Australian Govt to revoke citizenship based on “confidential information”
sbs.com.au
sbs.com.au
It's still a slippery slope though, and there was justified outcry earlier about plans to revoke citizenship for awfully loosely defined "terrorism" and similar offences.
This is the product of a power-tripping authoritarian government unchecked by a disgustingly apathetic citizenry who, so long as they have the ability to fire up a BBQ and crack a beer over the footy aftter spending the day fishing, will not give one shit about what rights the government strips away.
It's hard to describe how apathetic the average Aussie voter is. The political discourse here is squalid. It's the same reason why digital rights are under such an onslaught.
Disclaimer: am Aussie.
I think the reason that the Australian public is so passive about all these draconian rules is that they always (somewhat rightly) felt that they could trust their government and that their government had their best interests at heart. I think it may have been one of the best governments in the world. Most people who lived there could attest that the tax code is simple, not much bureaucracy, high quality internet services (almost all government services are available online), welfare system is good, public medical insurance was good (and private insurance very affordable), good education system (top universities are accessible to regular people), opportunities for all (there are plenty of well paid blue collar jobs). It's a shame to see them abuse this trust.
I remember I couldn't get a wired broadband connection to my apartment in Melbourne because the local exchange ports were all filled up and the ISP refused to invest more because of the NBN (fiber optic roll out) that never ended up happening. I literally checked every-day for many months to see if I could get an internet connection.
Australian high speed fiber optic internet was sabotaged by the Liberal government and Murdoch empire and now the infrastructure probably wont be improved for a very long time to come, another example of blatant corruption in which the people end up suffering for.
I was mostly referring to government websites, online banking, retirement accounts, etc... For example, in Germany, a lot of stuff is still done by paper mail. I've lived in other countries which had web portals but they were often terrible and didn't work properly.
It's only after living outside of Australia for a few years that I understood how smooth all the processes related to the government were over there. In Europe, to get anything done (like to get a national ID card), you have to run around to all sorts of different agencies to collect different paper documents and forms which depend on each other and nobody explicitly tells you what order you're supposed to get them in... It's only when you physically go to one agency that they then ask you to fill out a Form1234 and Form5678 which you were supposed to get from two different government agencies...
As an example, in Australia, to prove my identity, they had a score system so I could bring in different documents like a bank credit card, driver's licence and a passport and they would add up all the scores and it had to exceed a threshold. That was convenient. In Europe, to do some administrative procedure, they may often ask you for a specific document like a certified copy of your birth certificate which is less than 3 months old to prove your identity; it doesn't matter that you have a passport, a credit card, a driver's license, bank statements, a national ID card; they only want to see the birth certificate, there is no flexibility in the process and it's easy to get stuck; and if you do, it takes ages to resolve.
I know it's a complicated issue, but leaving your home nation to join an upstart state that's ostensibly waging a war against it (as unconventional of a war as it is/was) has to be one of the general cases where it's most acceptable.
The point here is the "confidential information" bit.
--
I may be very ill-informed: I thought that one's visa acceptance, and I thought also cancellation, to visit the USA, is discretional and unrequiring solid justification? I thought that legislative proposal in Australia was not uncommon for visas, though it is certainly an overly huge matter for what citizenship is concerned. ("They tell us you are a dissident, former citizen".)
In Australia, permanent residency is a type of visa. I imagine that's what they are talking about.
So guy a with dual citizenship goes to Syria to fight, his Danish citizenship gets revoked by administrative means. How does the authorities know that particular guy was in Syria? Will they let the guy know? In broad terms yes, in details probably not. He can come back to DK and have his day in court and jail, if he wants to find out more.
Sounds harsh, and I am not sure I agree with it. But that is the way this type of legislation works.
The article is about a parliamentary committee hearing but the title makes it seem like it’s actually happening.
It's like having an article about a facial recognition surveillance law being enacted by government and the title being: "Privacy Experts Criticize Government Legislation on Surveillance"
And if you've been following the news, the average turnaround on our government having a "parliamentary committee hearing" on a bill and passing it into law is about 3 days.
The article is dated august 27. If your estimate was accurate the bill should already be passed and this news story could be replaced with one about the final text of the bill.
it routinely uses the courts in unethical ways. It routinely uses the overwhelming dominance of the murdoch media to spill misinformation about any opponent.
(My government's ever worse btw)
Resist tyranny while you can people, its a gradual march, it can happen anywhere.
Laws that have negligible compliance rates but can be enforced on a whim to cause problems for people who dare cause problems for the government (or those whom the government serves) are a hallmark of totalitarian states.
