Glad someone sees the problems most Australians turn an blind eye to while keep condemning other cultures.
Re:Transparency Report
by fphhotchips on Sunday November 15, 2020 @01:34AM
(#25098831)
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.
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.