Australia’s status as an open democracy downgraded by The CIVICUS Monitor | Hacker News Reader

Australia’s status as an open democracy downgraded by The CIVICUS Monitor

hrlc.org.au

Yeah the current government has been accelerating an authoritarian slide unencumbered by a bill of rights. Neither major party supports such a document and without it you get bullshit like this recent secret trial and imprisonment:

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-21/canberra-prisoner-...

A bill of rights does not protect you against secret trials. Assange's secret indictment is a famous example.

No those rights need to be enforced and of the government won’t do it, the people have to put pressure on them.

Where is the trial of Assange secret exactly? You can consider his treatment to be unfair but there's been nothing secret about it.

It will be secret if it ends up somewhere like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig... . Given that we don't actually know anything about what happens in the FISA court it is plausible that Snowden will be dragged in there for reasons we are never told. Maybe we never even find out he appeared before the court, who knows.

And GP said indictment not trial.

For a few years he has claimed that the US had a sealed indictment on him in secret it was left unproven until recently when part of it was revealed and then it was confirmed.

There's also the case of ladar levison getting a national security letter when his business was FBI'ed for hosting encrypted snowden emails. That letter meant he could not even tell his wife what was happening, including going to court and being generally railroaded by the legal system. His defcon talks on the legal lies he experienced in court are amusing. Being accuses of running from police put the backdoor of 5 story apartment building with no exit for the sake of speeding up proceedings along with his lawyer being bismurched for ties he knew nothing about and copy and paste text in the prosecution's legal docs.

I mean the US had Guantanamo, secrecy in the US government has been the norm for a while.

Sounds like he thought he could outsmart the legal system and learned courts don't treat you well when you try to pretend the law is a computer program.

> Levison reluctantly turned over his encryption keys to the government, although not in a manner that the government deemed useful—he provided a lengthy printout in tiny type, a move the authorities said was objectionable. The company had treated the matter "as if it was a contract negotiation," rather than a "lawful court order,” Assistant US Attorney Andrew Peterson, who represented the government, told the appellate court.

Also, hearing someone say they didnt have time to hire a lawyer is a massive red flag. Not having a lawyer, especially if you haven't ever learned about the law, is nearly a guarantee you're about to be screwed. Most judges know this and will give you more time to find a lawyer if you need it (called a continuance). I don't know if he asked, but I suspect if he had and the judge had refused his request he'd have stated that.

His case may have had merits, but if this is how he approached the legal system I think his losses can be attributed to him.

When the other side of the story is Ladar saying he hired a lawyer and the prosecution characterized it as an act of defiance.. then character attacks on both sides lose their value.

He turned over the keys on paper because that's all he had access to in the 3 hours he had to provide it.

https://youtu.be/g_lN-RAfzRQ?t=4485 Timestamp for the paper keys.

There is way more detail that shows he was put in extremely difficult situations and his ability to respond to quite a few legal mechanisms was severely limited by compressed timeframes and legal actions been done in parallel and out of sight.

The whole talk linked goes through a lot of it in detail, if you want to take the Wiki's story do.. but it's not the whole story in any sense of the word.

https://youtu.be/g_lN-RAfzRQ?t=5754 Timestamp for a Q&A question that asks specifically about the paper keys and he goes in to much more detail.

I'm not going to watch the entire talk. Just listening at the timestamp you provided, I think he confirms my characterization. He states that technically the government never specified how they wanted the keys, so he could hand them over however he wanted even if the format he provided was extremely hard to make use of. This isn't how the law works. Him saying that he thought up some clever trick, and not that his lawyer proposed a clever trick, is also a massive red flag.

The document up on the screen in the video says he had 24 hours. That's enough time to type up an encryption key, if the printout was actually readable.

Can you provide a cite for hiring a lawyer being characterized as an act of defiance? My assumption, given no further information, is that he didn't hire a normal lawyer in a normal fashion if that happened. Many things are unfair about the US legal system, I have never heard being penalized for having a lawyer being one of them.

The cite for an act of defiance is in the video I linked. It's not a strict penalty, but an argument from prosecution.

If you listen to the talk he had flown to the court with a limited amount of equipment and he addresses the issue of "readability" in the Q&A section I linked. You didn't listen because he says himself he had 3 hours inside court proceedings to provide it.

