Why has the drift to an anti-dissent police state in Australia accelerated since 2014? It’s a conjunction, or perhaps coincidence, of several factors.

The Liberals’ illiberalism

The purported liberalism of the Liberal Party is only ever heard of in opposition. When Labor’s then-Attorney-General Nicola Roxon raised a data retention scheme, the opposition Liberal partyroom expressed concern and George Brandis and Malcolm Turnbull condemned it. After a change of government, Brandis and Turnbull led the charge to implement what they had condemned in opposition. Being in government literally erases the liberalism of Liberal moderates, who transform into national security hardliners the moment they obtain power. 

Labor’s cowardice

Forfeiting the role of an opposition, Labor has consistently ducked the challenge of advocating for civil liberties, leaving that role to the Greens, Nick Xenophon and David Leyonhjelm. Some of the worst assaults on civil liberties in Australian history have thus been a matter of bipartisan policy. That Labor under Bill Shorten has been a highly successful opposition in other areas only encouraged Labor to vacate the civil liberties field in the interests of electability.

The rise of ISIS

Islamic State, the direct result of the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq in which the Howard government participated, provided the pretext for a massive new wave of national security legislation from 2014 onward. There was ironic justice in this: the Iraq War had created the pretext for the Howard government’s attacks on civil liberties in the name of counter-terrorism; now the result of the Iraq War was furnishing another pretext for a further dramatic extension of state power.

However, ISIS was no Al Qaeda and had to be hyped into a substantial threat to Australians. Whereas Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-inspired cells plotted large-scale attacks and sought to obtain weapons of mass destruction, the majority of ISIS-inspired attacks were crude, involving knives, guns, bombs or vehicles. Nonetheless the threat of ISIS to Australians was surreally portrayed by the government as “existential”, as if a domestic violence perpetrator with a pistol could bring down western civilization.

The failure of the media

As the debate over data retention legislation showed, Australia’s media pay little attention to civil liberties even when they have a direct stake in the outcome — the media only woke up to the dramatic impacts mass surveillance would have on journalists on the eve of passage of the bill. Indeed, elements of the media, especially in News Corp, cheer on assaults on civil liberties, either because of partisan support for the Coalition,  or ideological sympathy for authoritarianism, or simply because they’re so reliant on drops from ministers as to be incapable of questioning them.

News Corp is also a willing cheerleader in the government’s campaign against the ABC, which is a core part of the anti-dissent state agenda. But what is changing is that the media is under greater pressure than ever before, and has fewer, and diminishing, resources to pursue a public interest agenda — for example, to contest censorship and litigation by governments and powerful interests.

You

Consistent with the myth of the boiling frog, voters haven’t reacted at all to the steady erosion of their rights or loss of privacy. Data retention was met with acquiescence; expansions of counter-terrorism powers drew no outcry; we sent soldiers back to the Middle East with no protest.

Incidences of government harassment of whistleblowers and those assisting them, such as the NBN/AFP raids on Labor, were treated as a curio in the everyday partisan circus. The ongoing government harassment of Witness K and his lawyer has occurred in plain sight to no outrage. The few occasions of pushback against expansions of powers have occurred either because of concerted media uproar, or Labor doing its job of opposing and scrutinising. They have been atypical, and even then, voters have shown little interest.

In such circumstances, it is entirely logical for the government, and security bureaucrats, to assume they can continue to push for ever more power, since there is no price to be paid even when they overreach. As some of us predicted several years ago, this constant push for more power, more surveillance and fewer rights will never stop. If anything, it will accelerate as governments like Malcolm Turnbull’s understand they face no resistance. Welcome to your future.