Australia has always seemed like the ultimate nanny state. Seems like they are one of the frontrunners in the anti-encryption debate. Mail is heavily scrutinized, etc.

But for some measurement, it seems to work. Drugs are insanely expensive in aus.

Australian here: I think we have a cultural high degree of trust in our institutions. That trust is frequently unearned or betrayed in the modern era, but it remains nonetheless.

I don't have a great definitive answer on why that's the case, but I do have suspicions. One is around the (perceived?) strength of our democracy, driven by mandatory voting and a well designed parliamentary system. Also, we don't have the American history of revolution - distrust for government just is not part of the thinking.

The other is that, for the most part of the last 50 years, our more public institutions have done a good job. The ABC (think the BBC, but Australian) is a trusted news source, Medicare largely "just works" for most people, our public/private education system mostly works, etc.

When it comes to law enforcement, I think the general perception is that while they're far from perfect, they tend to be well governed and as a result given a generous amount of power.

Again, whether this perception is justified or not is a different thing, especially if you're not of Anglo descent.

My learned view is that most Australians don’t dis-trust the government, they just think it’s a bunch of morons gather around to do a fairly shit job at leading the country.

It’s a democracy, so the “morons” are the best of the best?

No. That would be making an incorrect assumption, that the best of the best want to work as a civil servant...

So democracy doesn’t work?

Sure it "just works".

Culture of war crimes (ADF regularly executed civilians), metadata retention (bipartisan support), anti-encryption (bipartisan support), raiding journalists, letting multiple newborns die because of coronavirus travel restrictions, university censorship kowtowing to China, police brutality, no free speech, no free expression and repeated attacks on the IT industry (many companies incl Microsoft yanked data and compute away from Australia after the bi-partisan laws rammed through parliament allowing the government unfettered access to data).

All of the above has wide bi-partisan responsibility. Most of it has happened in the last 5 years.

Glad someone sees the problems most Australians turn an blind eye to while keep condemning other cultures.

You won't get any argument from me that those things are bad. They're total rubbish and I'm still pissed that my local member voted for metadata retention and data access laws from the opposition bench. That said, they wouldn't be able to if the majority of Australians didn't trust the government enough. There's been an election since those laws were passed.

Metadata retention has already been repeatedly abused, including by police and intelligence who use it to spy on girlfriends and random civilians. I don't hear any parties talking about it (because they don't care and issued full-throated endorsements of the practices).

In Australia, both parties sell you down a river and tell you they're the best party because of some irrelevant policy minutiae, meanwhile supporting war crimes and the evisceration of the IT industry and our rights.

I agree, although the quality of the ABC collapsed a few years ago after serious budget cuts and they will probably lose that trust over time.

But the other thing to note about Australia is that the country is a bit of a demographic and cultural misfit in SEA, and reliant on the US umbrella to have unquestioned security against the countries just to the north including two superpowers and any number of countries with the potential to be economic and military powerhouses.

It would be strategically justifiable for Australia to get serious about building up a powerful intelligence system, in a way that it just doesn't for Canada. I imagine if Canada wanted to become the next US State it probably could. Australia is much more isolated and it is foreseeable that the US might withdraw from the Pacific in the next 50 years.

Seems like that might just be due to the logistics of getting them across the ocean and through a port.

then don't let the free market just sit there

> Drugs are insanely expensive in aus

Isn't everything? Also consider that Australia's borders are much easier to patrol due to its "island" nation status.

It's also a far-away island. Easier to control Australia's coast, than to control, say, Italy's coast.

What’s the difference between a “nanny state” and a “totalitarian dystopia”?

Australia is a huge nanny state.

It’s traditional stereotypical “she’ll be right mate” image is far from reality. Hugely litigious, lots of red tape, if there is a fine for something you will be fined.

The ex prime minister stood in parliament and said “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” in regards to wanting to back door encryption. That’s what you are dealing with.