I'm not just going to transcribe a video for you. I've provided the source. I've spent enough time on this.

He may have had three hours to provide it from when the judge denied his motion, but people who know what they're doing plan on what they'll do if they lose a motion ahead of time.

He states that only lawyers are allowed to bring encrypted devices into federal courthouses. This is false. Likely he refers to the fact that you have to check electronic devices like cellphones at the security desk.

Here's what the appeals court had to say about his production of the keys:

> Despite the unequivocal language of the August 1 Order, Lavabit dallied and did not comply. Just before the 5:00 pm August 2 deadline, for instance, Levison provided the FBI with an 11-page printout containing largely illegible characters in 4-point type, which he represented to be Lavabit’s encryption keys. The Government instructed Lavabit to provide the keys in an industry-standard electronic format by the morning of August 5. Lavabit did not respond.

> The Government sought penalties of $5,000 a day until Lavabit provided the encryption keys to the Government. The district court granted the motion for sanctions that day. Two days later, Levison provided the keys to the Government. By that time, six weeks of data regarding the target had been lost.

http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions/Published/134625.P.pdf

If you know you might be forced to provide something, and you make it really hard for yourself to get that information in response, judges in the US legal system may well lack sympathy for you.

I'm not seeking to make a value judgement about right and wrong here, I'm trying to argue that Levison's issues stemmed from deliberately choosing to do legally dumb things.

An indictment is a charge of commiting a crime. It is the first step towards being out in trial for a crime. No secret trial has occurred in the Assange case.

Ladar Levison was not served with a national security letter by the FBI. National security letters can not legally compel either the turning over of encryption keys or installation of a device to intercept communications. In fact it can't compel turning over communications period but only any existing records regarding such communications. Existing being a key word because a NSL also can't compel keeping of additional records beyond what has already been collected by the entity receiving the NSL. Lidar Levison received a wiretap order issued by a federal court. Wiretaps require the FBI to prove to a judge that there is probable cause that a felony has been committed. I can't think of a country in the world that doesn't allow wiretaps and require them to be kept secret. Requiring a judge to issue a wiretap order is in fact more stringent control over wiretaps than exists in most of the world including many European countries where police can implement wiretaps on their own accord.

You also need several independent pieces of government (1) overseeing one another. People tend to underappreciate how the divided powers in the U.S. setup are also critical. Different branches of government. Different independent levels of government. And so on.

To some degree, the frustrations in America right now are due to the erosian of that system of separated powers, generally in favor of a national bureaucracy, which I don't thing many voters actually like.

(1) And, ideally, other social institutions would be in the mix, but those vary more by country. Having a monarch around to berate political leaders for nonsense helps with some things. A free press helps with others. Strong protest culture, etc.

As I was reading, I was about to pipe up with "oh, prosecuting whistleblowers and intimidating journalists? I hope the US and the UK are in the same boat" but yup, they are, according to the CIVICUS map. I see no reason to disagree.

I do have to say I'm surprised that Canada is considered 'open'. I don't know much about their politics, are things really good there on all those points? Also, highly amused by Russia only being 'Repressed', the past few years of news from that place seem anything but democratic.

Very good point, journalists, politicians being murdered but it is repressed...

Well, an MP was murdered in the UK a few years ago, and the current PM is making light of the murder.

On Canada, generally yes, it is.

Having lived in Russia for 6 months in the past, it's is not as bad as western media makes it seem. Unlike China, their internet is still open. Also, internet access is much cheaper there than in the west. Politically, people are definitely afraid to speak out against top government figures but there is still some freedom of expression politically but of course not quite at the level of most of the western world.

Russia's government is relatively new and people are still getting used to capitalism and democracy. I think people are still in control because they know most of the facts. People are simply more tolerant of their politicians bending the rules. Russians like a strong leader; for most Russian people, this is more important than democracy itself.

> Russians like a strong leader; for most Russian people, this is more important than democracy itself.

In the same way Italians preferred Berlusconi, despite the scandals (e.g. Bunga Bunga sex parties [1])?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunga_bunga#Resurgence_in_Ital...

You have to also understand the context. Russia was ruined by Yeltsin and the free for all under him, it was a major catastrophe. So of course Putin, who brought Russia out of the abyss and back into a position of power, will be popular there.

