I can't stress enough the potential for harm in any attempt to bypass various laws.
The Australian Government even refused to allow independent Medical Doctors into their off-shore immigration detention centres for fear of the detention conditions being made public.
Australia did nothing to even consider trying to maybe help Julian Assange, an Australian citizen seeking protection from nation-backed harassment, way back when, and two Australian citizens were murdered by the Indonesian Government for drug trafficking (Australia negotiated prior to the event, but no negative action was taken afterwards). These are admittedly both divisive examples - with the intention to point out that it depends on the direction of political winds as to how the Australian Government will react.
Australia is a good place to live and the anecdotes above are specifically chosen as the far end of the bad scale, but if you choose a fight with any of the few specific issues the Government is paranoid about or sensitive to, you may face significant resources aimed at your incarceration.
Just make sure your ass is thrice covered if you're going to go up against it...
Australian frogs are coming to the boil.
Irony at its finest.
Most of Australia's laws, our parliamentary system etc was based on UK Westminster system. In the early years of our country most people were very pro British Empire. There was enormous social pressure on people to go and "fight for the empire" during World War 1 lots and lots of Australian went and fought and died in Europe, then the same thing happened in World War 2, except suddenly the Japanese were threatening us (A lot of people don't know the Japanese bombed Australia cities during WW2) and most of our military was over in Europe and Northern Africa after the fall of Singapore Australia realized how vulnerable we were and that British could not be counted on to defend us, which caused a strategic realignment behind US and things like the ANZUS treaty etc.
To this day there is still a lot of positive British sentiment in Australia. A lot of people here really like the Queen it's a little bizarre, not so evident in the city but if you go into regional country towns it is pretty pro monarchy. When I was in high school the Queen visited my area and it was crazy big parades huge event I have never seen another politician of any sort anywhere in the country get the kind of reception she did. Most people here are completely cynical about politicians but they love the queen - weird.
The "royal weddings" (good lord, kill me now) do their little bit in fluffing up pro-monarchy anachronistic romantic notions in some of the younger set, but nowhere near the amount needed to sustain the 'no to a republic' vote even in the next ten years.
My assumption is that a lot of these same monarchists are fundamentally racist as a direct result of the various wars, which is semi-understandable. Humans don't tend to change their minds beyond a certain age, no matter the changing context.
There's a quote somewhere about "beliefs don't change, their proponents die out". I'm finding it applies in almost universal contexts.
Also the general opinion appears to be that we'd rather be a Republic than have Charles as our king ;)
I mean, your code is stored in a shared repo, right? So pushing a commit with the government-mandated changes to the shared repo is "informing others". But not pushing it means it'll never get to Prod.
Most places review code commits routinely, so how is a dev supposed to get their government-mandated changes into Prod without anyone seeing them?
If your Australian co-worker stops pushing their commits to the repo and starts trying to make changes to Prod without going through review, it's also a strong signal that something might be going on here...
In fact, if this legislation posed any kind of threat to your business, then your software development processes are broken and you're vulnerable to a ton of other, more likely, threats.
The legislation was written by a shower of technically-incompetent career politicians, with absolutely zero understanding of (or interest in) how software development works. This is the same mob of idiots of pronounced "the laws of mathematics are all very well, but we're in Australia so we obey Australian laws" when discussing their plans to break cryptography.
It's unenforceable, ridiculous, and will get changed before it ever gets used.
But as a startup tech co-founder dealing with encrypted documents, and an Australian citizen, I'm not planning to launch in Australia until it's fixed, and leaving Australia until it's fixed.
You don't need to release it to the public. Build it on your local device and hand it to them. Nobody needs to know.
On top of that, Apple is heavily siloed, and somebody working on the Calendar app won't have information on the operation of Secure Enclave, the chip that deals with authenticating fingerprints, passcodes, Apple Pay etc.
So it would be more like "Hey tech dude, can you sneak a change to the compiler your company uses to build iOS, to have it compile a backdoor into iOS, then surreptitiously login to the relevant machines and place your new compiler?"
It simply cannot work like this, because a single rogue employee can (and would have by now) posted it on a forum/wikileaks/something, simply because they could.
[0]: https://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/australia-outlaws-warrant-...
The Assistance and Access Act does have the same "existence or nonexistence" wording as the law you referred to, so you're not wrong that a warrant canary for a notice under the new legislation would be a criminal offense. But there is no blanket law against warrant canaries per se, it's done explicitly in each new law about secret warrants.
I wouldn't risk it. There are ways to legally provide aggregated information about the number of notices received in a 6-month period.
Also, talk to your representative and explain your concerns and push for it to be scrapped (though when I talked to the Labor senators' staffers they brushed me off and said that I wasn't interested in being informed when I disagreed with their party line). Federal elections are coming up, they're more likely to at least pretend to listen to you.
(edited for clarity)
Similar processes already exist for other legal/police requests. If this legislation is used, companies like Telstra will have dedicated teams to comply with requests.
If your new Australian Citizen hire can build back doors into your software you've got bigger issues than hiring. Though I could see real risk associated with an Australian-based team for a global company or an Australian-based supplier.
Right now the risk from Australia is theoretical. After that there could actually be bans from other governments about using software made in Australia.
If anything they would like it to happen. If being exposed as a stupid law was enough to scare off the major parties, it wouldn't have been made law in the first place.