that so many are descended from convicts – it's that so many are descended from prison officers".
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With regards to things like the Aussie requirement for phone check-ins every 15 minutes or they will deploy police to follow up and confirm your location, turn off the phone and make them eat the cost of having to deploy all available police resources just to see if people are submitting to the whim of the government every 15 minutes. Bonus if you opt to answer the door naked and claim you were busy showering/having sex/aligning your chakras/whatever.
Any bureaucracy will naturally follow the path of least resistance. It is your job to make it more painful for them to pursue their goals than it is to leave you alone.