> Russia was ruined by Yeltsin

This is just propaganda. Another way to look at it: Putin, as a head of FSB, sabotaged Yeltsin to get into power.

You’re getting unfairly downvoted, HN seems to have weird groupthink on Russia. I have heard this exact thing from other people who have lived in Russia, and it is a legitimate point of view.

I think generally people don't like Russia's influence campaigns on Western democracies and that distaste bleeds over; not to mention it's imperialist campaigns against Ukraine.

Yes, and decades of anti-Russian sentiment due to the Cold War, maybe. Russia’s position in Ukraine is distasteful to the west, but entirely in keeping with their defence strategy which has been consistent for hundreds of years.

I don't think hand waving the invasion of a neighboring country is going to change anyone's opinion.

I’m not trying to change anyone’s opinion. I think Russia is heading to dark place and as a liberal I am appalled at some of the Russian government’s policies and oppression. But the story most of us get in the west is weirdly biased, and not contextualised.

> "weirdly biased"

Yeah it is.

as bad as Russia has been (bots on internet), it pales in comparison with US/UK interference in other countries. In fact it pales in comparison with US meddling in Russian affairs - http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html

> Having lived in Russia for 6 months in the past, it's is not as bad as western media makes it seem. Unlike China, their internet is still open.

That would be great, if Russia were not actively working on closing off its Internet as China did and for similar reasons. [1][2] The Russian firewall is being put into place now. It's obvious what they will do with it. The sole reason it's still relatively open is because the Russian state is incredibly backwards technologically, it is operated top down by very slow fiat, and so it has taken a long time for the Russian authorities to implement total Internet control within their territory. They've been working that direction for a decade.

> Also, internet access is much cheaper there than in the west.

I fail to see how that's a good point. Russia is a very poor nation, with incomes less than 1/3 the median of the EU and less than 1/6 the median of affluent Western nations. Of course their services cost a lot less than in Denmark, Sweden, Germany or the US. As one example, Romania's Internet (famous for fast speeds at low cost) costs a lot less than it does in the US as well, appropriately so, their incomes are 15%-20% that of the US. The median Russian is poorer than the median Romanian now. To adjust to US income standards for Russian Internet costs, they should not be paying more than roughly $8 to $12 per month.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-sovereign-internet-la...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50259597

> Russia's government is relatively new and people are still getting used to capitalism and democracy.

No they aren't, because, among other things...

> Russians like a strong leader; for most Russian people, this is more important than democracy itself.

Which is among the reasons why they have a strong leader and not anything with more than the superficial veneer of democracy typical of most 20th Century and later authoritarian regimes

The anglosphere is in trouble in this way, at least much of it is. There's several factors that influence this across countries, and one of them is Robert Murdoch and the erosion of media culture.

Murdoch is a leaf on the river compared to technological change. Traditional journalism became endangered because the internet exposed a lot of what they do as vapid misinformation and opened up better options to do research. If I want to know about a politician's platform I can re-watch their debates and read their policies on demand. If I want to know about a subject, I can go straight to relevant technical reports. If I want to know about Cardinals being arrested for pedophilia then the newspapers are the only places that don't carry the news. Reading a newspaper article generally has negative value add, journalists usually don't capture the nuances.

But the bigger picture of authoritarianism is more to do with the technology needed to enable it. It is very cheap and efficient to run an authoritarian state with improved surveillance/computer vision and the ability to control people's purchasing with the electronic banking system.

We're already seeing early attempts at exercising this control in Australia with the cash ban bill this year. It'll ratchet up as time passes.

> Traditional journalism became endangered because the internet exposed a lot of what they do as vapid misinformation and opened up better options to do research.

Traditional journalism became endangered because the internet eroded the revenue stream that supported much if the good high quality journalism out there and opened up a world where chemtrails and anti-vax are the result as 'better options to do research'.

If I want to know about Cardinals being arrested for pedophilia then - you should thank papers like the Boston Globe for thei heavyweight investigative resources and guts.

All of the new media analysis speakers are disappearing behind pay walls. The Murdoch properties will be competing on roughly even ground against other paywalled off media properties, something his companies can plausibly succeed at outperforming their competitors.

