I can't believe someone actually bought that line. It's an obvious soundbite to make people ignore what they did, just like when they say "we did it for the children."
We don't need to "reserve judgement until then". We already know they don't plan on repealing the bill in any meaningful way. They also gave up on creating a new interim bill because "the police wouldn't have access to these powers over summer", which is an even worse excuse than the one that they don't have access for Christmas. These excuses all sound made-up, and like they weren't even trying.
Labor did make Liberals compromise on one thing - not allowing the anti-corruption agency access to this power. I guess they gladly "fell on their sword" for that one, huh? This is such a joke, I can't believe people actually take their excuses at face value. There must be bigger partisanship in Australia than I thought, which make people ignore this.
Also, 99% of the public comments were against this bill, and Labor ignored that, too. But, ultimately, if Labor did actually believe they were "keeping people safer over Christmas" with this bill which had no debate and was passed at night, then that just shows extreme weakness to compromising.
Will they pass any bill the other parties want to pass as long as they threaten Labor with accusations of "not wanting to keep people safe"? Is that how weak of a party they are, that they can't find real arguments against what that is a baseless accusation meant to cause misdirection?
One more thing, Australia just became the first western country to allow encryption backdoors, something all security experts have been warning is a very bad, terrible idea, that will both destroy the security of the systems in which those backdoors exist and hurt the tech economy. Even if you believe that Labor's action was genuine, does that really not sound like something you would want your party to "fall on its sword" over?
But again, their excuses make no sense, especially in the light of them actually fighting Liberals on disallowing the powers to be used against politicians.