Totalitarianism is a proposed concept used in academia and in politics to describe a form of government and political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life.
Are you sure it isn't a police state at this point? Because if that were anywhere else I'm pretty sure we'd call it a police state.
For instance in NSW (the state that Sydney is in) - the NSW Police have a list of Genuine Reasons to own a firearm[1].
There's also other criteria you need to meet.
It means that day to day, as a general rule the only people you might encounter with a firearm are police officers. That is, unless you work in a rural area or in one of those related industries.
[1] https://portal.police.nsw.gov.au/s/article/Firearms-Licensin...
It's no doubt something you would need to do to have a totalitarian government take over the US, but it's not really a step required for most other countries. There' aren't many countries that could raise a militia capable of overthrowing a military backed government just from it's citizens.
I still don't understand this mentality.
The ability to enact change in government is entirely unrelated to the ability to posses firearms.
Even during the pandemic there's been protests. Most of which were pretty peaceful.
> A different approach might have been a used in East Germany if every house the Stasi went into looking for 'undesirables' had the potential for meeting a shotgun.
Not everything has to be compared to Nazi Germany.
I'll note that the lower possession of guns does have a difference in how we interact with the police, ad how the police interact with everyone else.
For instance, Officer-involved shootings are practically non-existent. For that matter, shootings of any kind are practically non-existent.
No-knock / SWAT style raids and use of pyrotechnics/flash-bangs/etc are reserved for where there's a lot more evidence that someone has a large number of weapons.
Nobody is afraid they might get shot by a police officer because they reached into their glove box or into their pocket.
I'm not saying things are all rainbows and unicorns, but still...
I don't see how turning up to talk to your representatives with a whole bunch of weapons is going to make the conversation go any better.
Nazi Germany is used as hyperbole - because it's both that and historically true (demonstrating the hyperbole to be still tangible).
I agree there are some great things about living in a society largely free from gun crime and the risk of being unnecessarily shot by police. But in Australia we have basically no meaningful internal backstop should a tyrannical government sweep over us.
I'm also definitely not advocating using or displaying weapons when talking with your representatives. I think that's a dishonest and uncharitable interpretation of what I've written. I am saying however that any laws may find it difficult for broad enforcement in a society that is armed and displeased with whatever law is attempting to be enforced -- and that that is a deterrent to creating such laws in the first place.
Exactly. And that's why he said East Germany and not Nazi Germany.
If you don't like it you can easily substitute in a plethora of other soviet satellite states that had secret police.
I disagree. That sounds more like a military junta than a government.
> If you have 2 groups of people, one group armed and one unarmed, which one is in charge?
Insufficient information.
The members of government are, by and large, unarmed - and certainly unarmed when in Canberra. Our defence forces have a whole bunch of firearms, yet answers to and obeys the lawful orders of the government.
For example, the ability for Seargeant Jerk to feel justified in sending a SWAT team to your door at 4AM on the (plausibly deniable) suggestion of a government official who is highly peeved by your public criticism of his/her policy is directly proportional to how likely that 4AM raid is to go badly enough to attract media attention and the tough questions that follow. It's a hell of a lot harder to justify abuse when you have to put your people and your credibility as a professional in danger to do it.
Of course, things could still go badly if the populace is not armed but it's orders of magnitude more likely. And of course the government can still harass people without entering their homes but it's much less efficient.
Social media, viral content and dank memes make the people on a more level playing field with the government when it comes to disseminating information and coordinating (yes, this has downsides, so be it). Firearms (or any other tool of violence) perform similar functions but for violence. They serve as a force multiplier for the individual and decrease the size of the biggest group of people the government can marginalize. We don't usually think of information as being something the state has a monopoly over because few states do these days (i.e. basically just north Korea) but if you rewind the clock to back before the printing press all the parallels are there. The state/church held a tight grip on information but not violence. Today things are reversed with the state having near absolute power to enact violence. Holding a tight enough monopoly on either can enable near absolute control.
Their loss.
Of course we have a vain and ineffectual government and some overreach on privacy laws. But it's bizarre how the internet has decided that Australia is now a police state - we have all the same liberties that normal Western democracies have. For the majority of the pandemic there were essentially zero restrictions in place, and now there are temporary lockdown in place until vaccination targets are hit. What's the alternative, kill 1 in 490 of the population like other countries have?
The online hysteria over Australia has to stop, it's not rooted in reality.
Mind you, the Morrison government deserves every kick it gets, especially if it's a kick up the bum at the next Federal election.
They literally just introduced new laws that allow cops to modify data and without a warrant from a judge. Wake up bro!
No. They introduced three types of warrants with sole purpose of modifying data.