Australian government plans to force tech giants to decrypt messages

Either the Australian government is incredibly incompetent or they are outright lying to the public. From the article -

He (Senetor Brandis) said he met the British government’s chief cryptographer last week and believed it was technically possible to decode encrypted messages in a timeframe that police needed to act.

And -

This could be achieved without so-called back doors — built-in weaknesses that allowed a tech company access to a communication but could also leave it vulnerable to hackers, Senator Brandis said.

You really can't make this up. What is their true motive here? They can't force Apple, Google, Facebook etc to comply. We have seen the only option which China took is to block services which fail to comply (ie Google). Such moves would be deeply unpopular in the land down under.