This time there actually was a big ground-swell of opposition. In the consultation period there were hundreds of submissions, all of them negative (except one from some random church in Tasmania). These were a mix of letters from technical groups, business groups, law groups, human rights groups, civil society groups, and individuals (both developers/specialists and regular concerned citizens).

When the bill was being considered by the Parliamentary Joint Committee for Intelligence and Security, some of these groups were called up. I read the Hansard (transcript) of the hearing - the testimony was impeccable. Clear, concise, and absolutely demolished the bill. Unfortunately, to give you the level some of the senators were working at, a lot of the questions came back to "but don't you think we need to stop terrorists?" when going through how it's technically impossible to do what the law enforcement wants without creating systemic weaknesses/vulnerabilities, and you can't just define that away like the bill tried to...

Coming up to it being passed, there was a huge amount of calls, emails and letters to the members of parliament and senators. Several mentioned the unusual volume in Parliament, and also many in the opposition mentioned multiple times how many problems there was with the bill. They illogically passed it in mid-December to "keep Australia safe over Christmas" (despite the fact that nothing in the bill could be put into effect for months and Australian law enforcement and intelligence services already have far more over-reaching powers to do all sorts of stuff that would be illegal in the US and Europe).

Opposition to the bill was way better organised, and way bigger than anything previous for the tech industry. We are getting better at the politics, but given the irrational actions of the opposition in voting for it (who had the numbers in the Senate to block the bill) I can only conclude that there must have been some dirty dealing going on either between the parties, or between the intelligence services and the parliamentarians.