It is not enough to argue that the legislature should not have passed the Act: it was never safe for the legislature to have been allowed the power to do so in the first place.
Those in positions of power, no matter what political faction from which they come, will always have a strong tendency to do things which increase their power because power is a convergent instrumental goal: in other words, the more power that one has, the easier that it is to achieve any other goal, no matter what it is. Moreover, the more power that an individual or organisation has, the easier that it is to acquire yet more power - for precisely the same reason.
Thus, choosing between competing political factions will never be a sufficient protection against abuses of power nor against an exponential increase in concentrated coercive power in the hands of the state. In other words, democracy alone is inherently insufficient at preventing a decline into authoritarianism and, in due course, totalitarianism (gradual at first, then rapidly accelerating, as with every type of exponential growth).
Only actual and totally irreversible dissipation of state power (by mechanisms such as very rigorous separateion of the powers, greatly strengthening the rule of law especially as applied to the state, and curtailing in particular the power of the state to give itself more power and discretionary coercive power of all forms) will ever be enough to make people safe from arbitrary abuses of power in which politicians will trade off an arbitrarily large amount of harm to everyone else against an arbitrarily small increase in their chance of retaining power.
Only if power dissipation is near the top of a high proportion of voters' priorities in every election for the foreseeable future is this likely to happen. In other words, the only way of preventing an exponentially increasing decline into totalitarianism of which the so-called Online "Safety" Act is a very, very sinister part is to make power dissipation a high priority in public discourse over the long-term.
It is not enough to argue that the legislature should not have passed the Act: it was never safe for the legislature to have been allowed the power to do so in the first place.
Those in positions of power, no matter what political faction from which they come, will always have a strong tendency to do things which increase their power because power is a convergent instrumental goal: in other words, the more power that one has, the easier that it is to achieve any other goal, no matter what it is. Moreover, the more power that an individual or organisation has, the easier that it is to acquire yet more power - for precisely the same reason.
Thus, choosing between competing political factions will never be a sufficient protection against abuses of power nor against an exponential increase in concentrated coercive power in the hands of the state. In other words, democracy alone is inherently insufficient at preventing a decline into authoritarianism and, in due course, totalitarianism (gradual at first, then rapidly accelerating, as with every type of exponential growth).
Only actual and totally irreversible dissipation of state power (by mechanisms such as very rigorous separateion of the powers, greatly strengthening the rule of law especially as applied to the state, and curtailing in particular the power of the state to give itself more power and discretionary coercive power of all forms) will ever be enough to make people safe from arbitrary abuses of power in which politicians will trade off an arbitrarily large amount of harm to everyone else against an arbitrarily small increase in their chance of retaining power.
Only if power dissipation is near the top of a high proportion of voters' priorities in every election for the foreseeable future is this likely to happen. In other words, the only way of preventing an exponentially increasing decline into totalitarianism of which the so-called Online "Safety" Act is a very, very sinister part is to make power dissipation a high priority in public discourse over the long-term.