I'm unsurprised this is occurring in Australia. Australia has for a long time now been pursuing policies which seem on their face to feel more at home in China. I suspect for most Australians though, they'll just go along with this and there will be a greater proportion of tech-savvy people who find a way to dodge this and exclusively connect via VPN.

It's becoming more and more commonplace for people outside the US to connect to the Internet exclusively via a VPN egress in the US, creating "US-based" online accounts, and operating online as if they were a US person. It seems in the future this may be necessary just to experience the Internet with even basic expectations of free access and anonymity.

As long as they continue to play ball geopolitically with the rest of the West, nobody is going to call them out, but the last decade in Australia has seen a significant curtailing of human rights. The most surprising thing is that it seems few people are speaking out about it, generally.