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Comment by budududuroiu | Hacker News Reader

What’s wrong with Australia, I swear for the past couple years these guys saw every authoritarian dystopian movie and went “hold my biya”

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It’s depressing, both major political parties are enthusiastic about the idea of removing as many rights of citizens as possible.

But why? Like for example, in the US you can chalk it up to reducing labor rights to drive down cost and increase stock price, but what’s the reason Australia has this authoritarian boner atm?

Australia is a special case as it does not have a national-level bill of rights [1]. There are various cases that enshrine aspects of human rights as Australia is party to many UN human rights agreements, but there is no central easy document people can go back to like the US constitution or the German Grundgesetz. That allows for easy overreach that has to, time and time again, be pushed back by courts and then enshrined in new laws. For example, age discrimination is unconstitutional in some countries but is only illegal in Australia since the Age Discrimination Act 2004. So Australia needs piecemeal laws for every civil rights issue.

[1] https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/how-parliament-...

Australia is very much a Nanny state. You get fined for all sorts of things - Jay walking, biking without helmet, speeding over 5km/h, red light cameras, changing lanes without signal e.t.c

Cops ask, cops get. Same as America.

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