I'm sick of all this idealism. Life is not a Disney movie. Labor did what they could under the circumstances. I hate it as much as anyone else, but c'mon, You can't expect an opposition, who are in a very strong position right now to die on their sword for what is, for the vast majority of Australians, a fringe issue.
Saying they would "die on their sword" is wrong. Nobody would care if they said "we're waiting 6 months because we want time to debate". They do that sort of thing all the time, doesn't raise a blip. This is a fringe issue! Nobody understands or cares about cybersecurity, that is the only reason that they can get something like this passed.
To claim the Liberals would run a scare campaign is one of the most baldfaced lies since "I thank the honorable [opposition] member for their question" in parliamentary Question Time. Scare campaigns don't need to be run based on facts, politics has moved beyond that. If a scare campaign is in the works it will go ahead regardless. Labour are still going to get called soft on crime if the Liberals think it will win them votes.
Again, be realistic, and account for the context of the situation. The LNP, in cahoots with our corrupt media made this a "keep Aussies safe over Christmas" issue.
No one in Australia is strong enough to take on the Murdoch media cabal. If Labor opposed, and even a minor incident occurred over Christmas they would have jeopardized their chances of election. For what? An issue that the vast majority of Australians don't care about? Idiocy.
I'm as disappointed as any other punter, but I've been unable to convince any of the tech-illiterate in my social circle that it matters.
Which is even more disingenuous when you consider that the bill won't even take effect until March, and probably won't lead to any backdoors until significant time after that.
How do you win in this scenario?
Honestly, I don't know how we could possibly win in this scenario. A corrupt media stoking unfounded fears in an ignorant public is a very powerful thing.
Search for "IT'S THE LAW NOW, SO WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?"
It depends how you present things, get some press release that say: "The Australian government knows all about your visits to Youporn" would talk to people way more than "Australia new encryption law". About that, see the episode about government surveillance on last week tonight that tries to explain all the NSA programs when it comes to dick picks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M
welcome to Australian politics ;)
I appreciate that they might be "playing the game" to keep on the court, but it looks like that is at our expense, and something is wrong with that.
I think you make an intuitive point here that warrants attention: you’re not wrong, someone is free to “pick their battles”, and be strategical. And that’s fine.
However, when they do, they should face the consequences.
Supposedly, this is a fringe issue, and only the people on HN will care. So we shouldn’t chastise them for being strategical.
But you are on HN! This is where those few people are, who care! So this is where they are held to account. If nobody else does, great, then you were right and it was a fringe issue. But that’s not up to you to decide.
It’s essentially like a market. If Apple decides to “piss off” developers by removing the F keys, do we tell people on HN not to be crybabies because “it’s a fringe issue”? “You know they were right from their perspective, so keep buying Apple products”? No. Those who liked F keys enough will stop, and the market will decide how important it really was and who was right.
Same with political issues.
This is not idealism. This is people choosing their battles. The Australian government did. The people here do. Just a market for votes. Nothing idealistic about it.
Their job is to keep a cool head and not shoot their economy in the foot twice. Their job is to point out that it is an incredibly stupid idea that makes /China/ look like a better place to do business with if you are concerned about data security at all.
It’s legislative and electoral cowardice more than political pragmatism.
The only reason you can say this is because you have no skin in the game. If you were in Parliament, faced with a fringe issue (I don't think it is, but the vast, vast majority of Aussies do, probably because they don't understand the ramifications), then, unless you wanted to commit political seppuku, you'd have done the rational thing and supported this bill.
Politics isn't like Internet armchair quarterbacking, you do what you can to ensure that a) your position is safe, and b) that you will lose the battle to eventually win the war.
The privilege of never compromising on your values is reserved for the rest of us who have nothing to lose by criticizing the process.
You can choose from any of the following one broad categories of incompetence.
So to hell with pragmatism.
Politicians deserve, and should be subject to, unrelenting ridicule and scorn.
Yes it fucking sucks. But please point out to me any other democratic country that is not a 2 party system? I don't know of any and maybe that says something about democracy itself. This may be any issue that can't be fixed.
This is not a failure of democracy. It's a failure to teach people about voting systems and game theory.
Proportional representation is the solution to this, so that new ideas can enter government incrementally instead of only when they get the majority vote, by which time it's probably too late.
But this is really hard to get through people's heads, because it is very hard to get someone to understand something, when their influence and power depends on not understanding it.
In the past decade, we've had parliaments only able to establish a majority by negotiating a deal with a third party or independents.
I absolutely, as an Australian citizen, resident and voter, have skin in the game.
Labor losing the next election just because they refused to pass this specific bill is an extremely unlikely course of events. I don’t find it particularly rational – especially when the urgency to do so is blatantly manufactured and it was so widely opposed by public submissions – to pass a potentially disastrous, under scrutinised and widely criticised law, just because you’re worried a hypothetical scare campaign might work. It sounds a lot like paranoia or cowardice.
> Politics isn't like Internet armchair quarterbacking, you do what you can to ensure that a) your position is safe, and b) that you will lose the battle to eventually win the war.
What’s the war here? If you keep losing battles you’re certain to lose the war.
If the war is the election, Labor could certainly have afforded to lose this PR battle. If the war is cybersecurity policy in Australia, then I think the tech industry and tech users are getting quite sick of people trying to make excuses for yet another surrender.
> The privilege of never compromising on your values is reserved for the rest of us who have nothing to lose by criticizing the process.