The old media has been losing out hand over fist against free analysis, but that is disappearing. Repackaging the news into analysis for a world view is becoming walled off again, how it used to be.

The technological change exists in many countries, and Murdoch's influence does not, so I'm not content to dismiss his corrupting influence. Consider the counterexamples of Germany, Sweden, New Zealand etc.

Yeah, the map is a bit weird and biased, maybe just uninformed or influence of governments is spilling over to the map. I see examples of repressed status given to closed countries, obstructed and narrowed to more open than narrowed countries.

I was hoping that this article was going to be more of an in-depth critique of the poor state of regulatory capture and disruption of democratic institutions by bad actors in the private sector. My local state government ( NSW ) has been steadily growing more ostensibly corrupt over the last decade. I don't think there's many people denying the fact that wealthy business stakeholders get a disproportionate say in legislation and the allocation of public resources at the moment.

I still have no idea why people voted them in again, Everything they do can be found to benefit the developers (like selling waterfront property in Woy Woy for only $40k to a developer, selling the land the powerhouse museum is on to developers, rail corridors etc)

It's pretty depressing

In a sense if that is the major complaint then it makes sense why they are getting relected - developers are taking land and building things people want. There has always been a background level of corruption in construction afaik. Everyone wants it to be a squeaky clean process, but everyone also wants infrastructure; we have high immigration and we need the groundwork laid in Sydney to support population growth.

We can argue about whether they are making great long term decisions. They probably aren't. But there is a lot of activity in the right general space; they took political risks with their light rail build up for example. And the recent Federal Labor party has a questionable record at infrastructure projects and it seems unlikely that the NSW branch has a better handle on the situation.

Negative gearing and franking credits seem to be more important than absolutely everything else.

I see two major issues in politics right now.

The first being that Democracy wasn’t ready for social media and the Internet and still isn’t.

The second is a major one without an easy solution. It seems we’re always forced to vote for the least worst option.

I feel many democracies need to consider alternatives. I think It would be nice to introduce a pre-election poll and first ask voters to decide on whether they’re actually satisfied with the candidates and policies put forth prior to the actual election. Else we just end up with 4 years of no one being happy with the lesser of two evils running the show.

This is why people always say “I can’t believe X won”. It’s because there is often no alternative but democracy just plugs on as usual even though no one was really satisfied with their options. I believe it’s also why many major elections of late have been so close, people are just divided.

I’d propose that if the voters aren’t ready to proceed with the election, say someone such as the Governor General (in Australia’s case), needs to work with major parties to start another pre-selection round.

I’m also interested in the idea that politicians should be “pardoned” by those who elected them before leaving office, ie if major initiatives were not implemented, there should be some accountability for that and maybe some penalties, ie reduced pension.

It’s insane to think one can be the leader of a country and not be held accountable for a single thing during a term in office, wow.

I feel like this is less a problem with democracy than it is with our legacy nation-states. Democracy doesn't scale well and is not equipped to reconcile irreconcilable differences. How can lefties in San Francisco and right wingers in Oklahoma be expected to find middle ground when their stated goals are mutually exclusive?

You could address these issues by tinkering with democracy on a massive scale, or you could sub-divide the legacy nation states into regional powers with common cultures and goals, and allow them to go their separate ways.

NSW has always been corrupt. Look at the Rum Rebellion [0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_Rebellion

This refers to the CIVICUS Monitor rankings. See the interactive world map: https://monitor.civicus.org/

The article doesn't go into any specifics. But I can't say I disagree, unfortunately, with actions like the bipartisan legislation on strong encryption last year.

Australia needs to adopt the US Bill of Rights - just cross out "Congress" and write in "Parliament" and be done.

It won't stop abuses, but would give a way to fight back.

yeah I dont disagree, but I find it hard to believe that the US has the same rating as Aus...

Also, is it just me or is that map just a double of "Left or Right aligned" ?

They list New Zealand as "open" when that country just passed new laws - almost overnight - allowing people to be jailed for their speech.

So yes, they have a lot of bias. They are pointing out real problems, but they are also ignoring real problems.

I thought the notion that Australia was a democracy was laid to rest in 1975 with the CIA's coup of Whitlam's government.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/23/gough-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...