AFAIK Australia has far weaker personal privacy protections and powerful remedies for government agencies. They even passed a law in 2018 allowing them to force companies to build-in backdoors.

I am not Australian and have not seen any updates since it was passed, but "forcing companies to build backdoors" is a massive understatement. The government could effectively compel any employee to act as a spy, without their consent. Don't want to play along? Go directly to jail.

> The new law also allows officials to approach specific individuals—such as key employees within a company—with these demands, rather than the institution itself. In practice, they can force the engineer or IT administrator in charge of vetting and pushing out a product's updates to undermine its security. In some situations, the government could even compel the individual or a small group of people to carry this out in secret. Under the Australian law, companies that fail or refuse to comply with these orders will face fines up to about $7.3 million. Individuals who resist could face prison time.

https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...

So what you are saying is there is absolutely no reason to use any data service hosted in Australia or to trust any tech hardware they produce

Well, if you want to go to that extreme, probably also ditch any data service hosted by any company that hires an Australian. The law passed was not restricted to Australian corporations, but Australian citizens regardless of where in the world they reside. Since E3 visas (basically an Australian-only H1b) are so easy to get, that's probably just about any US-based company with more than a few hundred employees.

In practice though I don't think anyone actually cares. I certainly haven't been asked about it by any prospective employers and I work in areas of finance where companies are famously protective of their IP.

This includes the HN favorite service, Fastmail.

And also Atlassian (jira, bitbucket, etc)

The varying strategies (and their varying results -- even when applying the same strategy but in a different location) is rather surprising to me, especially when you dig around a little and find that plenty of places don't re-think their strategy for decades while the results remain 'meh' at best.

Maybe this works well for Australia, or they are stuck in 1990 and simply haven't looked back and wondered if anything could be done differently.

Example would be: instead of catching everything you see, you can also collect information until you find a pattern, central driver or societal problem and solve that to solve the underlying problem. The counter-example would then be: instead of always trying to catch the biggest fish you can also make a few examples and disturb something like a criminal network by messing up the actions of their foot soldiers.

I suspect the way you go about it increases or decreases the amount of individual requests you need in order to execute your mandate.

> places don't re-think their strategy for decades

because it is hard to measure the effectiveness. How many terrorist attacks and domestic incidents are there (assuming in good faith those are the only things to be prevented) ?

I would assume in the absence of any of these national security agencies that there were only very few per year if not decade. That makes it hard to adjust the strategy even if you assume that they are totally focused on security only, and not e.g. on the continued presence of their paycheck of suppression of opposition parties.

To give you an example: the (American) security measures at the airport that were introduced in 2001 can be considered a total success, as there has been no incidence since then (success = good, people can get promoted for that[0]), although these measures have been called security theater at times[1].

And with these measures called successful by those promoted people, why change them? Of course some other people opine that they may not be as successful as they claim they are [2], but it is still hard to quantify.

> instead of catching everything you see, you can also collect information until you find a pattern

yeah that seems likely. Though this scares me personally as I may demonstrate a pattern now that will make me a suspect in the future, despite doing nothing wrong.

[0] I worked at big tech once upon a time [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/01/tsa-bus... [2] https://www.thelocal.de/20091231/24279

Yes, the way we 'measure' or call something a 'success' can be amusing at best (sometimes). Reminds me of a joke where someone is throwing paper out of a train, someone asks: why are you doing that. Person says: to keep the flying elephants away from the train. And since there are no flying elephants storming the train it must be working!

As an Australian this nugget resonated with me recently:

“The ancestors of Australians aren’t prisoners, but rather prison _guards_”

More important: canada has 68500 police. Austrailia has 63000 (google). So australia has a much higher police:people ratio. Once all the traffic tickets are issued there is probably a tipping point where there are suddenly more officers for technology-related investigations. Canada is also netorious for not investigating tech crimes. It is not a focus for the RCMP.

How accurately can you compare these numbers against country populations? Do iProducts have an equal distribution around the world in various countries?