Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

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.

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.

> 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.

[1] https://www.covid-19.sa.gov.au/restrictions-and-responsibili...

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.

> managed quarantine

Love it.

No where else in the world is cracking down like this (AFAIK, maybe China?)

This is totally abusing a crisis to gain handover people and using "safety" as justification.

Sounds just like this was taken from a dystopian novel.

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.

What's that?

Be careful. Stockholm syndrome is real.

Oh, well I guess it's ok then. /s

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?

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.

(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).

It's time for computer security to include nation states in their threat model. We need tamper-evident hardware.

Comfort makes it hard to rebel.

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.

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.

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.

If you're in Victoria it can't be a long jog (2hr total per day), and it can't be after 9pm though!

Sorry for being pedantic but really it should be you are allowed outside for a jog sometimes

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?

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.

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).

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.

[1] https://headtopics.com/au/andrews-slams-sunset-lovers-breaki...

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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

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.

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."

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.)

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

[0] https://iseralaska.org/static/legacy_publication_links/Alcoh...

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.

We're on the internet, you can look it up.

Sounds like you have a vested interest in not realizing what these new laws mean for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_in_...

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/feb/17/federal-police...

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”.

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.

Economic improvement for the masses is merely a byproduct.

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.

See https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-13/election-2019-vote-co... amongst others.

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.

I’m still going to blame Murdoch and the LNP.

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.

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)

but central planners always think that. Doesn't mean it's true.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3142757/ch...

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/30-austra...

"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.

(I've lived in Australia since birth.)

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?

2. The moon

3. Mars

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.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/australias-hacking-bill-passes...

> 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.

It's not that they shouldn't care about their property portfolio, but it shouldn't be the only thing they care about.

For example, the AU government has given away millions to polluters with no appreciable return (https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12...).

It also has a terrible track record on human rights.

And that's just the last things I read... there's plenty more (this mandate for instance).

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.

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.