How does this relate to the Democracy Index [1]? In the 2018 version, Australia is a full point ahead to USA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

This CIVICUS rating has a lot less fidelity. But both seem to be based off surveying political scientists and other experts. I guess it is difficult to quantify something as complex as the "democraticness" of a government.

It's somewhat funny that Australia and the UK should be lumped in with the US. Australia's democracy has a ton of features that the US system completely lacks; independent electoral commission, preference voting, an ecosystem of parties that have real power outside the two major parties, parliamentary system instead of presidential, and many more.

I think a lot of alarm over recent scandals is just the ongoing tug of war between order and liberty. People who support more liberty or more order are always quick to argue that recent events extrapolate into infinite of whatever they think is bad. Very occasionally they are right, but mostly they are not.

Yes, that's the problem with reducing all these things to one number.

Political science, like all the social sciences these days, has an extreme ideological skew. Consequently, any subjective evaluation of the openness (or any other kind of goodness) of a particular country is going to partially reflect merely the extent to which that country reflects the prevailing ideological skew among the experts doing the evaluation. In the present climate, it's difficult to imagine a well-run democratic country with politics opposite to that which prevails in Western academia receiving a great score no matter how well it's run.

Personally, I consider these sorts of studies as just noise. I can't trust any of their methods or conclusions when the researchers are all drawn from an intellectual monoculture that demands constant activism in favor of that monoculture.

From the "How it works" page

> We aim to share reliable, up-to-date data on the state of civil society freedoms in all countries.

I guess you can be more democratic than you are free? Also it's an index that's bound to be imprecise to some degree. And one is by a consortium of human rights orgs, the other by a company.

Thoroughly depressing.

One can argue that to fight authoritarian infiltration and culture clash, certain amount of de-democracy may be needed. After all, the free nature of democracy by which malignant powers exploited is what allowed the situation worsening to alarming levels.

No we need more democracy, to combat this attack on democracy.

A bad democracy is still in principle better than a benevolent dictatorship.

https://monitor.civicus.org

According to this map Australia then joins the ranks of the US, the UK, South Africa and Japan.

It is a fun map. But honestly it is silly. Australia is an open and functioning democracy, so is the UK or the US for that matter.

This is based not on any research, polls, just a group of people decide how is a country by reading newspaper articles. While in some cases a democracy status might really show what is happening in a specific country on the other hand there is bias involved, if we compare that in France we've got constant protests, fighting with Police and it is on the same level as Australia?

Its based on human rights watch organisations, not people reading newspapers.

Also, democracy does not equal absence of civil unrest. Possibly even the opposite.

"democracy does not equal absence of civil unrest. Possibly even the opposite." This is next level thinking and reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_the_mil...

The index it's based on attempts to rank "civic spaces" - not levels of democracy.

The name implies how these organisations do their work - they watch. And the only way to watch is to read articles, watch TV news, etc.

Civil unrest shows that people are unhappy and government is not doing anything, is this democracy? The difference between France and poor countries is if you live in a poor country you fight to survive and have got no energy to protest, in Europe, basic rights (food, vote, etc) are provided and people can protest and then go to supermarkets to get food. So again is French government truly democratic? Should we use the same measures in France, Australia and Kongo?

That is absolutely not the only way to watch. These organisations talk to local activists, assess the court processes in countries, etc.

While I believe that these organisation do more good than harm I do believe that they are biased in some cases.

Are you implying that protests happening is less democracy? AFAIK there are always a group of people that are not happy about something and they will protests. Teachers are not happy about salaries and they protests, X is not happy abut petrol tax and protest etc.

I don't think that the number of protests were used anyway and from what I seen a there are countries like US were people are at most protesting on social media but I never seen major teachers,students,truck drivers,farmers protests in US either so I don't think is correlated if you are a poor country you are too busy to protest.

Protest is a sign of democracy, really. If you find yourself somewhere where there's never any protest, ever, well, you're probably somewhere very nasty indeed.

Queensland is attempting to pass laws as a knee jerk reaction to some of the climate protests that disrupted traffic recently.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/09/queen...

https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-09/extinction-rebelli...

Yeah, I've always had the impression that Australia, or at least its governments, has a disconcerting authoritarian streak that just isn't found to the same level in other western democracies. Possibly impacted by not having a real equivalent to either a US style bill of rights or something like the ECHR.

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