Citizens need to enforce and assert their rights there before it's too late.
A "bill of rights" is a piece of paper. A piece of paper which is ruled upon by a court that was granted its power by the very same collection of papers.
For example, the right to keep and bear arms (obviously not for hunting but for war and security) has been infringed upon many times, but constitutional courts have decided that actually despite the bill of rights, some infringement is allowed. (EDIT: And this doesn't even address the problem of governments creating unconstitutional laws or executing unconstitutional actions which de facto strip your rights for some possibly significant time until it can be overturned by a court, but without much redress or punishment or deterrent)
In the end the people are the ultimate arbiters and deciders of what rights they are willing to give up and what powers they are willing to be governed under. This plays out the same way in USA and Australia and Afghanistan and Libya.
I've never understood why America puts of with basically being a police state, with the level of police brutality and incarceration that they have.
And here in aussieland, we don't have that, but we do nothing to protect our liberties.
Unfortunately this creates a strong incentive for all governments to actually create such societies and increase division and mistrust in order to gain power.
> Unfortunately this creates a strong incentive for all governments to actually create such societies and increase division and mistrust in order to gain power.
Have you actually been to Australia before? Or Europe for that matter? Or Japan? Your claims don’t make much sense with the current examples. All we have is a developed country that heavily values the right to bear arms and has a horrible crime rate, while the other countries are the exact opposite.
I didn't say they were.
> Have you actually been to Australia before? Or Europe for that matter? Or Japan?
Yes, yes, yes. Worthless rhetorical questions.
> Your claims don’t make much sense with the current examples.
What claims?
> All we have is a developed country that heavily values the right to bear arms and has a horrible crime rate, while the other countries are the exact opposite.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but Europe is not a country. And there are more countries than your examples with differences in crime rates and gun ownership, so I suspect whatever point you are trying to prove with selective data points wouldn't actually hold up.
Patently false from all available exemples.
And nowhere did I say that that is the only reason a society would be willing to turn to the state for protection, so spare me the false counter examples dressed up breathlessly to look like some incredible gotcha.
There is always going to be capacity for doing better, society is always what we make of it, even without hard legal limits (not to suggest imposing limits of state power is bad).
Kick 'm out, elect a new batch and keep their feet to the fire.
You can instead spend 2 weeks locked up in a hotel at your expense.
That’s like saying people aren’t forced to vaccinate since you don’t “need” to work at that particular job and you don’t “need” to exercise in a gym or watch a movie in a theater.
Everything in history shows the slope is slippery. They will pass this on to everyone. It’s a blatant power grab. They want to spy on you and track you. They don’t care about your health.
> It’s a blatant power grab. They want to spy on you and track you. They don’t care about your health.
That sounds like a conspiracy theory.
And I think the outrage is useful. It will mobilize people until it boils over into action, if enough people do it when it actually counts. This is when it actually counts. Everyone has spent all their Outrage Points on useless shit some actor or celebrity said about something no one will care about on their deathbed, but so few are saying anything about this totalitarian nightmare.
But the App that is the subject of the article serves to reduce the severity of that law and thus reduces government overreach. To be upset about the App, rather than the original quarantine law, is to be focusing attention in the wrong place.
Returning travelers quarantining at home will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a...
It's a reduction in government overreach that you have a "choice" between one of their quarantine "hotels" or in-home surveillance? Is the part that is the lesser government overreach, the part where if you fail to address one of their random pings they'll send officers to your house to conduct an in-person check?
The app isn't the problem in itself. The problem is the enslavement. This is a system of enslavement.
Creating an alternative solution for home quarantine gives people more options.
You could argue that there was a better way to implement home quarantine. You could argue that the 2 week quarantine is goverment overreach. You could even argue that this option helps the government keep the 2 week quarantine in place longer by tempering its severity.
I don't see those sorts of rational arguments. I see a bunch of people making an irrational or uninformed argument that this extends government overreach by making the 2 week quarantine rule more severe.
It was a bit of a wake up call actually - the level of conversation was starting to feel more like reddit than what I'd always (until now i guess) expected from hacker news.
Australia would essentially become a failed state with your suggestion, and I don't exactly think the government is just going to let that happen.
Let's go back a long way to 1854 during the cholera epidemic in London when Dr John Snow found that the Broad Street pump was its cause and he located it by contact tracing those who contacted cholera and worked backwards to the source. This case is famous for the very fact it shows that contact tracing and isolating saves lives (please ensure that you look at the map he used to trace the pump): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_ou...
I can attest to this, contact tracing put a quick end to the COVID outbreak near where I live and I'm very thankful for the work those tracers did under very arduous circumstances.
In principle, contact tracing during a pandemic has nothing to do with the general increase in surveillance that's gripping the planet at the moment - it is an entirely separate matter.
The fact that we have sleezebag governments prepared to subvert a decent legitimate process is - again - a separate and serious problem for democracy.
Dr. Chant said: “We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the New World Order…yes it will be pubs and clubs and other things if we have a positive case there.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/new-world-order-austra...
Sometimes you have to break the rules to make long-term positive changes.
Wake up before it is too late.
https://theconversation.com/vaccine-passports-are-coming-to-...
“NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian yesterday announced freedoms for fully vaccinated people once 70% of the state’s eligible population are double dosed. These include being able to go to hospitality venues, hairdressers and gyms, and have five people to your home.”
They are even now trying to limit how many people you can have over in your own home. It is a failed state. Wake up before you are enslaved.