A lot of people have a lot to lose if the process is abused or outright fails.
sigh, I meant real skin in the game, i.e. you would face another 4 years in opposition if Murdoch and mates politicized your "support of ISIS".
>Labor losing the next election just because they refused to pass this specific bill is an extremely unlikely course of events.
I wish the world were different, but it just isn't. Given a modest 1/10,000 possibility of some "terror" attack over Christmas, would a rational actor hang their political future on an issue that 99.99% of average Aussies don't understand?
I hate this bill. I hate that we're moving in the direction of a world with mass surveillance, but realistically, if we take off our rose coloured glasses, and putting aside political idealism, would we expect Labor to do any different?
I mean, in this scenario most Labor MPs keep their jobs, while thousands of people face an uncertain future as companies openly contemplate the risks of hiring Australians or doing business here, and perhaps millions risk their cybersecurity being covertly weakened. If you are subject to Australian law, you have just as much skin in this ‘game’ as the politicians themselves, if not more. After all, the law does apply to you.
> I wish the world were different, but it just isn't. Given a modest 1/10,000 possibility of some "terror" attack over Christmas, would a rational actor hang their political future on an issue that 99.99% of average Aussies don't understand?
Again, please define rational. Is Labor’s only rational plan to amass as much political power as possible at the least cost? To absolutely eliminate any risk of losing the next election by being as uncontroversial as possible? I’m not so cynical as to think there aren’t any technologically literate or principled people in the Labor Caucus, so I’m rather disappointed they simply went AWOL when they were needed most.
Labor just had an election in Victoria where News Corp went pretty hard after them on law and order for several months – yet they won. They weren’t going to lose federally in the next six months because of this bill.
> I hate this bill. I hate that we're moving in the direction of a world with mass surveillance, but realistically, if we take off our rose coloured glasses, and putting aside political idealism, would we expect Labor to do any different?
You’re sounding awfully defeatist. Labor didn’t have a gun to their head, either metaphorically or literally. They do actually have political power and they are allowed to use it. Be as cynical as you like, but opposition parties are still allowed to oppose things on principle.
yes, unfortunately this is the game called politics. It stinks, but it is what it is.
>Be as cynical as you like, but opposition parties are still allowed to oppose things on principle.
Again, is it rational to oppose a bill which, for the Murdoch media would boil down to "Labor loves ISIS"?
It's unwinnable. Smart political operators fight battles that have some chance of being won. This wasn't one of them. I wish it was.
I actually think they've created a huge problem for themselves. Instead of shelving this issue away for the election, they have guaranteed it's going to come back. The government is already flagging they will not accept amendments as a political tactic to prolong the discussion because they think it will distract from all their other policy failures. This may actually be a massive own-goal from Shorten.
Shorten/Labor let it through because they support it and won't look at it next year. We judge them on their actions not their vague promises.
yep fair comment, and fwiw I agree with you, but I take issue with people who think it's reasonable for an opposition party to take sides on a complex technical issue that unfortunately boils down to "should we allow ISIS to use whats app?" argument.
It's unwinnable.
I hate it, but I can't fault them for taking a pragmatic stand. It's a lose-lose for them to block the bill. How could they realign the narrative to make it palatable to joe average brickies apprentice?
Sorry, Not possible.
2) those with courage resign and sit on the cross bench (as we have seen recently).
you expect Shorten to go to the cross bench? get real.
Anyone in the ALP could have voted against the bill and moved to the cross bench. The “get real” response is where the courage comes into play.
So "99.99% of Aussies" don't care that their software industry (or at least, security-related stuff) gets destroyed, and Australian engineers etc become unemployable?
Yes, I'm sorry, but in AU "Information Media and Telecommunications" sector employment made up 1.7% of all employed people [1]. Most Aussies don't care about your nerdy tech job :( and FWIW that makes me really sad.
[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...
Having a little time, I massaged that. See: https://keybase.pub/mirimir/AU-industries.pdf
So maybe more like 10% could be affected?
Sorry I didn't have a chance to dig into your data, but even if it were 10%, that leaves 90% who are uninformed/disinterested and are easily swayed by the rhetoric: "If you've got nothing to hide then you are fine", "Do you want to protect ISIS from ASIO eyes?" etc...
The for case is so easily won in the public sphere that it's laughable. I wish it were otherwise, but most people cannot understand where we come from because they lack the background knowledge.
We're not special in that regard. As tech people we oppose this bill. How many other crappy bills pass without any protest from us nerds, just because we don't understand the particulars of climate/jobs/pollution/forestry/land management/policing/urban development etc.etc.etc.?
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.
I didn't buy the line, but be realistic, what percentage of Australians could even make a coherent argument against this bill? It's a vanishingly small percentage.
I watched some bullshit morning TV segment on this where an EFF spokesperson gave some sound arguments wrt this bills overreach potential and downsides, the opposing argument? "But who can argue against ISIS using whats app?". Boom, argument shut down and the presenter sided with the ISIS argument.
It's sad, it sucks, but unfortunately most people are not even able to comprehend the anit-argument because terrorists=bad.
> 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?
Yes this is modern politics. What is your solution? I don't have one.
>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,
Australia is a piddling little country that is a test bed for the 5eyes. We think we're globally important, but that is simple self-delusion.
>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.
Yes, absolutely. It makes me sick that there is a provision within the bill to exclude parliamentarians. There is a deep sickness in our democratic process, but how do we expect to fix it?